Category: Web 2.0

Social Networking remains very, very hot. Just a day after the E-Commerce Times ran this story about kiddies starting to turn away from MySpace because it’s become a bit to mainstream, and that they are moving to sites such as bebo, Paid Content reports that bebo has just raised $15 million in VC from Benchmark Capital.

What I also found completely amazing was their membership numbers: 24 million registered users and rising. That’s about 35-40% of MySpace, but in a marketplace in which quite recently MySpace was said to have over 80% of the market, I’d think NewsCorp and Rupert would want to watch their backs with this mob.

Tags: bebo, social networking

Wise words from the old man of blogging:

How to compete with FeedBurner….First, I’d either do a deal with a registrar, become a registrar, or merge or partner with one. It’s absolutely essential that the user own the domain that their feed is hosted at, so that, in case of emergency, they can switch to a different hosting service. If they don’t own the domain, it doesn’t matter how many promises the vendor makes, or how well-intentioned they are, an act of god could result in a blackout of a huge portion of the RSS network. It’s irresponsible to host a large percentage of the net’s RSS feeds at one domain. I would set it up so it’s the other way around. My hosting service won’t host your feed unless you own the domain.

My thoughts exactly, and the very problem I have with Feedburner, I don’t like the idea of giving up control of my feed.

Great thinking Dave.

Tags: Dave Winer, Feedburner

Lots of debate emerging over the new feed service “feedpass“, a new service that allows your feed to have essentially it’s own multi-faceted feed subscription page, mainly because they allow you to create pages for blogs you don’t own, and earn revenue off it.

I won’t get into the whole copyright/ theft issue some are claiming, but essentially I like the idea, and I’ve dropped my buttons on the right hand side of duncanriley.com (at the time of writing at least) and put up the feedpass subscribe button. Click on it to check it out.

Michael Arrington at TechChrunch argues that feedpass does nothing:

In the end this just can’t compete with Feedburner, a much more robust solution for publishers. Feedburner provides stats and other tools that Feedpass doesn’t have at this time.

But I’d argue there is a reason I’m more attracted to feedpass as opposed to Feedburner, and that because feedpass doesn’t hijack my feed. There’s no need to change my feed details to a feedpass URL to use feedpass, as there is with Feedburner. Every link on my feedpass page is my RSS feed, not one delivered by another party. Sure, Feedburner provides a whole lot more in terms of extras, but I’ve always remained weary of basically signing away control of my feed to a third party. In this regards, feedpass fills an as yet uncatered for hole in the market, and I’m willing to give them a shot….at the end of the day if I decide I don’t want to use feedpass, I drop them, no problems with URL’s for feeds or anything of the like.

Tags: feedpass

Looks like Mike Arrington got into a whole pile of trouble whilst I was away after shafting his web designer. Lot of coverage here, here, here, here and here.

Personally I don’t particularly dislike the design, the layout itself isn’t too bad, although I’m not a huge fan of some of the whitespace, fonts and sizing, but the fundamentals are there of a reasonably good layout. What I absolutely can not stand on the site is the Green. The Green just doesn’t work. It’s not even a solid green. Yuk.

The 360 reports on a proposal to form essentially a commodities style market for advertising in the United States:

A consortium of some of the biggest advertisers in the United States has plans to move the ad industry out the era of the cattle exchange and into the internet age. They’re looking for someone to build an ADSDAQ – an online exchange similar to the NASDAQ where advertisers and media owners can trade.

Interesting idea. I wonder if blogs could play a role?

Every one raves about Seth Godin. Personally, I’ve always thought the hype was way out of control, and as much as a lot of what he says makes sense, I’ve always thought most of it was common sense as opposed to anything ground breaking, and perhaps very well articulated, but nothing really more than this.

Seth of course, seems to lap the hype up. Instead of down playing the hype he’s allowed it to bubble, and like any bubble it’s eventually bound to burst. Techchrunch predicts that Squidoo is going to burst the Seth Godin bubble…well at least give it a rather large leak.

Of course the mettle of the man will be surely tested once Squidoo fails (as it seems it’s going to….I mean $30 is your top payment after 6 months? If we were running b5 like that no one would be working for us any more). Lets see how Seth Godin handles failure. If he pulls through and handles it with style and panache, then I might consider joining the fan club.

The winners of the 2006 Webby Awards have been announced, and it appears as though the blogosphere doesn’t exist….but of course it does, but bloggers aren’t really up for the $500 USD entry fee, and hence we get the usual corporate sites winning awards, and Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post (not really representative of the blogosphere is it?…any one up for making up a George Clooney post? 🙂 ) despite the fact that web eyeballs are looking elsewhere.

Wired and Investor.com take a similar line, which is heartening in knowing I’m not the only one who seems to think this.

So where the bloody hell would you start the first country based version of MySpace, well according to Lee’s Blog:

MySpace Australia.

According to News Corp:

The Australian divisions of multinational companies such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Johnson & Johnson and Toyota are expected to be approached as they have advertised on the US site, along with key local brands such as Telstra.

I’m soooooo excited. I could have a heart attack like Big Kev!!!

China to have 60 million bloggers by end of 2006 (reuters)

China is the world’s second-largest Internet market after the United States with more than 110 million users. A survey by Chinese search engine Baidu.com put the current number of blog, or Web log, sites at 36.82 million which are kept by 16 million people, the official Xinhua news agency said on Saturday.

The number of Chinese bloggers is expected to hit 60 million by the end of this year, Xinhua said, quoting a report on China’s media industry by the prestigious Tsinghua University.

Zhang Xiaorong, strategy development director of “Bokee”, which was set up in 2002 and claims the biggest share of China’s blogging market, said his company adds about 100,000 blogs a day.

“The expected 60 million bloggers would account for more than half of China’s 110 million netizens,” Xinhua quoted Zhang as saying.

Notice this great software via Aaron’s new blog, Canvas.

It basically allows you to set up your WordPress blog from within WordPress, everything from layout to colours, without needing to touch any code. But it’s not a basic editor, we are talking full customisation here. Really great, easy to use stuff. I haven’t given it a go yet but I will be shortly. If I was Matt Mullenweg, I’d be signing up these folks with Automattic yesterday!

Tags: canvas