First eBook Purchase

A couple of weeks ago I was bitching that none of my favourite authors had their most recent books available in eBook format. Well as luck would have it, Tom Wolfe just released his new novel I am Charlotte Simmons and it is available as an eBook! I went to 3 sources to check out … Read more

Combined Subscriber Stats for Aliased RSS Feeds

This is a copy of a suggestion I’ve just sent to Bloglines Support. It was inspired by a Feedburner Forums thread I started a few days ago, regarding whether Feedburner was counting all of my RSS feeds in their statistics. Turned out they weren’t and there was indeed an issue “with online aggregators when you … Read more

Branding Microcontent

Well here I am blogging in my pyjamas. Not literally, but metaphorically. Chillin’. Taking stock. Thinking about goals for next year. I’ve also been thinking about my Design for Data theory and while I’ve been doing that, a few posts elsewhere have attracted my attention… First a “in a nutshell” re-cap of what Design for … Read more

Blog Aid Successful

To wrap up what has been a busy week, yesterday I finally got some momentum going in the blogosphere with the O’Reilly interview. Thanks to Jason Kottke, Robert Scoble, Phil Pearson (btw welcome back Phil!), Lucas Gonze and all the others who kindly linked to it. What happened was, I published Part 1 of the … Read more

Tim O’Reilly Interview, Part 3: eBooks & Remix Culture

In this final instalment of my interview with Tim O’Reilly (see also: Part 1 & Part 2), we discuss eBooks, social networking, collaboration and Remix culture. This is probably my favourite segment of the interview, because we explored some interesting new ideas here about Web publishing. Books and Social Networking Richard: eBooks are a current … Read more

Summary of Bill Ives’ KM Storytelling Posts

I recently did a dump of content from my PDA to my linkblog – things I’d been reading offline and not yet recorded in my ‘Ideas Database’ (aka my linkblog). One batch of links is from a single person, Bill Ives. So I thought I’d dump them into one R/WW post – more for my … Read more

Tim O’Reilly Interview, Part 2: Business Models & RSS

This is the second in a 3-part interview with O’Reilly Media CEO, Tim O’Reilly. In part 2, we discuss business models for Web 2.0 and the future of RSS. Business Models for Web Content Richard: There’s been a bit of discussion amongst bloggers recently about monetizing weblogs – making money off one’s Web content. This … Read more

Don’t all link to me at once…

In a recent post I floated the theory that Content Creators need Media Companies to help them attract mass eyeballs to read their carefully-crafted content. It would be a symbiotic relationship – the Media Co’s get compelling content and the Content Creator gets mass readership. It’s win-win and I think this is one way round … Read more

Tim O’Reilly Interview, Part 1: Web 2.0

Welcome to the second in my series of Web 2.0 interviews, in which I interview people in the Web community who are building or shaping Web 2.0 – i.e. the Web as Platform. And who better to talk to than the person who organized the hugely successful Web 2.0 conference held in San Francisco in … Read more

On Influence – Media Interest in Blogs

Summary: Let bloggers focus on getting the content right. Delivering that content to a large readership is another business altogether and one which media companies are best suited to provide. My previous post was a rumination on whether the future for Web content creators is getting brighter, with the increased interest in bloggers by media … Read more

Gettin’ Paid: A Future for Content Creators?

UPDATE 12/11/04: An interesting conversation has developed in the comments to this post, spurred on by Phil Jones who disagreed with my position. Joshua, Liam and Matt Scofield also contributed thoughtful comments that are well worth reading. I’d like to get other opinions too… do you think there is a future – finally – for … Read more

Living Data & The Momentum of Webfeeds

I’m exploring the Design for Data thread and later in this post I’m going to get arty on ya’ll. I think tomorrow I’ll begin to investigate Atomflow, but for now let me give you an informal overview of my thoughts so far:  – it’s about movement of data/content (in time); not places where data/content resides. … Read more

Design for Data III

Oh boy, this gets better… check out this extract from the latest issue of Fortune magazine (hat-tip Susan Mernit): “The latest version of MyYahoo! allows its users to create custom home pages that automatically bring up headlines from any blogs you select, using a technology called RSS (Really Simple Syndication). The software can also draw … Read more

Design for Data II

Quick follow-up on my post from last night. Over the past week James Enck has been writing a series of posts about ‘analyst blogging’. Ross Mayfield called it a “blog-based research model” and I wrote about it too. Now to be honest I’m not too sure what a “sell-side analyst” is in the investment industry, … Read more

Design for Data: Thoughts

Nearly a month ago I left a comment on Jason Kottke’s weblog, in response to a post about his upcoming Web 2.0 conference workshop called Design for Web 2.0. He had listed 15 questions that were to be discussed in that workshop and one in particular caught my eye. It was: “Right now, Web design … Read more