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Why can't you just produce and consume interaction streams?

I want to see the interaction going on at your site. That way, I'll know whether to give you my attention.

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So, I read with interest Matt McCallister's plaint last week about how long it is taking RSS to reach the mainstream. The weird thing is that by many measures, RSS is mainstream but just not widely recognized as such. After all, 31% of the online population use it, it's just that 90% of this group don't know they are doing it.

Given the gnarly technical nature of RSS, Matt wonders, rightly I think, what the sales pitch is to the average user. Why is it useful? Well, it's clear that the idea of being able to subscribe to the sites you want in your portal page is taking off. That's where the 31% comes from. But, it could be better. Instead of treating blogs and other small publishers as junior content producers for aggregation by the monetizing big boys, why not make it just as easy to subscribe to a small site's stream of interaction. I get the site-owner's data as well as the site's stream of comments and trackbacks. That's really where it's at for many small sites I deal with.

Sixapart and Blogger, two of the biggest blog providers could easily provide these streams. Their SPAM controls are adequate that the signal-to-noise ratio on interaction streams should be quite good. That way, as a consumer, I'm free to join community as I see fit without having to visit the site every day. Portal publishers should love it because it is yet more free content. Maybe their allied community sites won't though because it breaks their ownership of the community space.

Bud posted this on February 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape

Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used Web 2.0 technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.

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From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

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Bud posted this on August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

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)

RSS++, Power Information Consumption beyond RSS

Google's Personalized Home is more than just an RSS aggregator. By combining RSS with discovery, it allows you to stay in touch with the opportunities you have already defined and find new ones.

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In remarking on Google's apparent plans to add RSS to their Personalized Homepage (missed by me when I reviewed it yesterday), Richard MacManus makes this remark:

One thing: why are all the bigco's so intent on building portals, when users are more and more using RSS Aggregators as their central means of access to Web content ('homepages' in Web 1.0 parlance)? The answer may be that the portal products of Google, MSN and Yahoo are, over time, turning into RSS Aggregators.

Read/Write Web: Google and MSN's Web 2.0 Homepages

My cut is that we are moving to something beyond RSS consumption in Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Let's call it RSS++. RSS++ is the combination of RSS with other information services to make for a real power information consumption experience. RSS is the part where you bring your trusted sources to the table, letting you revel in the walled garden of your community.

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Bud posted this on May 20, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)