The Community Engine Blog: webservices Archives

Safari U: Great Idea, Right Way to Market?

I wonder if Safari U's Web 2.0 business model can really outproduce the storefront copy center, the traditional channel for custom books. In the latter, publishing and delivery are integrated. O'Reilly's Safari U decouples publishing and delivery, making the process more complex and less certain for customers.

I'm building a text book for the next rendition of the High Octane Blogging Bootcamp using O'Reilly's Safari U. The main advantages I see are:

Good corpus of material.
(Potentially) Convenient web interface.

But, I wonder how they are bringing this thing to market. In many ways, they are tied to their book publishing model. A lot of the recent content is not really available because it has not been converted for custom publication. Also, the custom book has to be ordered in quantity, no one-offs. This requirement essentially dictates that the book be pushed through traditional marketing channels. You can't really offer it to small client groups over the web. Finally, any access to the book is only available online for a fee. Why not provide a preview as in their regular Safari offering? Frankly, such previews would just provide more reason to purchase a Safari subscription.

I'm having some frustrations getting the material I want out of this service. I may resort to a last minute coursepack from a local copy center. The copy center will call O'Reilly for permissions, and the book should be done in time for the January class. Ironically, although the bootcamp is about Web 2.0, we are likely going to have to resort to pre-web methods to get the textbook produced.

Local copy centers integrate publishing and delivery, simplifying up the process of creating custom books for customers, and providing more certainty. Oddly, O'Reilly decouples these two processes making the process more complex and less certain, all under the veneer of advanced web technology.

Bud posted this on December 7, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network

The Community Engine played an important role in developing the new Corante hub network. In future posts, I'll be writing about the technology challenges we faced in bringing the network together. I also have some ideas for how to create bottom-up communities across network member blogs that I will share in future posts.

As Stowe Boyd mentioned yesterday, Corante has established a network of topical sites that re-aggregate content from “thought-leading” bloggers and provide editorial insight on emerging trends. I'm honored to note that this blog was chosen to be part of Corante's web hub. I'm also proud to announce that The Community Engine played a pivotal role in getting the technological infrastructure to work.

Continue reading "Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network"

Bud posted this on November 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Developing with Ning

Fred Wilson thinks Ning might lower the cost of entry for creating web applications designed to fulfill a specific need very well. Based on my experience, I don't think so, but I have a suggestion which might help.

Yesterday, I signed up for the Ning developer program, and today they accepted me. Ning is a platform for developing interactive web applications like this little bay area restaurant guide, an Ann Arbor version of which is depicted here:

Fred Wilson has suggested that Ning might lower the cost of entry for point web applications, i.e., those designed to fulfill a specific need very well. In its current state, I don't think so. In the example “Things around Ann Arbor” app I tried above, there were three items that were configurable without programming: the number of items to display on a page, the map image to show, and the google maps key. Everything else required modifying code intensive php pages. Examining these, it quickly became apparent that I was going to have to spend some time with the API documentation to make any real progress beyond showing Ann Arbor on the map.

Now, my work might lower the cost for someone who wants to simply copy my application (a process called cloning in Ning), but having to learn the Ning web app structure is a clear cost increase to me for just getting started. I have a recommendation that might help.

Continue reading "Developing with Ning"

Bud posted this on October 5, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (1)

Ning

Ning might fill a sweet spot where non-programmer entrepreneurs can create applications for groups of people who want to interact with each other. That's the missing link in today's social software value proposition.

I've been trying out Ning, which has been written about by many people. Ning is essentially a platform for creating interactive web apps. Here's one of them:

Dave Winer thinks it's a product that does not do anything original. I have a slightly different view. It's a product that has some potential if it can make developing and maintaining interactive web apps so easy that non-programmer community entrepreneurs can do it.

Continue reading "Ning"

Bud posted this on October 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk

“It slices, it dices ...” More specifically, this post presents an alpha release of a web service based on greasemonkey and reblog that identifies, validates, cleans, and republishes xFolk microformatted content. All comments are welcome.

I'm releasing a very alpha hack of an xFolk web service for this labor day weekend. Recall that xFolk is a microformat for representing the sort of social bookmark data you would find on a site like del.icio.us. A lot of people are republishing their links from such sites in their blogs. The advantage of using a microformat like xFolk for this sort of thing is that it makes it easier to write software to do something useful with the data.

The hack I am presenting here is a combination of a greasemonkey script and an alpha version of the reBlog refeed tool by eyebeam research and stamen design. The main action of interest is in the greasemonkey script that:

Finds all instances of xFolk microformatted content in a page.
Determines which of those instances are valid (i.e., contain all the required elements as indicated in the xFolk spec).
Creats a clean clone of the xFolk entry that only contains elements specified in the spec.
Uses an xml object to serialize the cleaned clone into a form element for republishing.
Adds a script to the valid xFolk instances that makes it possible to republish their “cleaned” version via Mike Migurski's alpha rewrite of the reblog republishing tool released by eyebeam and stamen

Continue reading "Veg-o-matic: An alpha web service using xFolk"

Bud posted this on September 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

xFolk — Blogmarks really steps up to the plate

Blogmarks has provided excellent support for xFolk in their Blog Sync functionality.

I meant to post about this earlier but have been very busy with client work. Blogmarks has really stepped up to the plate with xFolk support in their newly renovated blog sync functionality. Blog sync allows you to republish in your blog the links you bookmarked that day.

Continue reading "xFolk — Blogmarks really steps up to the plate"

Bud posted this on June 12, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Community Engine

Creating Effective Information Communities

webservices