1. Has anyone noticed that its impossible to trust a single word uttered about coaching changes, the draft, trades and even celebration parties these days ?

Bloggers, sports websites and even the print media have gotten so desperate they seem to have come to the conclusion that fabricated stories, passed off as rumors, are a better way to drive traffic and create awareness of a website or blog than actual reporting.

Unfortunately, ESPN and local newspapers, radio and TV media have become the patsies of bloggers. If some random blogger reports that he has heard that a trade of Joe for John is being discussed, then the traditional media, as they have told me many times is requested by their editor to run it down and see if its real. Its almost like a sad joke. How do you make an ESPN reporter jump ? Make up something and put it on your blog. Somewhere a bunch of sports bloggers are playing a drinking game. Chug if the other guys made up trade rumor makes the ESPN crawl.

How to stop it ? ESPN.com puts up a page of blacklisted blogs and websites who's posts they wont comment on or report on in any way. It will create a short term surge of traffic for those sites, but then they will go away as the proprietors of the sites realize that being discredited is not a good thing.

2. I did a quick and dirty interview with The Motley Fool. They asked me about Buy and Hold for Stocks. My answer was simple.

Buy and hold is long dead. It has always been a sucker's bet. Proponents point to charts of index performance over the long term; unfortunately, things like house repairs, kids, and college tuition don't follow the same chart.

Buy and hold is a great marketing slogan for funds that want to take your money. Nothing more or less.

Then they had John Bogle ,founder of Vanguard and creator of the Vanguard 500 comment on what I had to say. I'm glad to say that Mr Bogle made my point. In what should have been a simple answer for him, was not. Plus he managed to take a few shots at me. Hey, if you can't counter a point, slam the messenger ! Here is what he had to say. Notice all the qualifiers.

Cuban embargo is what we need after those silly statements.

Of course buy and hold is a sucker's bet where individual stocks are concerned (just ask the guys that bought and held Mark's own company!)
And while buy and hold for all of American business (a stock index fund) may produce long years of plenty interrupted by years of famine, putting equity capital to work in that way will be great so long as America is great.
And as a group, all investors, by definition, are buy and hold investors! Not complicated! And mathematically, those who themselves are buy and holders (without costs) will not might outperform those who trade back and forth with one another, who capture the same market return but let all those croupier costs destroy their returns.

Finally, if buy and hold refers not to stocks or the stock portfolio but to one's aggregate investment portfolio, reducing the stock commitment as age takes its toll, it is the most certain way to wealth that exists in our uncertain world.

He's right about the marketing slogan except when it is applied to the strategy described in the immediately preceding paragraph.

I stand by what I had to say. Buyer beware.

ShareThis

Never underestimate the power of first-mover advantage, especially when being one of the first movers gets you bought by Google. Back in August, 1999, Pyra Labs launched Blogger. LiveJournal had launched six months before and Open Diary in October of the previous year. But it was Pyra Labs which was acquired by Google in February, 2003, and the rest was history. Now, nearly ten years later, Blogger is still the dominant hosted blogging platform. In May, 52 million individual people from the U.S. visited a Blogger blog, almost twice as many as the 28 million who visited a blog hosted by Wordpress.com (comScore). Six Apart properties, including Typepad.com, attracted 14 million.

Millions of bloggers still use Blogger because it is easy. However, Wordpress.com is making steady gains and growing its aggregate audience in the U.S. at more than twice the annual rate of Blogger (40 percent versus 14 percent). These numbers don't count all the blogs that host Wordpress on their own servers, such as Techcrunch.

The vast majority of Blogger traffic comes from outside the United States, where its annual growth rate is 38 percent compared to Wordpress.com's 59 percent. On a worldwide basis, Blogger blogs have a readership of 267 million people a month, compared to 143 million a month for Wordpress (comScore, April, 2008). The biggest countries are, in order:

1. U.S.
2. Brazil
3. Turkey
4. Spain
5. Canada
6. U.K.

From a business standpoint, Blogger is good for Google because it creates millions of sites which can show AdSesne ads. It creates more inventory for Google. Only recently has Google bothered to start showing ads to the users of Blogger itself every time they publish a post.

Can Blogger keep its lead indefinitely, or will Wordpress eventually catch up? Or will something else entirely overtake both of them?

Today, two of the people behind the original Blogger, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, have another little service that is capturing people's attention. It is called Twitter, you may have heard about it. In May, Twitter.com had 17.6 million unique U.S. visitors to its Website alone, making it bigger already than Six Apart.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Embed RSS Feeds in Web Pages

Go to this page, replace the feed URL with your own feed, use the default color scheme or change it to something else and then click Get Code. You'll get a JavaScript snippet that can be easily placed in the sidebar of your blog.

If you like to embed feeds from multiple sources, merge all of them into one using Yahoo Pipes and then pass the combined feed to the Google Gadget. You can also use RSS widgets like WidgetBox or YourMinis that are done in Flash and not JavaScript.

Embed MP3 music and other Audio

If you like to embed audio files like songs, podcasts or interviews in your web pages, use Yahoo! Media Player - its a free Flash music player that automatically detects all links to MP3 files in the current web page and turns them into a music player. Another alternative is the Google MP3 Player.

To embed other audio formats like 3GP, Midi, Real or Windows Media, it may be a good idea to convert these files into MP3 using Zamzar so that they play on almost any web browser.

Embed Flickr Photos and Slideshows

To embed an individual Flickr photograph in your blog, click the "Share This" link (available next to the photo title) and choose embed it. Flickr requires that the embedded image should link back to Flickr and this built-in embed option automatically takes care of that requirement. (see example)

To embed a Flickr photo slideshow in your web page, open any Slideshow in a new page (see example) and choose "Customize HTML" from the embed option (see example). Here you can specify a custom size for your Flash slideshow so that it fits just right into your web page.

Embed High Quality or HD YouTube Videos

To embed a high resolution version of YouTube clip in your web pages, first make sure that Watch in High Quality or Watch in HD link exists next to the YouTube player as most videos are only available in standard format.

Next copy the YouTube embed code and append &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 (for high quality) or &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 (for 720p High Definition) to the URL value of the movie parameter (both instances).

Embed Picasa Web Albums

When you open a photo album inside Picasa, click the link in the right sidebar that says "Link to this album" and choose "Embed Slideshow". You can use the same approach to embed individual photographs that are available inside Picasa.

Embed Events from Google Calendar

Click the drop-down arrow next to any Google Calendar and select Calendar settings. Open the Google Embeddable Calendar Helper program by clicking the customize button and choose elements that you want to display or hide in the calendar.

Embed Very Large Photographs

To embed really large images in your blog, you may either use Deep Zoom or the Google Maps viewer. These programs break your photographs in small tiles and you can even pan / zoom across these images very similar to the default interface of Google Maps.

Embed Charts and Graphs in Web Pages

My personal favorite is Zoho Sheet any chart created inside Zoho Sheet can be published as an external image without exposing the full spreadsheet. If you are interested in creating charts with low volume of data, use Google Charts.

Embed GIF Animations and Screencasts

GIF animations (see example) are a perfect way to embed short screencasts in web pages as they require no plugins and auto-play inside feed readers. You should upload GIF files to your Flickr account as it preserve all the frames while lot of other image hosting website will drop anything after the first frame.

Embed Word Documents

Upload your document to Scribd and they'll give you the embed code in Flash. Scribd supports both doc and the new Office 2007 docx format in addition to Open Office documents. Even Barack Obama is using Scribd to upload his public documents and upcoming plan.

Embed PowerPoint Presentations

While the popular choice is Slideshare, you should also consider using Issuu (best web application) for presentations that are either large or formatted in the form of magazines or catalogues (see example). The only downside is that Issuu accepts PDFs so you need to convert the presentation before uploading onto Issuu.

Embed Spreadsheet Data

Both Zoho Sheet and Google Docs allow you to publish a range of cells from a spreadsheet into a web page but the embedding process in Zoho is less complicated - select a range and choose "Publish" from the contextual menu to embed that range into your web page.

Embed Adobe PDF Files

To embed PDFs in a web page, you can either use Issuu (for magazine style PDFs) or Scribd for PDFs has either have lot of text or have a top-to-bottom reading layout similar to Word documents.

Embed Flash (SWF) or Flash Video (FLV)

The best option to embed Flash content is via swfobject. It improves the overall user experience by providing alternatives in case Flash is missing and your Flash content also becomes more searchable. This tutorial has all the files and other details to help you get started with SwfObject 2.

Embed LinkedIn Profile

If you wish to display your LinkedIn profile in the sidebar of your blog, try LinkInABox. People (site visitors) can read a summary of your LinkedIn profile without leaving the site.

Embed Google Maps in Web Pages

Embedding a Google Map in your website is now almost as easy as adding an image just open the Static Maps wizard, search for location that you want to embed and specify the dimensions of your map. They'll provide a simple URL that actually points to a static image of that map.

Embed Another Webpage in your Blog

If you like to embed another website into your web page, your best bet is an IFRAME tag also known as an Inline Frame. Just set the SRC value to the address of the web page that you want to embed into your current HTML document. You could try IFRAMEs for inserting live search results from Google into your web page without having to worry about APIs.

Embed Windows Media or QuickTime movies

While it is possible to embed mov or wmv videos in web pages directly using the OBJECT tag, I recommend that you put these videos onto blip.tv and then embed them in web pages as Flash video. That's because your visitors can then play the video without extra plugins and two, they always have the option to download the video in the original format from blip.tv servers.

Embed Other Fonts in Web Pages

Most web pages use universal fonts like Arial, Times New Roman or Verdana since they are installed on most computers and hence your web pages will render correctly. If you want to try something different and render pages in fonts like Microsoft Calibri or Adobe Garamond Pro that are only available on some machines, all you need is sIFR it lets you use almost any font for your web pages using JavaScript + Flash and is perfect for writing newspaper style headlines.

Embed your Lifestream in a Web Page

You have a presence on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Last.fm, Facebook, Amazon and a dozen other online places. It can get really tough for friends to track you at so many places so what you should do is create an account at FriendFeed, import all the different services that you use and then use the FriendFeed Badge to embed your lifestream activity on your main site.

Related tutorial: How to Embed Video in PowerPoint

How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website - Digital Inspiration

more graph humor and song chart memes

Nine companies are saying "yes," having recently launched Enterprise 2.0 offerings that integrate with SharePoint technology.

If there's one thing that any I.T. pro knows it's the value of "maximizing their investment" in whatever servers they run, technology they use, or services they've signed up for. With strict budgets in place, no I.T. purchases are bought on a whim. Instead, each decision is researched, tested, thoughtfully considered, and, if worthy, purchased, then rolled out to become a part of the I.T. infrastructure. SharePoint is no exception.

Why SharePoint?

One of the Microsoft Server products that businesses worldwide run is SharePoint. For those not from the I.T. community, SharePoint is thought of as a more robust version of Google Sites, but that's a poor comparison. Yes, both tools allow for team site creation and collaboration, however the similarities start and stop there.

For many companies, SharePoint is the portal for all their business data - and not just docs, spreadsheets, presentations, and PDFs, but also browser-based forms that interact with built-in workflow technologies which add business logic to sophisticated online applications.

Other tools allow for the addition of business intelligence enabled dashboards and reporting centers, enterprise search, and application templates that can be downloaded and customized to quickly set up internal web sites and services that provide everything from online help desks, to groupboard workspaces, to knowledge libraries, vacation scheduling tools, project tracking workspaces, sales pipelines, and much more.

In other words, businesses won't necessarily be ditching SharePoint anytime soon just to run the latest and greatest "Enterprise 2.0" technologies. However, that doesn't mean they're not interested in running Enterprise 2.0 apps - it just means that they'll be more likely to "maximize their investment" in SharePoint in order to do so.

This week at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, several vendors are demonstrating their social-computing business tools, and a good many of them are tools that integrate with SharePoint technologies. Here's a look at who these companies are and what they offer:

Awareness Inc.

Just yesterday, Awareness announced their new platform that allows for the creation of Web 2.0 communities that connect people and content through social networking technologies and Awareness-powered widgets that can be ported to any third-party services from Facebook to MySpace.

With the new platform from Awareness, Microsoft SharePoint integration is built-in, letting I.T. admins use SharePoint's scalable and searchable back end to tie together internally-facing SharePoint environments with externally-facing social networking/Web 2.0 communities.

This integration also includes the packaging of Awareness's Web 2.0 widgets as SharePoint Web Parts that let users monitor and contribute content, display user details and status, search content, and view metrics. Awareness also integrates with SharePoint's Identity Management to allow for SSO (single sign-on), which makes using both platforms together a seamless experience.

NewsGator Technologies

Yesterday, NewsGator announced the launch of their new SharePoint add-on, Social Sites 2.0. This tool brings new social capabilities to SharePoint Server 2007 including community pages, which are ad hoc communities formed around projects, interests, or locations, and social networking capabilities that let employees better collaborate and share knowledge. Social Sites also includes tools for tagging, search, customized recommendations, and a discussion component that includes email integration. Users are provided with social graphs based on both explicit and implied connections, making it easier for them to find their colleagues and content in an easier way than before.

Atlassian

Atlassian, makers of Confluence, an enterprise wiki creation tool, announced its integration with SharePoint through an embedding function that lets the Confluence wiki appear to be a part of the SharePoint site, complete with an edit button for making changes. The wiki lets users add charts, diagrams, image galleries, maps and database content within their pages.

WorkLight Inc.

Yesterday, WorkLight announced its new WorkLight for SharePoint, which lets SharePoint Server users securely view and update information from SharePoint Server through familiar consumer tools like Windows Vista gadgets, Facebook applications, personalized homepage gadgets, RSS, mobile devices, and more.

blueKiwi Software

Last month, blueKiwi Software announced their integration with both Microsoft Office and SharePoint. With their new SharePoint connector and blueKiwi OfficeAssistant, their social software suite easily integrates with a company's SharePoint Server to provide social networking tools and capabilities that include blogging, user profiles, conversation trackers, tagging, social search, and more.

Connectbeam

Yesterday, Connectbeam announced their new Spotlight Connect for SharePoint, a bookmarking and tagging add-on module for their enterprise social search-and-discovery application that brings social content, collaboration, and bookmarking tools into SharePoint via a special add-on module available this July.

Telligent Systems

Telligent's Community Server Evolution platform uses its REST API, mail gateway, shared authentication and single sign-on, to integrate with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, and Microsoft Active Directory. Their social-computing platform offers enterprise blogging tools, social networking, social streams, forums, media galleries, and business analytics through detailed reporting.

Leverage Software

Leverage Software announced integration with SharePoint Server, enabling users to interact with external-facing internet communities of their partners, customers, or corporate alumni, while maintaining the security needs of an enterprise.

Tomoye Corp.

Tomoye's Ecco software, which lets you get answers, network, and collaborate across the enterprise, is now offering a SharePoint-ready solution. This capability lets users publish documents from SharePoint to Ecco and supports SSO between applications.

Twitter, like anything, can be a little addictive as we look to reach out and communicate with all our friends and followers. Xefer has pulled together an interesting mashup which leverages Yahoo Pipes and Google Chart API to plot the usage of twitter of a specific user. So of course, I had to plug the somewhatfrank twitter id in and chart it.

Give it a try here for your twitter username.

Dunder Mifflin Scranton Branch Org Chart

(via)

By sharing my statistics openly, it will now be obvious to the world how little real traffic I get, opening me to ridicule. The emperor has no clothes, it could be said. Also, maybe the traffic I receive isn't seen as "quality" traffic? I still get a lot of visitors from Google image searches looking for R-rated material in vain. Maybe I don't want everybody to see that, and, therefore, take the site less seriously?

By sharing my statistics openly, it could be shown we're bragging, highlighting traffic, growth, and the trends. Smaller bloggers just getting started might see the data as unattainable and could throw potshots.

Just as it makes sense to visit Salary.com and determine what other people with your title in your geography are commanding, viewing other's statistics can give you a reference point for how you are performing against your peers.

One of the most interesting things I find from my statistics are where people are coming from, in the referral logs. It's likely that those people caring enough to send a link my way might be interested in the same topics I am, and, using the transitive property, my readers would be interested in what they are as well.

Despite one's best efforts, not every single story gets the same amount of solid traffic. There are peaks and valleys. Making this data public could better give guidance to other writers as to what topics are most interesting, might get the most engagement, or views.

Whether the total number of unique visitors, page views, referrals is in the hundreds, thousands or hundreds of thousands, by establishing that data publicly, your traffic now becomes part of the conversation, relative to yourself and relative to others, so you'll need to come to terms with this in advance.

A good blogger who knows their statistics can get used to specific readers. With a good combination of MyBlogLog, and location-based visits, I have a good idea of who the most frequent visitors are, and I think I know what stories they read, if I get the time to look it up. Maybe others could be as aggressive and figure out the same information. Some visitors might not like having this potential to be snooped expanded to the masses.

It's one thing to post data at your peak when things are going well. But if you have a slow week or months, and your numbers collapse, there's no hiding it. You can't undo a number once it's out, so that too would be a risk.

In the brain, heroin is converted to morphine, an opioid painkiller. Morphine acts by signaling through a receptor encoded by the gene OPRM1. Different versions of the OPRM1 gene are thought to affect how much morphine one needs to feel a given effect. This study of 139 heroin-addicts (primarily Swedes) and 170 non-addicts found that people with one or two copies of the G version of the SNP rs1799971 have almost 2.9 times the odds of being a heroin addict.

DNA Traits Comparison: David Ewing Duncan and Kevin Kelly

^{All Traits are from 23andme.com, except:
*Also on deCodeme.com
**Not on either site}

Next week (the fourth and final part of this series): Why the online genetic testing companies are important.

Content as infrastructure

I say the notion of persistent ubiquitous content. And when I say content - I mean all sorts of content - movies, TV shows, music and books - blog posts, links, RSS feeds, wikis - ideas, statistics, directories, memes, stories, articles, lists of links, concepts and most importantly personal expression byproduct.

What I mean by being persistent is that this content gets stored up on the web and is always there. And by ubiquitous - I mean its everywhere. So always there and everywhere.

What's important to keep in mind when building the mesh is that everything starts and ends with the user, the customer, the human being who's using the stuff. That's why every one of these blog series' posts will have the user's ID (profile page) at the center of the drawing. Then by overlaying any or all of these domain' drawings on top of each other, we'll be able to get an idea of what the mesh will actually look like - which I'm betting will be a hodge-podge and distributed mesh' of inter-connecting pieces - loosely coupled together.

No one vendor will be able to dictate exactly how the mesh will evolve. It'll be a hybrid combination of open and proprietary standards, all driven by market factors, latest trends and a gradual education of the mainstream populace as to the benefits of all this stuff.

You'll also notice that I'll put an RSS icon and the words - DataPortability and Interoperability on each chart - as well. Think of these things are portals or rabbit holes between each of the domains' I'm writing about.

Some of the connections between the components and domains of the mesh - will be based upon open standards, like RSS, OpenSocial or OpenID while others connectors' will be proprietary APIs, like Microsoft Windows Live Contacts APIs or MySpace APIs. And just so we're clear - the purpose of these blog post series is to map out how these various kinds of domains will all exist unto themselves as their own unique dimensions connecting to humans and providing unique functionality for us all - moving forward.

If we (software developers) can all agree upon standardized constructs, such as an RSS feeds, shared public servers, user profile pages or groups - then we can have disparate implementations, techniques and solutions - while at the same time - provide a comprehensive, loosely coupled meshed architecture which anyone can contribute to and benefit from - just like the web.

This mesh doesn't have to get LED by Microsoft or Google, but they can contribute to it - for sure. But I just wanna remind everyone that this all started with RSS and RSS readers - and the fact that no one (despite some efforts) owns or controls RSS. And even though HTML has it's own little governance and political world surrounding it - it also is not controlled' by any one entity or constituency.

Over the years I've given up thinking that there's one way to build the mesh, or that one set of altruistic standards and solutions will fit all.

As long as there is time - Microsoft will do it their own way. As the dusts of time accumulate we'll see that Google is also it's own world - unto itself. And there's no way in hell you're ever gonna tell Steve Jobs how to do soemthing, he's always gonna be his own man.

So now the questions are: will Facebook continue to innovate, extend and grow - or just become a puppet aligned with Microsoft? I'd also like to see if MySpace will continue on it's own path, or will it become subservient to Google? And thank god for the Evan Williams' of the world!

Politics aside - from a technology POV this is all possible, but it's gonna take cooperation, devoid of ageism, sexism or capitilism to make this all work. Yes we all need to make money, but NO you don't get to lock my balls up in YOUR vice. Ain't gonna happen.

The little guys needs to live off the crumbs left behind by the behemoths and this whole thing needs to work around the world - evenly.

So as user's behavior patterns shift and migrate and as vendors smarten up and start thinking of the user FIRST - in the center of all universes, I believe that the market trends and pressures from users will define the mesh. This series of blog posts simply lay out SOME of the domains, standard constructs and APIs - that will make up the mesh. it is by no means complete or exclusive.

Technology solutions today enable users to assume that we can buy music (and soon) movies through the web just as easy as going to Virgin Megastore or Wal-Mart. Customers are getting over Blockbuster and are choosing NetFlix instead. Because of separate regional rights and languages - we're seeing music and movie downloading and rental solutions pop up around the world.

End-uers are getting used to the notion of storing their files (text, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.), their media libraries (images, music, videos, etc.) and their user generated content' (blog posts, reviews, etc.) in storage facilities or storage lockers (as they're sometimes referred to) - on the web. On-line storage is an entire market category, though it's gonna be hard for small guys like Box.net and Omnidrive to compete with the likes of Amazon's S3, AOL's XDrive or both Microsoft and Google's storage offerings (Live drive and GDrive.) But god bless them - they are alternatives to the bug guys.

But storing files you own and control is only part of what ubiquitous and persistent content is all about.

What I MOST excited about is when we can rely upon old news reels, stock photo libraries, statistics libraries, biographies and documentaries - from places like the BBC open project and the Internet Archive. Wikipedia is also morphing towards this sort of on-line knowledge dissemination and availability.

Pioneered by Brewster Kahle and the Internet Archive - the idea of backing up the web' was so outrageous that I just couldn't believe it when I first heard of it.

You mean they're going to backup - the entire web - how many times? Forever?

And then when I heard about the BBC Open project - my head did a similar thump you mean the entire library of everything the Beeb has ever done will be available -on-line forever? (Of course we've found out later that its not quite everything and that it's gonna take YEARS to get all the rights clearances - but at least they got the right idea!)

Soon after the Beeb announcement Pathe also made their catalog on-line BUT they were charging for it - and it was minuscule compared to what the Internet Archive and the Beeb have.

We tried to to do a storage play for bloggers, podcasters and vloggers called ourmedia.org (back then) - as a UGC front-end to the Internet Archive. But the same month we launched - YouTube launched. So we know what happened with that scenario.

Now persistent ubquitous content is available for everyone. Your great American rock video, novel, soap opera or viral video - can be stored up in YouTube (or blip.tv.meta-cafe, Revver, whatever [insert 40 brand names here.]

If you step back and think about content as infrastructure you can take a different attitude towards stock photos, soundtracks and beats, 3D models, 3D city models and all sorts of reusable digital content assets. You can bake historical references, sports statistics, background on diseases and weather trends into your blog posts and software. You can make collaborative hypermedia a dream come true.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - as a key construct - is a mesh that can provide health information, small business knowledge and courseware for all ages - free and built into word processors, email, spreadsheets or browsers.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it - can enable entirely new kinds of record labels, movie studios and book publishers - which have a fighting chance of surviving. By lowering distribution, development and www costs - we can enable the Long Tail to at least cover their costs and pay the rent and feed themselves.

A mesh which has ubiquitous persistent content in it can seamlessly tie into other domains like the Live Web or Tools- and seamlessly mesh' with other constructs like micro-content, aggregators or collections.

Persistent ubiquitous content is an idea who's day has come.

I'm hoping that in all the billions of dollars of revenues, greed and exploitation of users, we can make sure to get enough content on-line and available for free - that new kinds of educational tools, knowledge bases and learning environments can evolve - to make our kids even smarter than we are.

Persistent ubiquitous content is a domain which can mesh into any other domain, construct and API. Here's a chart outlining some of the ways I think of this:

all sorts of opinions - threadsML, message boards, stored conversations, IM transcripts,

Action Items in this domain include:

- MORE free content - we'll never be done, they'll never be enough!

- APIs for content infrastructure - not sure what two-way APIs would be here - but they'r eimportant!

- standards for content infrastructure - hmm - I wonder what that would look like?

- educational objects' - that's an idea that's been bantered around for a while!

- persistent conversations - which are re-entrant and annotatable. That's what ThreadsML was all about.- and (of course) we need to continue to educate end-users onwhat the hell it is we MEAN by persistent ubiquitous content!

Action Items in general include:

- make sure that ALL the open standards continue to rise in popularity, that all implementations are compatible with each other and that more open standards get created

- testing and compatibility labs - a place where we can guarantee that everything works together. Building a COMPATIBLE mesh will be a challenge - and it won't ever happen if things break or don't work.

- two-way APIs - until we can write back into systems and services as easily as we can get data from those services we won't have a symmetrical architecture and a successful mesh environment

- establish OutputThis as a standard for content producers to list all of the destinations they'd like to route their content - to. SEE Dataportability.

Summary of persistent data repositories discussed here:

Box.net, Omnidrive, S3, GDrive, Live Drive, XDrive, Wikipedia, Revolution Health, Stats Inc., Freebase, Twine, DMOZ, Technorati, Hulu, iTunes, Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, all sorts of wikis I didn't even bother to put down. All the micro-content places - I'll cover in the next post!

Major players and people to watch and listen to:

Brewster Kahle, J.D. Lasica, Ross Mayfield, Brad de Graf, Jon Lebkowsky, Harold Gilchrist, Susan A. Kitchens, Mike Linksvayer, Mary Hodder, David Weinberger, Howard Rheingold, Stephen Downes, B.K. DeLong, Brian Dear, Marc Eisenstadt, Christopher Allen, Aaron Swartz, Paolo Valdemarin, Jamie Faye Fenton, Bernard Goldbach, Jeremy Zawodny, Larry Lessig, Joi Ito, Jimmy Wales

Major organizations and advocacy groups:

BBC, Internet Archive, ourmedia, mediaventure, Creative Commons,

Final NOTE: This is my second post in this series - I ain't done yet! Next up - #3 - micro-content.

Editor's Warning: This article contains adult content and it not suitable for children. If you are under age please navigate away from this article immediately. Thank you.

It is no secret that sex sells. I have previously highlighted the work of GOOD Magazine in creating this video explaining the porn industry and its financial success. That said, pornography generates interest and revenue both online and off and it was only a matter of time before Web 2.0 principles were applied to online porn. Zivity is one startup doing some interesting things in the space by enabling anyone to create and post their own videos, photos and other content and generate revenue for doing so. My friend Orli Yakuel has also previously pulled together an article showcasing a number of Porn 2.0 services. Fantasti.cc aggregates online video content from many of the video sites she listed.

Fantasti.cc offers ratings, comments and Digg-like voting to determine the hottest videos. It has other social features so users can create profiles and connect with one another. Fantasti.cc aggregates content from a bunch of different sources making it a one stop shop for all your free porn video needs. It also leverages 'folksonomy' or user tagging to help organize and categorize site content. In addition to videos Fantasti.cc also offers streaming real-time web cams.

I am not advocating viewing, creating or selling pornography I just wanted to point out that Fantasti.cc takes a very Web 2.0 approach to its video site by leveraging other site's content and incorportating social features to create an online pornographic video community. It's no wonder Fantasti.cc has seen its traffic grow significantly over the past year as shown in the chart (below).

[With apologies in advance to Martin Nisenholtz, who I believe is genuinely fighting the good fight, and who will no doubt end up with a great job at some fine Internet company.]

The hiring of Bill Kristol was the last straw.

I can't take it anymore.

I hereby inaugurate my New York Times Deathwatch, which will continue until the last Sulzberger has left the building.

Recent dispatches that are fit to print:

Leading the way [in terrible end-of-year news from the newspaper industry] was The New York Times Company, where total [quarterly] revenues fell 1.7% to $865.8 million, due mostly to a 4.1% drop in ad revenues... Advertising revenues at the news media group in particular fell 5.6%.

Source: Media Daily News.

Actually, that's being perhaps overly fair, since it takes into account an extra week last year. The straight year over year performance was:

[F]ourth-quarter revenue totaled $865.8 million, down 7.1% from $931.5 million a year earlier. The decline included a 9.1% drop in advertising revenue and a 4% fall in circulation revenue... [T]he company had an extra week in the final quarter of 2006, which boosted the year-earlier quarter's revenue by $50.8 million and its pretax income by $14.3 million.

Yes, we are dealing with a business where missing a single week means the difference between revenue falling 1.7% and 7.1%, and advertising revenue falling 4.1% and 9.1%. Go figure.

Source: Forbes.

Now, normally, beating up on someone like this isn't very much fun. But we are talking about a profession that specializes in passing judgment, often snide, on everyone else. And so, onward...

Turns out that December 2007 was particularly bad, and things may be getting even worse:

Separately, the [New York Times] reported that December ad revenue dropped 25.2%. Excluding an additional week in December 2006, ad revenue declined 12% for the month.

...[W]eakness across several national [advertising] categories including health care, books, technology products and transportation hampered results in the month. Classified ads, the traditional lifeblood of newspapers, saw steep declines in help-wanted, real estate and automotive sales. [Craig, you bad bad boy...]

"To date in January, the percentage decline in advertising revenue is trending similar to that of December..." said Janet Robinson, chief executive of New York Times...

As they say, sometimes it's darkest right before it goes pitch black.

Source: Marketwatch.

How are the company's other papers doing?

The [New York Times-owned] Boston Globe will soon announce cutbacks at the newspaper, including hundreds of layoffs, and an increase in the per copy price of the paper to 75 cents as of Feb. 1...

The Globe saw a nearly 7 percent decrease from 386,417 to 360,695 in its daily circulation between Sept. 2006 and Sept. 2007, according to numbers released in November by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. That report showed the paper's Sunday circulation down about 6.5 percent...

When you have an obsolete, inconvenient physical product that nobody wants in an era of universal online access, the appropriate strategy is clearly to raise the price.

Source: Metro Boston, which amusingly itself is 49 percent owned by the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times.

How about revenue at the Globe?

At the New England Media Group, which includes the Boston Globe, ad revenue fell nearly 16%. Circulation revenue fell 7%.

Source: Marketwatch.

How about the company's smaller newspapers?

The company's regional-media group, including papers in medium-sized markets such as Wilmington, N.C., and Santa Rosa, Calif., saw ad revenue decline almost 17%, while circulation fell 7.4%.

Source: Marketwatch.

Meanwhile, the Times faces its second assault from a major hedge fund in the last two years:

A hedge fund manager who acquired a stake in the New York Times Company and is pushing to gain seats on its board sent a letter to the company on Sunday in which he criticised directors as "ineffective" and called for it to shed more non-core assets.

Scott Galloway, founder of Firebrand Capital, who sent the letter, has joined with another hedge fund, Harbinger, to try to put forward their own nominees for the four independent seats on the media company's 13-member board at its meeting in April. The funds have amassed a combined 4.9 per cent stake in Times' shares.

Source: Financial Times.

An ineffective board? What could they be talking about?

Hmmmmm. That's not the direction you want to see those things go.

Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with noted Internet experts. Let's see:

• Brenda C. Barnes -- CEO of Sara Lee; noted snack cake expert
• Raul E. Cesan -- former CEO of Schering-Plough; noted Levitra expert
• Daniel H. Cohen -- president of DeepSee LLC, "an oceanic exploration and submarine leasing company"; noted Jacques Cousteau expert
• Lynn G. Dolnick -- former head of exhibits for the National Zoologic Park in Washington DC; noted marsupial expert
• Michael Golden -- current publisher of the International Herald Tribune; former head of the company's Women's Publishing Division; noted sundress expert
• William E. Kennard -- former head of the FCC; noted "seven dirty words" expert
• James M. Kilts -- former CEO of Gillette; noted smooth, smooth shave expert; prior to that, unindicted coconspirator at Philip Morris; noted expert on your grandfather's hacking cough
• David E. Liddle -- here I have to take a pause as I actually know this one; based on what's happening at the company, it could be reasonably asked whether he's actually attending the board meetings.
• Ellen R. Marram -- former CEO of Nabisco; noted Oreo expert. Oh, wait, she actually ran an Internet company: "From 1999 until 2000, Ms. Marram was president and chief executive officer of efdex Inc. (the Electronic Food & Drink Exchange), an Internet-based commodities exchange for the food and beverage industry." Ooh. I wonder if that ended well.
• Thomas Middelhoff -- former CEO of Bertelsmann; noted expert on complicated family politics -- well, that's probably coming in handy...
• Janet L. Robinson -- current CEO of the New York Times Company; noted expert on horrific business implosions
• Doreen A. Toben -- CFO of Verizon; noted 30-year debenture expert
• And finally, Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. -- the Big Kahuna -- the Man -- the Guy In Charge -- the chairman and scion -- the dude with the cojones to actually defend Judy Miller. Not noted Internet expert.

So, if you want to issue bonds to pay for FCC-approved snack cake manufacturing in a submarine on display at a national park by a sundress-wearing cigarette-puffing Levitra-popping Judy Miller, you're pretty much set.

Go team!

Last election cycle, a politician's own ill-chosen words became a viral video that cost him his candidacy. This November, will a politician get undermined by an ill-conceived viral video made by his own supporters? That's the thought I had after watching Yes We Can, a new YouTube video currently storming The Viral Video chart. It's a putative tribute to Senator Barack Obama's stirring words after the New Hampshire primary, directed by Jesse Dylan with music by will.i.am of The Black Eyed Peas. (Who's better known for his stirring words, Whatcha gonna do with all that junk inside your trunk?)

The video was made without the Obama campaign's participation or permission, according to ABC News, which is a good thing, because it's an appalling exercise in celebrity self-congratulation, reducing the Senator's soaring plea for optimistic unity into an opportunity for some popstars to preen in front of the camera. (While Obama's image is shunted aside, an unidentified brunette hottie actually flips her hair; Scarlett Johansson giggles. It's like Obama Girl without irony.)

Here at NewTeeVee, we like to keep things non-partisan, but whatever your personal inclinations this election, it's easy to see how this clip's growing popularity can't be good for the Obama campaign: after spending months fighting the criticism that their candidate has great rhetoric but little experience, here comes a viral video that seems specifically designed to derail their efforts. And unlike Obama Girl, Yes We Can is so highly polished, any protests that it's not actually part of their campaign will fall on deaf ears. I can already picture Fox News commentators deceptively using it to dismiss the Senator as an MTV candidate. (Nice beat, as blog star and Clinton supporter Jeff Jarvis puts it. But can you lead to it?)

Memo to politically active celebrities: if you actually want your candidate to win, how about coming up with viral videos that actually serve his campaign, and not yourselves? And always remember: when it comes to choosing the person who gives the 101st Airborne their marching orders, few care what the star of The Nanny Diaries has to contribute.

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I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.

First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don't trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn't long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.

If you switch to a 7 day view, you will see that Blogcatalog overtook MyBlogLog 24th January.

The observant will also note when looking at a 3 year chart that MyBlogLog had much more explosive growth over a short 3 month period, were purchased by Yahoo, and since that time has been a little bit in decline which is a shame because I still love MyBlogLog, and if I have a choice between MyBlogLog and Google Analytics for stats checking, I am more likely to have a glance in MyBlogLog than Google Analytics.

BlogCatalog has had a much more gradual growth, working to differentiate themselves by introducing lively discussion forums and member groups, and bringing bloggers together to support good causes with Bloggers Unite.
The growth has been viral, "grass roots" growth, with from memory one mention on Mashable, one mention on Marketing Pilgrim, and very little if any coverage on large technology blogs. Blogcatalog would be a great example of what Guy Kawasaki was talking about yesterday.

Forget A-list bloggers. Lousy reviews by them cannot tank your product. Great reviews cannot make it successful. Focus on big numbersany Technorati 1,000,000 blogger can be a channel to reach people. If enough people like your product, the A-list bloggers will have to write about you.

Some key recent enhancements (click through to see working examples on some of these widgets)

Blogcatalog Discussions & Groups

Discussion Forums and Groups

There are frequent enhancements to the features in the various discussion areas, the latest one being a new widget for the discussion groups you have joined - other features include practical enhancements to the discussion features, in many cases making them more useful than Facebook, where it is very hard to track discussion in the groups you join.

BlogRank Buttons (just released)

This was announced just a few hours ago

BlogCatalog ratings are based upon various metrics including votes using a widget on your site, voting on the site, visits from Blogcatalog to your blog, and overall Blogcatalog activity in various forms.

Communities Widget

This is a way to display your profile on other social media sites introduced in December. Quite simple, and useful if you don't want to give juice to the sites for reputation management.

On this one I am not sure who got there first, as MyBlogLog also launched a similar widget in December

There actually seems to be some bugs in the code generated, or maybe it is just my laggy connection, but I couldn't seem to get a version that displayed both the names of a service, and icons next to them.

BlogCatalog API

I am not that great a programmer but I have managed to play around with the Blogcatalog API and create some simple applications (still to be released) by combining data from Blogcatalog with data from other APIs. Blogcatalog has had their API available for some time.

MyBlogLog should have had their API launched months ago by my reckoning, and it finally entered beta a week ago. It seems like it might have more features than the current Blogcatalog API, but once you have opened up, opening up a little more isn't too difficult.
With wider adoption (the tech bloggers have been wooed by MBL in the past) the new MBL API is being greeted as the possible saviour of Yahoo.
Sure, it is possible MyBlogLog have more data stored, I am not sure what data Blogcatalog collect, have a wider audience, and MyBlogLog have the "social starfish" available via API, but it isn't much more work for Blogcatalog to allow access to that data.
MyBlogLog have however been working on infrastructure heavily for the last 12 months - I would hope their API is now ready for some heavy usage.

I would love to have seen some cool apps made with the Blogcatalog API by now

Support For Wordpress.com, Myspace, or Yahoo! 360 Blog?

This is something that MyBlogLog have had for some time, Blogcatalog announced support for Wordpress.com, Myspace and Yahoo! 360 yesterday.

Who knows, maybe you can even see my recent visitors in a feed reader, in fact that would be an interesting addition.

Tagging & Reading

Quite a few months ago I wrote about Blogcatalog parsing tags from your feed itmes and then listing your content on varous tag pages, just like Technorati. At the time they only offered support for a few blogs, using a specific format for tags and categories. I noticed a couple of months ago that they now have my blog being picked up and fed into tag feeds

In addition on your profile pages it is now possible to read the feeds of the blogs you have added to your neighborhood

Ok now for the big one

Blogcatalog SezWho Partnership

Blogcatalog today have just announced a partnership with SezWho, who provide special plugins to integrate with Plugin Systems on various blogging and discussion forums.
The good things from my perspective:-

• SezWho doesn't require any form of browser plugin
• This doesn't replace the existing comment system, thus a blog owner retains the content on their site, and if they choose, can remain dofollow. That isn't true of other replacement comment systems with similar features.
• No browser plugin is required - I often had problems using various browser based comment tracking with incompatibilities, and I also had problems with their plugins, though I must admit I haven't retried with cocomment recently, maybe that situation has improved. Comment tracking that required me to click a button was always awkward, and subscribing to RSS feeds for comments on individual posts just became a chore - we will see how this works in the long run
• Comment ratings - this could be likened to the thumbs up / thumbs down on SEOmoz where you gain points, but this is a distributed rating system that means you gain in reputation for leaving high quality comments across multiple blogs - I am not sure whether this gets gamed heavily, but Ihope that it will encourage better commenting, especially on dofollow blogs.

Warning:- I may be more inclined to just delete a URL from a spam comment rather than deleting them totally, so that other readers can also vote your comment down
yes, sometimes there is a little evil in me

Negative points?

• Only support for Wordpress self-hosted and Moveable Type - in many ways I would look on this as a plus, as it might encourage more people onto their own hosting, though I hope they can come up with a solution for my many blogging friends on Typepad.
• Installation is a little complicated for a novice, though there is a WordPress widget (regular readers know I don't like Wordpress Widgets though for SEO reasons)

I should also point out that as I am writing this I haven't tested the integration on this blog with the threaded comments, but I don't expect there to a problem, and by the time many people read this I will have everything up and running.

Setting Up SezWho

Log into Blogcatalog, go to your account and manage your blog

You will see just after the feed management section a big button to create an account on SezWho. |Click it, wait a moment or 2, and you will be issued an API key, and you will be given a link to click to download special versions of the SezWho plugins.

Goodbye MyAvatars

I have been using the Wordpress plugin MyAvatars for over a year now, but it is time for it to be retired.

MyAvatars uses images from MyBlogLog, and unfortunately on popular content it is starting to cause me problems on page loading times. This isn't something that was a major problem for me before, because I had a very fast connection, but it has started to cause me real problems, maybe because MyBlogLog switched over to the Yahoo image platform, or maybe it is a problem that always existed.

This doesn't prevent people viewing my content quickly, because avatars and widgets are generally loaded in parallel, but on a slow connection it can start to hurt a little.
When your total page sizes can reach over 1MB, and most of that is avatars on comments, it is time to reconsider.

One caveat, I am not sure if the SEZWho Blogcatalog plugin will add avatars to trackbacks, I will have to take a look.

Benefits

Big immediate benefit for Blogcatalog is press coverage, as SezWho are in California. I think it is a good match as both are heavily aimed at promoting discussion between bloggers, both on blogs and off them.

I am also not a fan of applications that try to do too much - SezWho seems to do just enough to be worthwhile whilst leaving me in control of content left on my blog, and commenter ratings will certainly help in making the decision on whether a commenter is generally well behaved. I don't mind short jokey comments or great post Andy if it is from someone legitimate, it is when someone comes in as a first time commenter, you rarely know if they are genuine.

About Blogcatalog & SezWho

My blog has in the last 9 months grown into quite an in depth resource on all things "Blogcatalog". I first started writing about them when they relaunched around April 2007 with an initial investment of $40000 to purchase the existing property.
Full coverage of Blogcatalog can be found by browsing my Blogcatalog tag.

Primary competitor for Blogcatalog is Mybloglog

SezWho when they received $1M investment from KPG Ventures back in October 2007 were given quite a luke warm reception on Techcrunch.

Competitors to SezWho include Disqus, Intense Debate and coComment

Specific Disclosure - I do some consulting with Blogcatalog on a very much low key, part time basis, though I also give coverage to their competitors and try to remain impartial - I have given MyBlogLog extensive coverage as well, most recently in a joint interview with Ian Kennedy on Collective Thoughts

Further coverage no doubt on the Blogcatalog blog though the press release isn't posted yet.

Related posts

• Wordpress 2.1 Launch date set (1)
• Traffic Or Topical Community - What Comes First? (28)
• Supporting Your Most Valued Communities Without WIIFM (24)
• MyBlogLog vs Blogcatalog - Differentiation (41)
• MyBlogLog Spam Hack Update & Widget Performance | Linkbait Idea (2)
• MyBlogLog API - How Far Forward Are You Thinking (3)
• I Bet You Missed Some of These (March 07) (4)
• Exclusive: Blogcatalog vs Technorati? - Sharing The Love & Tagging (nofollow removed) (20)
• Blogcatalog
  Blogger Social Networking Hub (9)
• Blogcatalog Slam Dunks MyBlogLog? (29)

Glaser talks about how he used to be excited when he received a notification of a new action on Facebook -- a poke, a wall post, a message -- but more recently, all that has changed. "Now, my reaction to getting the same kinds of notifications has changed, and I dread clicking through to see what kind of spam or scam is coming my way," he writes.

What happened? Well, for one, the Facebook platform happened. The Facebook platform allowed application developers to flood the site with applications, both useful and not (by many accounts, mostly not), and because of the way it is set up, app developers were able to encourage, and sometimes force or trick, users into sending out mass invites, notifications, or new feed announcements about often times trivial matters. This increased the noise on the Facebook network ten fold, and decreased the enjoyment of the social networks for some people.

Users, though, are beginning to push back. In just over a month, more than 65,000 people have joined the No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application! group, which has spun off an ancillary group that catalogues the applications that require users to invite friends before even using the app. And over 4,200 people have signed a petition calling on Facebook to step in and stop developers from using the "forced invite" tactic to grow their apps virally.

Further, blogger Alex Saunders points to recent statistics from Adonomics that indicate that the top Facebook apps have recently seen significant dips in the number of active users. "All of the top 10 leaderboard applications have seen substantial drops in daily users since peaking in November and December," writes Saunders. The chart below is from his site:

	Peak	Today
Funwall	5800	2500
Superwall	4800	1800
Top Friends	2900	2200
Likeness	821	181
Super poke	1500	500
Movies	814	500
Compare People	1000	471
iLike	941	372
Causes	469	110
Superlatives	320	110
	All figures in 1,000s

It is important to note that not all (if any) of these applications employ forced invites or tricky user invite schemes. Nonetheless, the drop in active users is telling, and is perhaps indicative of a Facebook populace that is beginning to get fed up with application noise or is getting tired of applications in general. It is certainly possible that the novelty has begun to wear off, and users are no longer interested in trying every hot new app under the sun, and have grown weary of some of the apps they were once so fond of.

One of the most annoying apps on Facebook -- at least in my opinion -- "Pirates vs. Ninjas," is way down off its November peak as well, according to Adonomics. What would make an app slide from over 165,000 daily users to 24,000 in just a couple of months? It's hard to say, but perhaps users have begun to grow tired of noveltly apps that don't do much else except spam their friends with invites to join the application.

App Fatigue: A Good Thing?

I wrote earlier that users suffering from app fatigue and pushing back against apps that employ sneaky invite schemes to grow is a good thing, and I think it probably is. Assuming Facebook steps in and imposes stricter invite rules -- which they should, applications will need to find different ways to spread virally. If people are simultaneously beginning to suffer from app fatigue (or app apathy -- appathy?), there is really only one sure fire way to get apps to spread virally: make better applications!

There are now 15,422 apps on the Facebook platform -- how many of them are truly useful? Anecdotal evidence would suggest that the novelty has worn off and users are finally starting to demand more of the applications they install. As Alex Saunders writes, "Developers of Facebook applications, however, have reached a watershed that demands a focus on delivering utility and value rather than thinly disguised advertising vehicles."

What do you think? Are you suffering from Facebook app fatigue? Do you think Facebook should step in and tighten invite rules for developers? Sound off in the comments below.

How about year over year growth? Facebook had 10.59% marketshare in December 2006, Hitwise says. Myspace dropped from nearly 79%. It appears that social networking has grown in general; though Facebook posts impressive numbers of new users, in terms of sheer visits Myspace is nearly keeping up with its growth.

Other Networks Growing Too

If we assume that Facebook is growing rapidly then the relatively similar marketshare numbers year over year indicate it's actually the entire sector that's growing. Though trailing in the distance of the big two, market share percentages have held steady or grown for the next services in line as well: Bebo, BlackPlanet, ClubPenguin, GaiaOnline, MyYearbook and Hi5 have unchanged or increased marketshare numbers according to the same metric.

Chart from Hitwise

The Hype

Tech bloggers write about Facebook all the time, I feel like every coffee shop I visit is filled with laptops open to Facebook and Richard MacManus (in transit to the US as we speak) says he just saw a whole magazine about Facebook in the airport. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was on 60 Minutes last weekend, interviewed by a reporter who marveled at the most basic social networking functionality.

The Facebook platform, valuation and scandals have all caught the imagination of much of the press. Many of our readers, however, are less thrilled with the direction Facebook is going. Two of our most popular posts of late were an interview with a disgruntled early Facebook user and our coverage of the just released Facebook feature that lets users hide the overhyped applications in their profile!

Tom's Still Got Friends

Meanwhile, millions and millions of people are still happily logging into MySpace to communicate with their friends. I spent some time on MySpace last night, exploring the profile pages of family and friends and was shocked to see that all the music players on the site are now sponsored by Zune. It was news to me but I'm told it's been that way for weeks. I haven't been able to find a single shred of coverage of that deal on any of the top tech blogs - but I would assume it's helping sell more Zunes than ever.

Numbers like those from Hitwise always need a grain of salt, but the next time someone tells you "by this time next year, everything you invest in will be built on top of Facebook," (as Tribe.net founder Mark Pincus reportedly told Fred Wilson last year) - you just send them over here to this post and then see what they say.

Facebook is interesting but Myspace is where the users are, still.

Is Classism Part of this Story?

It's entirely possible that people actually know about this already, but that the technocratic classes are excited as they (we) are about Facebook for another reason. Money. It's been documented and is generally understood that Facebook users tend to come from wealthier demographics that are more invested in the high-end economy than are Myspace users.

There has certainly been a lot of innovation at Facebook, and that innovation is more accessible to developers than the still-forthcoming Myspace Platform, but how much of this excitement about Facebook is really grounded in the perception that it's the Junior LinkedIn - the path to yuppie pockets. If people mock niche social networks aimed explicitly at wealthy or upwardly mobile people - why is it more polite to focus on a social network widely understood as yuppie-focused (Facebook) as the future of everything important on the internet? How often does the press pay attention to BlackPlanet.com? Not very often, as far as I can tell.

Growth in 2007: Last year was a busy one for new APIs with over 250 new APIs added. We saw a distinct increase in the last quarter and we're seeing lots more this January compared to the same time last year. (On a related note, see Bungee Lab's Alex Barnett's recent look at 8 Trends in Software as a Service Platforms which included a take ProgrammableWeb data such as new APIs per year).

Mashups by API: The pie chart below shows the most frequently used APIs in our directory of 2600 mashups. And although mapping mashups may have the biggest slice of our sample, it's easy to forget that there are examples in the directory that in total use almost 300 different APIs.

APIs by category: Speaking of different classes of APIs, what about the number of APIs per category? This is different than mashups-per-API in that it gives a sense of how many distinct API providers are competing within a given market. Here are top 10 categories with the most APIs listed:

• Mapping: 50 APIs
• Internet: 32 APIs
• eCommerce: 29 APIs
• Reference: 28 APIs
• Photos: 23 APIs
• Music: 22 APIs
• Search: 22 APIs
• Messaging: 22 APIs
• Social: 17 APIs
• Email: 15 APIs

As lastly, given how much growth and activity we see in each of the leading categories, we're continuing to expand our ProgrammableWeb Verticals section which now pulls-together API news and resources for six markets including:

• Social APIs and platforms
• Video
• Government
• Mapping
• eCommerce
• Telephony

Expect to see a lot more category-specific coverage from us in 2008.

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Whatever it is, it needs to layer an understanding of semantics on top of a consumer application. The consumer application needs to be so cool and so viral that people will be open to learning that it is powered by semantic technologies. In that case, it will be possible to further market applications as Semantic Web apps. Consumers will understand that if one Semantic Web application has potential, so might others. In math, this is called proof by induction. In marketing this is called creating a market. In any case, it needs to be done.

In this post, we analyze several existing and potential applications of semantic technologies and look for the killer app.

Natual Language Understanding

Since the beginning, the Semantic Web has been associated with Artificial Intelligence. The idea of representing information in structured form so that computers can "understand it" and then solve complex problems was one of the keystones of the Semantic Web vision. The problem is that representing billions of existing web documents as RDF is a rather daunting, if not impossible task. An alternative would be to "teach" computers natural language. If an application could read the page the way we read it and interpret what it says, the annotations would not be necessary.

Natural language processing has been the Holy Grail of AI for awhile now. However, it is a very difficult problem, because humans are born with the innate ability to understand language and we learn it not in a vacuum, but in the context of life. Certainly if we could replicate that with computers, it would be amazing and it would be the killer app. The problem is that this is not on the horizon. The Semantic Web technologies of today are not able to represent natural language in its entirety, and this is not really even their goal. Even if we could represent each page completely, there is still the matter of interpreting structure into semantics, which is the magic that our brain does so well and so easily.

Genie In The Bottle

Related to natural language understanding, is another idea that is not on the horizon. John Markoff called it "the perfect vacation." I call it the "Genie in the Bottle" to illustrate the impossibility of this. There is a misunderstanding about the Semantic Web which is floating around, which equates the Semantic Web with ability to solve really hard problems. It is simply not true.

For example, if you go to a new travel agency and ask them to book the perfect vacation for you, the travel agent will not be able to do it, because she does not know you. In order to find the perfect vacation there needs to be constraints: where you've been before, who you are going with, what you like to do, what is your budget, etc. Finding the "perfect" vacation is not a one shot deal, it is a process, which leverages iteration and memory.

True, with the Semantic Web the information is structured, but it does not mean that the computer can necessarily solve complex problems. These are two completely different things. Just because you have a map, does not mean that you know the best way to get from point A to point B. Having a map is necessary, but it is not sufficient, you need the algorithm to find the best path. There is a big difference between asking what is the capital of France and what is the cheapest airfair today to fly from New York to Paris. And the even harder question is: Where should I go on vacation next? Computers are not going to give us an instant, perfect answer to this question anytime soon, if ever. Again, this would be the killer app, it is just not likely to happen.

Semantic Knowledge Databases

So what is realistic and possible today? The first in the list of growing applications are Semantic Knowledge Databases. The two examples that we will look at here are Freebase and Twine. While Freebase is focusing on building essentially a semantic equivalent of Wikipedia, and Twine is focused on a personal semantic database, both are databases, both focus on knowledge management, and both are Wikipedia-like. The advantage of these databases over Wikipedia is that they represent information in a structured way and support queries. To understand the difference, take a look at the Alicia Keys page on Freebase and on Wikipedia. At first glance they are very similar, but Freebase "knows" that Alicia Keys is a blues singer and it then knows other blues singers. For Wikipedia, blues is just another page, not a music genre. So Freebase can potentially answer a question of listing all blues singers, while Wikipedia can not.

This is certainly interesting but the question is will people care? Can the end consumer tell the difference? Unlikely. Today Wikipedia contains definitive references on a vast number of topics. Like Google, it is easy to search and find relevant information, and as a result, people are not likely to be in need of a better Wikipedia. With Twine the situation might prove to be different, because personal knowledge management is an important problem. The first question is: Are their enough people who want to be efficient in managing personal knowledge? I think the answer is increasingly likely to be "yes." And the second question is: Does knowing the semantics of knowledge help you build the best application? At the very least Twine has to beat del.icio.us bookmarks and ideally needs to do for personal knowledge management what Highrise is doing for CRM.

But beyond the execution, there is still another problem. For a semantic knowledge base to be the killer app it needs to ignite imagination and capture people's hearts and minds. This is not likely to happen. We appreciate libraries, we can not live without them, but we take them for granted. Knowledge has been commoditized thanks to Google, Wikipedia, and the blogosphere, and is perceived as abundant and unexciting. For this reason Semantic Databases are not likely to be the killer apps -- but they might become a stepping stone towards one.

Semantic Search

An early candidate for the killer app in the semantic web category was search. First Hakia and more recently Powerset marketed the idea that a semantic search engine, one that is based on the understanding of natural language, can beat Google. On top of having the pressure to deliver qualitatively better results, Semantic Search companies also have to, at least approximately, solve the problem of natural language understanding, which as we discussed earlier is a very difficult one.

Where things stand right now, it does not look like search is the killer app for semantics. The understanding of natural language does not seem to give you a noticeable edge in getting better search results. At least in the comparisons that we have performed earlier there is no major difference. The statistical algorithm deployed by Google is precise and good enough, which is why it has been the clear leader in web search for the past 8 years. To unseat Google will require more than incremental improvement in search, it will likely take a paradigm shift and the creation of a different web experience. Below, we discuss how "discovery" could possibly take a bite out of the pie, but as of now Google's algorithm remains good and strong.

Social Graph

After Tim Bernes-Lee posted his thoughts on the Social Graph, a discussion began on the web in which people wondered if the Social Graph is in fact the Semantic Web. This, however, is a gross misinterpretation of the post. The Social Graph is not the Semantic Web, nor is it the killer app of the Semantic Web. They are just two separate concepts. The confusion comes from the fact that they both are Mathematical Graphs or a Network. The underlying structure of both consists of nodes connected by links. Many things in the nature and society are networks, so it is not surprising that meaning and people fall into this category.

If anything, it is more correct to say that the Social Graph is a subset of the giant, all encompasing Semantic Web. Knowing how people are connected is important in order to solve the perfect vacation problem. After all, a perfect vacation should be taken together with perfect friends, right? But jokes aside, the Social Graph is an interesting and important trend for 2008, however, it is not really related to Semantic Web.

Shortcuts

Increasingly, we are seeing a new breed of Semantic Applications, which we generalize as shortcuts. This category includes SnapShots from Snap, BlueOrganizer and SmartLinks from AdaptiveBlue, Shortcuts from Yahoo!, and In-text search from Lingospot. What is common between all these technologies is that they leverage the simple semantics of the content to deliver additional information. In the case of Snap and AdaptiveBlue, the semantics is defined by the URL, while Yahoo! and Lingospot perform text analysis.

Regardless of the method, all of these technologies deliver related information via Ajax popups. That is, they leverage semantics to pull the information from the web. This is essentially discovery or reverse search. When the user is looking at a book there is a preview with a brief description and the cover image, when the user encounters a stock symbol he is presented with a stock chart, analysis and additional links to the company, when the user is looking at a music album there is a play button, and when the user encounters a movie there is an ability to watch the trailer in place. The shortcuts remove the need to search, instead, the related content from the web comes right into the page.

Today's shortcut technologies are simple and still in their infancy, but they are among the most successful examples of semantic applications. However, we can not call them the killer app for several reasons.

First, people perceive them as advertising, which is not the point. Snap certainly made an early push into ads, but this is not a representation of what these technologies will look like in the future. Second, in their current implementation, all of these technologies are utilities. For the same reason that people are not going to get emotional about personal knowledge management, they will not be emotional about shortcuts. Shortcuts will also be taken for granted.

Yet, shortcuts hold the most promise. With a few more iterations these technologies are going to get slicker and more precise. They will leverage content and micro-context to reduce the amount of search. They will become more personalized based on user behavior. And once this happens it will be a big deal.

Full Disclosure: Alex Iskold is the founder and CEO of AdaptiveBlue.

Conclusion

We are still waiting for the killer app for Semantic Web, something that can get viral and turn semantics into a marketing term. Problems like natural language understanding still remain difficult to solve, and the solutions do not appear to be on our horizon right now. It also appears that a semantic search engine, at least based on the ones we have seen to date, does not have a substantial advantage over Google. We are seeing the rise of early Semantic Knowledge Databases, but while we expect them to get better and more interesting, they are more likely to be the stepping stones to the killer app, rather than the app itself.

In the mean time, we are seeing the rise of shortcut technologies, which leverage the basic semantics of the content, like URL and simple context analysis, to deliver relevant information, links, and media directly into the page. While still very early, these technologies hold the most promise because they are simple and useful. We expect that the next generation of these technologies in conjunction with personalization will deliver an interesting alternative to search -- contextual discovery. We will discuss this alternative in more detail in a future post.

Now tell us what you think the killer app for Semantic Web will be? Which of these technologies do you think is the most promising?

On Clinton/Citigroup:

New York-based, enormously well-capitalized, longstanding market leader whose name is synonymous with the sector it dominates. A powerhouse in the 1990s is having difficulty reclaiming past glory.

Edwards/McDonald's:

Disdained by the media elite as declasse, shunned by the fashionable as too populist and unhealthy to body politic, manages to thrive by working hard and dishing out cheap meat and potatoes to working-class patrons. Worldly sophistication is belied by simple message that appeals to economically disadvantaged consumers.

Romney/Blackstone:

While stock is at 52-week low, can't be written off due to deep reservoirs of cash, ruthlessness, and cynicism.

As for the real-money InTrade markets, the speed with which Clinton and Obama have traded places is nothing short of astonishing. Here's a live chart of Obama, over the past week:

And here's Clinton:

From: Noah Robischon Subject: Editor Newsletter - 2008 Preview Edition Date: December 31, 2007 11:42:12 AM PST

In January, as you've no doubt heard, Gawker editorial is introducing a new bonus system. While your base monthly pay remains the same, the chance of a bonus will depend on your individual performance. More specifically: it will depend on the popularity of your posts that month. Below, an explanation of the background to the move; why now; and how the new system works.

1. BACKGROUND

It's only on the internet that a writer's contributions can be measured. At newspapers, a reporter's reputation depends on the opinion of their editors, which can be fickle. Some people get on because they play the office politics well. Or simply because they're more aggressive in lobbying for more prominent jobs, or pay increases.

Advertising people say that the internet is special, because the audience's engagement is so much more measurable than that of newspaper readers, or television viewers. Which makes it so bizarre that most writers, on the internet as in print, are paid for the sheer brute quantity of their output.

Gawker has been equally backward. Sure, we pioneered the pageview bonus system, which rewards all writers for a site's performance. But, let's be honest: those bonuses have been allocated subjectively. And, in the large, writers have been rewarded, at $12 a post, for mind-numbing frequency. When we've paid a higher rate (the $200 "feature" rate) we've often not been rewarding better pieces; merely encouraging the padding of perfectly good, short items.

In short, we have repeated the bad habits of traditional media organizations: leaving remuneration to the arbitrary will of upper management; and, by treating words as if they were Soviet steel output targets, encouraging quantity over quality.

2. WHY NOW

Early on in the commercial blog era, frequency was the key to the success of a site: Engadget took a lead because it churned out 24 posts a day while Gizmodo, fearful of overwhelming its audience, stuck to a dainty dozen items. We learnt that lesson, and vowed never to be out-produced again. But we now really are reaching the limits of sheer volume. Readers can't take any more. And the proliferation of blogs, and social news services such as Digg, has changed the rules.

Where there was a shortage of attitude and commentary, there's now a surfeit. And what's in heavy demand, and short supply, is linkworthy material, by which I mean a secret memo, a spy photo, a chart, a well-argued rant, a list, an exclusive piece of news, a well-packaged find. Gina showed on Lifehacker, with the style of feature she pioneered a couple of years ago, that it was possible to grow a site's audience without endlessly increasing the number of posts.

Second, our objective is not merely to provide gratification for a writer, or amusement for their pals, but to appeal to the wider readership of a site, and to new readers who might discover it through Digg or Google or some other link. It's fine to pen the occasional self-indulgent or self-referential item. But we're not going to waste the editorial budget on them, when we're investing so heavily in the sites. We need a more efficient form of bonus compensation -- and one that's fair to the writers who care most about their readers.

Third, the market for editorial talent is becoming more competitive. If a writer works like hell, or sparkles, we always run a risk: that somebody outside the organization notices before the news trickles up the management hierarchy. We need a mechanism to reward hard work, and stardom -- to dispense pay increases automatically, if you will.

3. HOW IT WORKS

For several months now, we've displayed the number of views each item receives. It's not a perfect measure. The view count does not reflect attention paid to the posts on the front page; nor photo galleries (which are usually junk views anyhow); and it can overstate the value of cheap items with superficial appeal, but which damage a site's reputation. Nevertheless, it's the best measure we have, so we're going to use it to calculate bonuses.

From now on, you will be paid a set monthly fee. This is the total amount of money outlined in your editorial agreement or determined between you and your site lead. The era of counting posts that are worth $12 or $200 is over. You will be expected to contribute a set number of posts each month in exchange for your monthly base pay.

On top of your monthly base pay, you will be eligible for a bonus based on the number of pageviews your posts receive each month. This total includes any pageview on any story with your byline that was read during the month, even if the story is months or years old. You can track your monthly total here: (Click your site name in the rollup data section along the very top of the page).

Each site will be assigned a pageview rate, which is the dollar amount that each 1,000 pageviews on the site is worth. Although this sounds similar to an advertising CPM, this number has nothing to do with your site's revenue or advertising value. At the end of the month, if the money you earn in pageviews exceeds your monthly base pay, you will be paid the extra money as a bonus.

This chart should make it clearer. If your site has a PV rate of $5:
$2,000 = 400,000 views:
$5,000 = 1m views:
$7,000 = 1.4m views

Based on this example, if your base pay is $2,000 per month then you would need to get upwards of 400,000 pageviews to begin earning bonus. A total of 500,000 views would earn $500 bonus (or $2,500 total pay).

Your site lead will be able to tell you the pageview rate for your site, and give you a chart like this one to for calculating bonus.

For the majority of sites, there is no cap on the amount of bonus you can earn each month. Four sites are already using the new bonus system (Gawker, Wonkette, Gizmodo and Defamer). One guest editor on Wonkette landed a huge exclusive and walked away with an extra $3k in his paycheck.

-Rules Of The Road-

* The pageview rate for each site will change at the beginning of each quarter. It cannot be changed at any other time.

* This bonus will replace all other bonuses that now exist.

* Site leads do not take part in this system. They are still measured on overall site performance.

* The site lead has the right to revoke pageviews on any post. This is to guard against the publication of material that may be inappropriate or illicit, and we hope it is never necessary.

The site leads have more detailed information about all of this, and can share specific numbers for your site to give you a better sense of how your pageviews will translate into bonus.

Please send questions to so that we can round them all up and answer for everyone.

All best,
- Noah and Nick

Check out Newey's chart with links in the iframe below, or if you're viewing in a format that doesn't work well with the iframe, in the static image below the fold. See conversation and pending additions to the list at WhiteAfrican.com.

The question is: what kind of numbers would actually get your attention on a revenue chart for the first 12 months of business (or would income / cash flow be a better measure?) Before I answer the question, I want to add an explicit qualifier this answer applies to early stage software / Internet startups think a few people, an idea, and maybe a prototype.

The answer is none. I've seen around 4,387,215 financial models for startups. I've invested in over 100 companies. As far as I can remember, not a single revenue model was anywhere close to accurate in the first 24 months, other than the ones that said there would be $0 revenue.

Now I invest in software / Internet companies the vast majority of which don't make any money in the first year or two. But - the principle scales beyond year 1. I can't remember a company that I have been involved with that had an accurate view of its revenue dynamics until at least the third year. The vast majority of companies were well below their initial expectations (which isn't necessarily bad); a few demolished their expectations (on the upside.) In either case, the conclusion is the same: Your Revenue Forecast Is Wrong.

I'm not suggesting that the right answer to the question posed above is don't bother with a financial model. Rather, I'm suggesting that your financial model is going to be incorrect and a credible early stage investor is going to know that before you sit down with him. It's actually a good test if your potential investor immediately digs into your financial model before understanding how your actual business works it might be a good signal to you that he doesn't understand how a startup software company evolves.

As a result of my assertion that your revenue forecast is wrong, I'm less concerned about the absolute numbers and more interested in understanding how you think about them. I'm also very interested in how you see the expense side of the equation growing over time since that is the piece you ultimately have control over. However, I don't want to spend any time on this until I understand what you are trying to accomplish with the business and whether or not it is in an area that I believe I'd be interested in investing in. Especially because whatever you have forecast and are presenting to me will almost certainly be wrong, although not necessarily invalid.

I first dipped my toe into creating content on the web back in 2000 when I managed the website of a division of Hitachi Europe Ltd. I've maintained my own personal website since then, but I've only recently launched myself headlong into social media.

I can't believe how much my life has changed since then.

I plotted a timeline of my adoption of web 2.0 tools this year. It's not comprehensive, but it's sufficient to make my point:

This isn't a linear chart; if anything, the increase is exponential:

One look at my average day shows the central role that social media plays in my life:

• Listen to podcasts on the way to/from my communications job
• Check my RSS feeds: first thing in the morning, at lunchtime and before leaving work (shared items RSS feed here)
• Check and update Twitter/Jaiku on the way to/from meetings via Instant Messenger. Twitter updates my Facebook profile
• Listen to podcasts while running in the evening
• Upload the GPS data from my run (example) to MotionBased network
• Blog at TorontoRunner.com about (a) the run route (example) and (b) my feelings on the run (example)
• RSS feed for my GPS data available on TorontoRunner.com
• Log my run on BreakingTheTape.com and RunnersLounge.com
• Blog here about the cross-over of PR, social media and marketing
• Post a heads-up on Twitter/Jaiku about the new blog posts
• Check LinkedIn and Facebook for the latest updates

I love this new lifestyle. I'm always connected. Nothing I do happens in a vacuum any more. I've met a tonne of new people. What's more, my lifestyle accomodates my new-found passion, so I don't have to sacrifice anything except time to accomplish all of this.

There's just one cloud on the horizon - the chart above.

The line can't keep going up. There isn't enough time in the day.

I see three options:

• Option #1: Burn-out
• Option #2: Level-off
• Option #3: Aggregate

Option #1: I can continue to use more tools and burn out (no thanks).

Option #2: I can stop using new tools, or I can keep using new ones and let a few less valuable ones drop off. I can see this happening, but it would be more through necessity than choice.

Option #3 Find ways to keep up with multiple tools through one interface. I like this option. A lot.

I already have a few tools to do this:

Twitku is a great tool that lets me watch and update my Twitter and Jaiku feeds at the same time.

Google Reader lets me keep tabs a bunch of sites. As a result, I only need to check sites like Technorati or Facebook occasionally.

iGoogle lets me watch Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader and GTalk while accessing my Google Notebook, TinyURL and Google Docs... all from one page. Vista's sidebar does a similar job, although with less gadgets available for now.

What ties all these applications together? Information sharing.

In a world of information overload, walled gardens don't work.

In the future, tools will only fit into my toolkit if they're opened-up. I need to aggregate their information through other tools. RSS feeds, open APIs and widgets are essential.

I'm not arrogant enough to believe I'm the only one thinking this way.

Companies need to share information through these tools or risk falling into obscurity.

I first met Dick in June 2004 when Kevin Werbach took pity on me and gave me a pass to attend Supernova. Not only had Dick just decided that txting ruld, but that making it easier to share and consume RSS feeds was very important. He was right on both. What they did with Feedburner was stunning. They made structured XML mark up extremely sexy and business-friendly.

But I'm wasting your time. What you should be reading are my below notes from Dick's presentation and his recent blog entries on first hires, exit fallacy and start-up offices.

My notes from his talk:

• When hiring, looks for talented-at-anything people, not just position-perfect people. Plans will change and if people can't move, it's a major loss.
• Launch late and launch often. (By this he's suggesting to not launch until you have a lot of features ready or almost ready. Launch with a solid core set, but then keep releasing new features quickly, some of which may have been ready at launch, but held to keep excitement up.)
• Don't write pre-launch long-term business plans. They'll be void within months of deployment.
• Keep your org chart as flat as possible for as long as possible. Reporting chains hinder fast, flexible development.
• Speed of execution is a competitive advantage. When you fear Why won't Google just copy your product once it's live? The answer is becasue we are fast and nimble and they are slow and hamstrung.
• Develop your service and business models the way an optometrist tests your eyes. They try 40 different combo's of A vs B. to methodically find the best combination.
• Make it as easy as possible for the Markets to determine what your most valuable offering is. Allow them to tell you what your business is. Open, accessible businesses get scrubbed and reviewed by the business people of the world. The wisdom of those markets can often finds your true value offering much faster than you can in your board rooms. Secret, private companies do not get such benefits.
• Open APIs and the like make this happen ever faster. Dick thinks open APIs are a great business advantage as the Markets can even faster scrub your offerings. Even if it means your competition can benefit from it too, you will always be 2 steps ahead of them because you'll be leading and they'll be copying.
• You ALWAYS spend more money than you plan. Be brutal with your revenue forecasts and slash them to as small as they could be if nothing new happened other than what you've proven. [Ted note: trust me, only count on revenue you've already proven. Plan for growth, but do not require your company to achieve it.]
• Compete on your merits, not the short comings of your competitors. Your outward case for your company should be what you do better than anyone else, not that others do it worse than you.

Photo by Ted R. Hosted on Flickr. Trilby tip to Greg Cohn for pointer to Dick's recent posts.

This article was contributed by Ted Rheingold who is a passionate thirty-something accidental entrepreneur and founder of Dogster and Catster. He writes about the biz and passion-centric online communities at the Dogster, Inc. company blog and his personal blog, Spidey Senses.