2006

In Part 1 of this series I introduced the concept of Microcontent Design, followed by a case study of BBC’s developer network backstage.bbc.co.uk in Part 2. Now let’s look at what’s being built by external parties, using the BBC Backstage ecosystem. Specifically this post is an in-depth and developer-focused look into a application called Mightyv, … Read more

Tonight Google unveiled its online Calendar. As usual whenever Google releases a product these days, it prompted me to ponder the Google Office 🙂 I’m convinced it’s around the corner, so I decided to check Google’s progress on this ‘Moby Dick’ – the Great Web Office! More on my ZDNet blog, but here’s the table … Read more

A couple of months ago Mike Arrington posted a plea to the blogosphere for more email syndication services for blogs. Mike didn’t like the overly orange branding of Feedblitz, but more to the point he noted that blogs still need email. Now I’m about as big an RSS advocate as you’ll find on the Web, … Read more

John Hagel has a thought-provoking post about microchunking and media businesses. It follows on from Umair Haque’s post, in which Umair said that “unbundling” media (e.g. Disney releasing tv shows for free online) is only half the equation. The other half – the real value – is in “rebundling”. By which he means individual users … Read more

– Live.com to be homepage of Vista, IE7 (Niall Kennedy answers a question I asked at Microsoft Search Champs in January – HUGE news for RSS, search and gadgets) – Microserfs, Revisted (“perhaps Scoble is the modern equivalent” – of the Microserfs narrator, I think he means…) – Outlook on software in 2006: Healthy, disruptive … Read more

The Structured Blogging website has been upgraded and went live tonight. I re-designed the website and did the writing for it, under the employ of Marc Canter’s Broadband Mechanics and with the help of others in the Structured Blogging community such as Conor O’Neill. PubSub supplied the stylesheets and php code. Indeed PubSub and BBM … Read more

– Social Media Spending to Hit $757M in 2010 (over half in the technology, auto and media categories…) – Growing The Buzz (Alex Bosworth on Buzznet: “Plenty of room in the 300 billion advertising industry for social networks, they just need to be more aggressive about grabbing their share.”) – Dave Winer: The Internet as … Read more

Some interesting posts recently on the Internet TV trend, which is really ramping up this year. Mark Cuban, who co-founded Broadcast.com in 1995 and sold it to Yahoo! in 1999, has a great post on his blog outlining some of the pros and cons of rich media on the Net. He notes: “The reality of … Read more

A lot of people have been seeing new Google Base verticals popping up – and indeed the Google Base homepage has suddenly had a number of new categories added to it. As I noted on ZDNet, the full list is now: Blogs Coupons Clinical trials Events and activities Housing Jobs Mobile content News and articles … Read more

It seems a lot of people took my April Fool’s post about me moving into the TechCrunch ranch in Silicon Valley seriously, so I’m compelled to put the record straight. I’m still living in New Zealand. 🙂 I don’t think it’s a case of foolish people, rather I think my April Fool’s post was a … Read more

This post was written by Ajit Jaokar, who is a R/WW guest blogger on Mobile Web 2.0 and digital convergence. In my last post, I spoke of the differences between browser applications on the web and on the mobile device. This topic is important because the Mobile Web is all about extending the concept of … Read more

– Yahoo7 Combined 10% More Traffic than Previously (Ben Barren: “…[Y!7 users] demand is insatiable – they need more product than can be provided by Yahoo7. And they need more filtering and aggregation tools.”) – What do we do with ‘social media’? (Tom Coates: “The age of social media then is probably about a fusing … Read more

In May 2005 the BBC launched a new developer network site initially called BBC Backstage, since re-named backstage.bbc.co.uk. In doing so they put the call out for people to remix their content, using their content RSS feeds and in future APIs. It marked a turning point for the BBC’s already impressive online efforts, because with … Read more

This *isn’t* an April Fool’s joke 😉 I’ve joined up with John Battelle‘s Federated Media Publishing network, which is a great collection of blogs and sites – such as Boing Boing, TechCrunch, digg and others. I’m really honoured to have been chosen, because of the criteria for being invited: “FM looks for passion, integrity, authority, … Read more

Filtering is one of my hot topics in 2006. It’s the next step from aggregation, because many of us now have too much information coming at us. Let’s face it, even with your favourite blogs or websites, you don’t want to read every single post or article that is published. You ideally want to filter … Read more