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What is Web 2.0 and why do (some) journalists fear it?

Friday | April 25, 2008 | 5:50 pm  

I thought the guys from the O’Reilly Insight Group did a really good job of summing up what “Web 2.0″ is:

• Listening - To your customers, readers, partners, etc.
• Participation - Joining into the conversations and relationships that those folks are having, and letting them participate in your conversations and relationships.
• Transparency - Opening yourself up, being honest about mistakes
• Ongoing inquiry - Continually asking your audience about what they’re looking for from you, ways to improve, etc.

Don’t those four points sound an awful lot like things that are core to journalism?

• Listening - To your sources, to your readers.
• Participation - Providing information to create better participants in a democracy. Participating in the society via an Op/Ed page.
• Transparency - Isn’t it every journalist’s goal to make as much of the public and private sectors transparent to the community they serve?
• Ongoing inquiry - Beat reporting, investigative journalism. We are an industry of ongoing inquiries.

So if “Web 2.0″ and journalism are so similar, then why are so many journalists afraid or hostile toward “2.0″ features on their Web site and “2.0″ sites in general?

I don’t have an answer, and the Web doesn’t need any more speculation, so I’ll just put that question out there and hope some smarter folks have answers.

Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Business, Journalism, Management, Technology

Early Web 2.0 braindump

Thursday | April 24, 2008 | 7:05 pm  

I thought I’d take advantage of the slow Wednesday afternoon to try and collalesce some thoughts from the first two days of the Web 2.0 Conference

• There are a lot of suit-types-with-PCs here (as opposed to geeks-with-macs). I’m guessing that means that the “enterprise” is starting to pay attention to all this stuff if they’re sending execs, product management folks, etc.

• OpenID & OAuth are being talked about. A. Lot.

• OpenSocial is as well, to a lesser extent.

• Data Portability is on a lot of folks’ minds.

• It seems like a lot of folks are hoping that OpenID + OAuth + OpenSocial + Data Portability + As Yet Unknown Social Graph Provider == Facebook killer.

• The social web is broken. That is, unless you like re-accounting, re-friending, re-profiling, re-usernaming and re-passwording with every site you go to.

• If you’re trying to convince your enterprise to adopt social/Web 2.0 features, then get them a copy of Groundswell, it’s written by some folks from Forrester so it has that shiny veneer of expensive consulting. (I’m being a little too hard on them, they did have some good and interesting points and compelling data).

• Web 2.0 is a stupid term. However, if it gets translated as “talk with and then listen to your customers” then it might worth having yet-another-buzzword. Snarky comment: Uh, maybe I’m just in the wrong generation, but why is this such a difficult concept for companies to grasp?

• Clay Shirky is a smart guy. (Clay, where’s the RSS at?). Traditional media will continue to see a decline in usage as each new generation of Internet users becomes more participative. If you don’t allow your consumers to become creators, sharers and commentators of your content, then watch out.

• Jonathan Zittrain is also a really smart guy. As computing moves into the cloud (can we come up with a better metaphor) there are some real and serious legal issues to consider. If the government or a mega-corp doesn’t like your application hosted on EC2/Google App Engine, what’s more likely: they help you in your legal battle to keep it alive -or- they suspend your account to avoid a costly lawsuit.

• The mobile Web is broken and is a bad idea. One Web, one set of standards is the only way to have an even remote chance at replicating the success of the “Desktop Web”.

• Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook and others are to Web 2.0 what Microsoft was to Web 1.0 — they want you to develop on their platform and be locked into their API. Smart developers will remember that the only API we need is HTML/HTTP — play in their gardens (walled or otherwise) but live on the Web.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Programming, Technology

Single serving sites: Now unhip

Friday | March 7, 2008 | 6:03 pm  

Single serving sites — thanks Kottke for the name — are all the rage.

But now, they must be considered un-hip, for I have one.

From now until I decide to stop doing it iwantopenid.com will display the name of the site I’d like next to embrace OpenID.

When the site I’ve chosen to direct my lack-of-OpenID scorn at succumbs to my single-serving petition I shall place a new name atop the list.

On a lark, if you’d like to nominate the next site, put it on del.icio.us with a tag of iwantopenid.

A warning to any site who considers providing OpenID without consuming it as well — there will be a special bit of shaming for you. Friends don’t let friends provide OpenID without consuming it.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology, Whatcha doin'

Online ads are priced right

Monday | February 25, 2008 | 8:28 pm  

There’s a good interview with the CEO of an online ad firm at Silicon Alley Insider that raises a very good point about Internet advertising rates:

Moore: The fact of the matter is the Internet has been either dramatically underpriced or offline media is dramatically overpriced. Right now a reader of the Wall Street Journal might be worth a dollar, but for someone reading the online Journal you get a nickel. That’s 20 to 1 offline versus online pricing. You need 20 online readers to replace one offline reader. So when you talk about pricing overall I think the web is dramatically underpriced already.

(Via O’Reilly Radar.)

While I think most of us in the Internet publishing business would like to think ads are underpriced, my gut says no.

• Unlike print, very few folks go online specifically for advertising
• Those that do, go to a business’ Web site directly, or to a free listing site.
• Studies show that users are in a “seek” mode most of the time online, so they’re likely looking for the content that’s near the ads
• Eyetracking studies confirm that users very rarely look at the ads once they’ve found the content their looking for

Long term, the Internet is going to prove disruptive to the traditional display advertising model — users can get to advertisers’ information directly without the middleman of a content provider.

What does this mean for content publishers on the Internet? What business model(s) will emerge to reign supreme?

I. Wish. I. Knew.

Permalink | Comments (2) | Categories: Business, Technology

Quote of the day: NITF

Thursday | February 21, 2008 | 2:57 pm  

“OMG I can hear the clunking sounds coming from the NITF website” – IM conversation with Zellyn

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Journalism, Programming, Technology

My first Django snippet: Another Memcache status view

Thursday | February 14, 2008 | 5:50 pm  

Hooray! I posted by first Django snippet today. It’s a status view for your memcache server(s).

I had originally used this snippet, but the regex and socket thing never quite sat right with me.

Turns out that django.core.cache has a _cache object with a nice get_status() function. It returns a list of tuples — one for each server in your CACHE_BACKEND setting — the first item of each tuple is the server name/IP and port, the second item of the tuple is a dictionary with all the relevant stats you could need.

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Django, Python, Technology

Yelp.com missing the boat on RSS

Monday | February 11, 2008 | 1:57 pm  

So Yelp is uh, totally missing the boat on RSS.

They’ve got a a page listing their meager RSS offerings.

I’m not sure why they’re rolling feeds out city by city, in most systems if you’ve built in the ability to serve RSS feeds it shouldn’t need extra effort to apply that to a different set of data.

For the cities where they do have feeds, it’s rather disappointing:

You can’t get a feed of just restaurants, or just stores.

I’m not sure why they haven’t allowed users to create an RSS feed from any arbitrary search within their system. That’d allow folks to limit by content type, neighborhoods, cuisines, etc.

In this day and age it strikes me as odd that such a (shudder)Web 2.0-ish(/shudder) company would not adopt RSS thoroughly.

(I know it’s like the pot calling the kettle black, but I’d argue that we’ve really expanded our RSS offerings at work and we’re trying to get better. But, hey, who would call a newspaper a (shudder)Web 2.0(/shudder) company?)

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Business, Technology

Open Source means you can create content, right?

Tuesday | February 5, 2008 | 6:30 pm  

I know it’s a CMN but I thought this was too funny not to share:

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

Mail.app and Gmail performance boost

Monday | January 14, 2008 | 5:38 pm  

So I’m loving that Gmail finally got IMAP as a feature.

It makes the iPhone experience soooo much better and it is nice to be able to read my mail in a desktop app at work and at home.

However, I noticed that Mail.app and Gmail were not getting along so well. Mail.app’s activity viewer would constantly show it syncronizing, updating, downloading or doing various other network activities that made it decidedly not cool.

I tried Thunderbird for a while, and it had great performance.

I wanted to switch back to Mail.app, though, as I got an iPhone for Christmas (sweetness), and I wanted to use the pretty sweet platform of Mail.app/Address Book/iCal + iPhone.

Long story short… the secret is to not let Mail.app download and store your messages from Gmail. With my 1.8 GB of mail it. Takes. A. While. To. Download.

Secret sauce is to go: Mail -> Preferences -> Accounts -> Advanced and set “Keep copies of my messages for offline viewing” to “Don’t keep copies of any messages.”

The only downside that I can see is that you can’t search your mail very well from within Mail.app or Spotlight. But, uh, that’s what Gmail is for!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Technology

Let’s not forget about graceful degradation

Tuesday | December 4, 2007 | 10:59 am  

Far be it from me to be a nattering nabob of negativity, but in all the Web 2.0 euphoria (I hate that name, BTW), let’s not forget about graceful degradation.

Let’s examine the discussion between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 in regards to errors like this:

Web 1.0: What is this?

Web 1.0: Where did you get this?

Web 1.0: Where did you learn about this kind of thing?

Web 2.0: [Filled with teen angst] I learned it by watching you!

Permalink | Comments (0) | Categories: Programming, Technology, Web design