Category: Web 2.0

Reuters reports that the U.S. intelligence community on Tuesday unveiled its own secret internal wiki, saying that Wikipedia’s format is key to the future of American espionage.

Struth.

No word as to what wiki platform they are running on, but given the comparisons to Wikipedia you’d guess they’re using mediawiki. Unfortunately the service wasn’t named spookipedia, but Intellipedia. Reuters does have some fun however, suggesting that the new wiki service could prevent further WMD-Iraq style situations.

Greg Sterling at Search Engine Journal points to Compete’s Snapshot, a new service offering Alexa like stats. From what I can gather the company compares itself more to comScore in it’s methodology, promoting the service as the “First premium web metrics tool made available for free”. The stats come from over 2 million users of the Compete Toolbar, so the data gathering is similar to Alexa’s, however they are primarily focused on the US market, where as Alexa looks at traffic worldwide.

Question is I guess: are the figures any good?

My gut feeling after plonking in a few sites is that they are as nearly as good as Alexa’s figures, with the proviso that Alexa’s figures are at best questionable. You get the visitor figures for a month, not daily like Alexa, but the actual data itself is fairly rich including uniques, a rank, page views per visit and time spent on the site. However despite the service playing up it’s advantages over Alexa in the FAQ, I don’t think it’s anywhere near being an Alexa killer yet. People like the up to date stats in Alexa where as monthly stats from Snapshot are sort of nice, but certainly isn’t going to drive demand to the site when you see the same figures for the whole month. And yet, competition is always healthy, so best of luck to the team at Snapshot.

Tags: Alexa, snapshot

Congrats to Cam on the news that TPN and News Corp have hooked up to produce a celebrity podcast for news.com.au, one of Australia’s leading online news sites. Nice to see Australian companies looking at doing deals like this, now if only they’d get their chequebooks out and fund TPN so we can keep it here in Australia instead of losing it to the States.

Fortune reports that Yahoo! is in talks with Time Warner to acquire AOL. Naturally it makes business sense but every time one of the bigger companies are gobbled up, that’s one less major site/ competitor out there, and further consolidates internet traffic at the top. OK, so we all know the barrier to entry onto the web is low, but every day it gets harder and harder, indeed even impossible to start a new service that would seriously be able to compete with the existing players. Where as Google came around at the right time, there probably will never be another Google, baring some magical technology advance, and given Google is still the leader in search the chances of someone else coming up with it is next to zero.

Mike Arrington with the good news for those who cant get a ticket. I’m not sure I’m allowed to say from who, but I managed to get a ticket so I’ll be in NY on the 16th. My first trip to the States as well, and all for a tech party, so here’s hoping it’s all good, which I’m sure it will be. Given there will now be 2 parties and if you’re chasing a ticket, I’d sign up to the waiting list quick smart.

I’m particularly looking forward to meeting some of the event’s sponsors, Blog Talk Radio would be top of the list: I still think it’s a facinating idea, Right Media with their ad auction service should be of interest, plus obviously some of the other Web 2.0 startups, both from a personal interest perspective and looking at some of the services on offer in relation to what we are doing at b5media. Of course did I forget to mention the opportunity to meet some great Web 2.0 people in the Capital of the free world?! fun, fun.

Tags: TechCrunch, TechCrunch New York

TechDirt on Weblogs Inc vs Newsgator. My natural inclination (dare I say once again) is to side with Jason Calacanis on this, however Mike does make an interesting point. It’s an issue I still struggle with when it comes to full vs part feeds..how do you actually measure the return on these sorts of things, presuming there is one.

Tags: Jason Calacanis, Weblogs Inc, Techdirt

Nick Carr on the growing communist tones in Web 2.0. He’s not the only person to have seen it. You can see it in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail book as well. Web 2.0 shouldn’t be about ideology in terms of being a purist pursuit, it should only be about freedom of choice and anything that empowers the user. Whether or not YouTube allows downloads of clips or not is totally irrelevant: at the end of the day they empower the user, the consumer, the individual who wants to upload their own videos, and for me that makes them a Web 2.0 company. The flip side of the debate however is a dire one, because if the Web 2.0 purists win it will actually result in driving people, and for that matter companies and capital away from Web 2.0 in the same way the red flag waving in the Open Source community scares corporations away from embracing everything from Firefox through to the various distributions of Linux. Web 2.0 should be about inclusiveness, and in deed in practice it is a broad church. Let’s hope that some of those ideologically driven types dont win the day.

Tags: Nick Carr, Web 2.0

Scoble reports that Tim Bray of Sun fame is in strife after dropping the f word.

OK, so sometimes even humble I self censor myself here at duncanriley.com at times, after all you never really want to offend people too much, however sometimes there really is no reasonable alternative to using fuck, or even fucking when your trying to describe somethings, no matter what the do gooders might suggest. There’s some uniquely strong about the use of the word. And here’s another thing: isn’t blogging suppose to be about reflecting our thoughts without censorship, about being honest and open?

When I think about my everyday interactions with people, the f word is in common usage, and it has been really for generations, indeed even baby boomers use it (although admitedly their parents didn’t). Sure, there are some bounds to reasonable taste, for example I’d never use the c word on this blog, and it’s not something that I’d use regularly in everyday speach either (although she who must be obeyed has dropped it on occasions..but again to make a point, after all, some people really can be c’s), but for one man who is passionate about what he’s talking about, to say that it’s fucking cool shouldn’t really be cause for morality based attacks from others. I’m rooting for you Tim, and I’m sure a fucking lot of other people are as well. 🙂

Tags: Tim Bray, Robert Scoble, Sun, fuck

Scoble on Video:

First, the videos I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m putting up are around 200MB a piece. The bandwidth distributors I know are charging $.14 or more PER GIGABYTE to distribute those videos. So, that comes to $28, or more for 1,000 downloads (if my math is right).

Wait a second here. We?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢re going to collect $10 in advertising to pay $28 in bandwidth? Who said video is a great business? We?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢re losing money, but I?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢m sure we?ɬ¢?¢‚Äö¬¨?¢‚Äû¬¢ll make it up in quantity. Heheh.

Here’s the thing, I think it’s a similar issue with Podcasting as well. It’s why services such as YouTube are so popular, even with people doing their own video blogs. Revver is the company to watch though: did you know that even ZeFrank’s The Show is on Revver? Yep, despite the inherent risks anyone takes in not hosting their own content (copyright and control are the biggies), most people are using “free” services to host video because the economics don’t yet work properly in hosting it yourself. It should also be noted that it’s also not costing the big free hosting firms the sort of money Scoble is talking about either in terms of bandwidth costs…strength in numbers I guess.

Tags: Robert Scoble, Revver, Zefrank, YouTube

The Blogging Times has the scoop:Universal, Sony BMG Music entertainment and the Warner Music Group have all taken small share holding in YouTube. In you can’t beat them, join them I guess, but on a deeper note are the big record and movie houses finally changing their tune? (pardon the pun 🙂 ).