ReadWriteWeb

Late last week it was surprisingly revealed that Microsoft now aims to be a media company, rather than a software company. This was in the context of Microsoft’s launch of its adCenter product, a direct competitor to Google’s Adsense and Adwords. But there it was in black and white, in a Microsoft press release: “”Ad-supported … Read more

As a Web (2.0) consultant and analyst (about me), I track a variety of market segments and products. Luckily for me, nowadays I don’t have to do as much grunt work on gathering high level product data as I used to. There are a plethora of product lists and data about web 2.0 companies on … Read more

Mike Riversdale asked an interesting question in the comments of my previous post: “What, in your (and others) opinion, is the difference (if any) between the “online desktop” (A) (I’m thinking Netvibes and the like) and the “Personal Content Network” (B).” Actually I’m seeing a lot of crossover and cross-pollination in the market segments I’m … Read more

In part 3 of my look at mc aggregators [here are parts 1 and 2], I get stuck into Suprglu. In this post I ask the question: how sticky is this site? But enough puns, let’s get down to business. SuprGlu, a production of New York design studio Iridesco, is another product that enables users … Read more

– Talkin’ bout a media revolution (BBC article on, er, BBC media. And they chose the worst possible Murdoch photo to use 🙂 Anyway, it’s an interesting article on how media is coping with web 2.0) – BW on News Corp Web strategy (“Fox Interactive Media has picked up two small Web companies to complement … Read more

The big news of the night is Yahoo’s release of a new technology portal, aimed squarely at non-geeks (see site tour). To make the point it’s not for geeks, the site features 4 stereotypical “advisors” (aka bloggers): The Boomer, The Mom, The Working Guy, The Techie Diva. They are described as “struggling with tech every … Read more

Continuing my look at Microcontent Aggregators, Peoplefeeds is right up there with 43Things.com as a leader in this market. Before I start the review, I came across a new Web 2.0 list today called categoriz – which puts Peoplefeeds in its ‘Content Management’ category and the others I’ve been tracking in categories such as ‘Social … Read more

I’ve been writing a lot recently on the topic of Web Office, over at my ZDNet blog. Some R/WW readers may be interested in checking out those posts too, so here are the recent ones: – Morfik tests browser boundaries – builds Javascript chess app – WebOS market review – XIN – a Web OS … Read more

News Corp has quietly released its own set of blogs, dubbed “Newsblog”. The design is rather bland and the actual personalities of the bloggers is not revealed. It all seems a bit too corporate for my tastes, but some of the ‘blogs’ are getting a large amount of traffic already. For example a post about … Read more

James Governor of analyst firm Redmonk has posted a thoughtful piece on how blogging is changing the analyst and PR landscapes. When he wrote this part, he may as well have been talking about myself and Read/WriteWeb: “Bloggers and emerging non-traditional analyst firms are increasingly influencing technology and product strategies. In order to make money, … Read more

The BBC has always been at the vanguard of new media in the Web 2.0 era, thanks in part to their public service charter – but also they obviously have a lot of smart, innovative thinkers on board. Today they announced “bbc.co.uk 2.0”, which will be a full-on attempt to turn BBC online into a … Read more

Recently I wrote a series of posts about Microcontent Design, using BBC Backstage as the main casestudy. As a segue from that theme, one of the product types I’ve been looking at recently is Microcontent Aggregators. One type of Microcontent Aggregator is a service that aggregates microcontent about a person (usually via RSS) and displays … Read more

– GData and Open Standards (Matt Kaufman from edgeio thinks Google could’ve done better to support existing open standards like Structured Blogging — via Jeff Clavier) – The Economist feature on new media (high level look at things like blogging and wikipedia) – Diversified Media Companies – Year To Date Price Breakouts (a chart which … Read more

So Russell Beattie has decided to call it a day. I admit his decision surprised me, because I’ve always enjoyed reading Russ’ well-informed commentary on the mobile Web. However it did make me wonder – what would cause other people to give up blogging? Here are the top ten reasons I could think of: 10. … Read more

My ZDNet post today explores the reasons behind Google’s new syndication format, GData. Like most people, Jeff Jarvis isn’t sure what this means – and neither is Dave Winer. I’m in the same boat, but what I do know is that Google has taken a sudden interest in extending RSS and Atom. Check out this … Read more