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Distributed Tagging Hell

When many pieces loosely joined break, all hell can break loose without too much effort. Apologies to Tim O'Reilly who I have tracked back to 4 times at least for just one of his posts and all of you who are getting duplicate posts in your feeds.

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At O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Stephen Randall put it best in terms of what he wants for usability:

  • One hand (not complex for those who get it)
  • Two billion people (anyone can get it)
  • Three steps (no time commitment)

Neither Movable Type nor distributed tagging (via technorati) are like this, but they need to be.

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

Microsoft's Virtual Earth and the remixable web

Web 2.0 hacking with things like Virtual Earth is seductive but subject to potential lock-in. What we need are open data formats that can match the speed of hacking development that will make these services more plug and play. I wonder if microformats are up to that challenge.

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I'm at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 today. Microsoft has presented a neat application, Virtual Earth. It's not out yet, but you can see propaganda at the site I linked.

What's neat about this service is that they make explicit allowance for social applications. You will be able to do things like put up reviews of local businesses and integrate them with maps. I had been talking with Ryan King at technorati about this just two days ago in discussing a location microformat. I wanted to find a set of reviews for local gyms near my sister's house in San Francisco. Sure, she and her friends had ideas, but they were not tuned in to the kinds of things I look for (I am a workout addict).

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

More on Web 2.0, price discrimination, and commoditization

My continuing discussions with search industry participants at Where 2.0 about the business case for offering your data for free.

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As announced at O'Reilly's Where 2.0, Google released their mapping API as did Yahoo. Microsoft is also mentioning that their Virtual Earth will be for free. I'll leave it to others to discuss the key elements of these APIs. From my perspective, the kicker is the licensing terms. For instance, Google is offering their API for free as long as people can use your mapping web application for free.

I had a chance to follow up a bit with Mark Law from Microsoft's Virtual Earth on their licensing terms. In particular, what does it mean to be non-commercial? According to him, non-commercial means you are not making money off the map data, so it sounds like Google. They plan to introduce a tiered pricing structure for access to the data for commercial use, based on volume and number of services used.

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Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Is web 2.0 really just about price discrimination?

If data is a commodity, can you price discriminate even if you spent a lot of money collecting the data?

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I'm listening to “What is a sustainable business model for data?” at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. The guy from Navteq has mentioned that they sell data based on use. In other words, they are trying to price discriminate. Non-commercial use is free. What is non-commercial? Maybe it means not making a lot money yet, so we won't pursue you.

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Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Copyright and the remixable web

Will remixing the web encourage people to use more liberal copyrights because the value of participating is higher than the value of retaining an exclusive lock on their data?

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I'm listening to the John Battelle panel on local search at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. John Frank of Metacarta just raised the point that dhtml (aka ajax, an easy javascript technology for mixing in content into web pages from web services) enables copyright infringement, a bad thing from the perspective of the recent Supreme Court ruling on file sharing services. You're probably okay if you do not encourage stealing of copyrighted materials. I wonder if things like microformats and easy data sharing will push more and more providers into putting more liberal copyright restrictions on their work that allow for sharing.

Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)