Some of the Web 2.0 trends and talk I tracked this week… accompanied by some dodgy Austin Powers subheaders. Oh and this post doubles for my Marqui shout-out this week. Thanks to Marqui for sponsoring my blog for 3 months. Oh behave!
Tagalicious, baby, yeah!
Flickr and del.icio.us made tagging cool, now every social software app is doing it. Technorati, The Robot Co-op and Metafilter were among the companies braggin’ about taggin’ this week. There was also a fair amount of hand-wringing on the pros and cons of tagging – Many-to-Many covered a lot of it and Joshua Porter summarized why tagging is a good thing.
I shall call him… Mini-me
Bit of talk in the blog world this week about Big Internet companies buying little ones. The Internet Stock Blog asked: will Yahoo acquire Six Apart?
“…as these companies [Google, Yahoo, MS] assemble the complete bundle of integrated personal Web tools, the social networking sites will be acquired, del.icio.us will be acquired, and… Six Apart will be acquired.”
In another neck of the blogosphere, Andrew Chen of Monkey Methods (nb: a different Andrew Chen from the one in my blogroll) suggested that Feedster and Technorati “will die”. Death in this context meaning that they end up as “a discount acquisition by one of the portals”. Andrew gave 5 reasons and the gist of 1-4 was that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are too big and strong for Feedster and Technorati. OK, he may have a point there. The 5th reason is interesting:
“Feedster and Technorati have, fundamentally, the wrong UI paradigm.”
I think Andrew is wrong on that score and Feedster CEO Scott Rafer hinted in the comments why:
“We believe that RSS will change both Internet search and paid-search dramatically and in a way that Feedster can use to thrive independently.”
With my Design for Data theory (see also my most recent post on it), I’m exploring a new type of design paradigm for Web 2.0. Feedster and Technorati are among the companies building this new paradigm. Here’s a hint Andrew – it’s not about “stickiness and pageviews” anymore.
Amazon’s Groovy Developers Conference
Huge props to the Amazon Web Services Blog for real-time blogging of Amazon DevCon. I particularly enjoyed the notes of Rael Dornfest’s talk, entitled Remix: beyond rip, mix, burn. It inspired me to remix some of the notes into my own post entitled Remixing and Speculation on The Future of RSS, with the theme of Information Remixing.
The ‘future of RSS’ bit was this: in the not too distant future, more people will subscribe to topic/tag/remix feeds than feeds of actual people. I wrote a follow-up post fleshing that idea out a bit.
Google’s Juice
Narry a week goes by without Google making some news. This week they hacked around with one of the Web’s fundamental principles – the link. Google created a “no-follow” attribute for the hyperlink, to try and thwart comment spammers. News.com reported:
“Called a “no follow” tag, the control when placed before pages of blog comments will signal to Google as it indexes the Web that the pages are to be overlooked. That will render comment spam ineffectual.”
Here’s Google’s statement in the Google Blog. John Batelle has some good analysis on it.
John also reported on the Google AdWords API, a new advertising platform perhaps? John said:
“Google is opening up API support for AdWords. This is a big deal (I hope) in that it lets new ecologies of AdWord-based plays begin to thrive.”
Schwimmer tries to take away Bloglines’ mojo
Lawyer Martin Schwimmer opened up a can of worms this week, with his request (granted) to have his RSS feed removed from Bloglines. I followed the action in this post. As yet Bloglines has not publicly responded to the controversy, but I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this issue in the coming months. For a more light-hearted take on it (or is it?!), check out Dennis Kennedy’s post.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)