For years Digg has had an active comment community, where the comments are submitted and appear on the Digg landing page, rather than on the article linked from Digg. FriendFeed got into this game by making it possible to comment on content pulled in from multiple web services, where all the comments appear on FriendFeed, […]

I was thinking last night about books and why I don’t read them anyone — I was a lit major in college, and used to be voracious book reader. What happened?

Perhaps you don’t need any more explanations of the significance of Microsoft’s offer to buy Yahoo, but I don’t want to lose my media/tech blogger license, so here’s mine.

Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo is akin to newspaper industry consolidation over the last few years — combining business with solid cash flow to achieve some efficiencies and […]

Although I haven’t had time to use Twitter recently, I’ve been following all the discussions about Twitter, because it’s become a flashpoint for innovative thinking about online communication and media.

Twitter was much maligned for going down during Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote — I agree with Larry Dignan that this is unfair. If you’re going to […]

The death of email meme is completely absurd. Email is NOT going to die because, as Charlie O’Donnell points out, EVERYONE HAS EMAIL. That’s why we all get so much spam and other useless email — because it’s a guaranteed way to reach us.

It’s hard to come by exclusives in the tech blogosphere, but I’m betting I have the exclusive blog post on this: Guy Kawasaki interviewing Robert Scoble at the Stanford Web Publishing Course. I’m here along with them and a bunch of other web-savvy “faculty” helping a group of publishers get more web savvy — my […]

Think about all the different relationships in your life — parents, children, siblings, extended family, close friends, casual friends, acquaintances, closely collaborative colleagues, professional contacts, superiors, subordinates — our lives are an intricate web of relationships. Yet on the Web — with its capacity for near infinite complexity — these relationships have been reduced to […]

So I got my Publishing 2.0 feed set up to crosspost to Facebook and Twitter, but I’m wondering about the utility of doing so, given that most of the people I’m connected to on Facebook and Twitter also subscribe to my regular blog RSS feed.

I’m starting to think that this has the potential to […]

Never underestimate Steve Jobs. After all of the hand-wringing over Apple’s iPhone being a closed platform, today Apple announced that the iPhone will indeed be open to third-party applications — ingeniously, through integration with Apple’s Safari web browser, which has just been released for Windows (which itself is a huge smack against Microsoft, which has […]

Facebook Platform is already having a huge impact on the crowded and competitive Web 2.0 start-uplandscape, most notably in the social music category, i.e. applications that allow users to share with others what songs they listen to and to discover new music by seeing what their friends and others in their network are listening to. […]

Has Facebook missed the boat by not being acquired by Yahoo, or is it just getting warmed up? A MediaPost piece by Gavin O’Malley showcases some opinions supporting the former:

Google has more engineers and infrastructure than God, but that hasn’t prevented me from being frozen out of my Gmail account for the last hour with this error message:

Just when you thought you understood Web 2.0, along comes a theory so disruptive it razes everything in its path. The theory of cumulative advantage suggests that every successful Web 2.0 site — and the output of every Web 2.0 platform — is completely arbitrary and random. The head-exploding NYT piece by Columbia professor Duncan […]

Last spring I wrote a post “Has The MySpace Downturn Begun?” Dan Mitchell at NYT picked it up in a piece “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” My post was purely speculative and, not surprisingly, completely wrong. But the fact remains that MySpace belongs to News Corp, not MySpace users, which is why News Corp can […]

Web 2.0 is all about openness, right? At least that’s the ideology. But as to the BUSINESS of Web 2.0, the most successful money-making machine of the Web 2.0 era, Google AdWords, derives huge strategic advantage from opacity.

Today, Google lost some of that advantage when upstart Quigo forced Google to open the kimono on its […]

Here’s a statistic to put a chill the heart of any online content or web app business looking to ride the wave of consumer advertising shifting online (via AdAge):

Corporate and brand websites — once derided as “brochureware” in a digital marketing world that quickly moved to sexier applications — are getting a rehabilitation of sorts […]

It’s easy to embrace the New York Times hype about Web 3.0 — Web 2.0 hasn’t built that many successful businesses yet, so why not drop it already and mover on to the next big thing so that we can keep pumping up start-up valuations for bigger exits? Rapid software releases may be the new […]

The signature experience of the Web 2.0 Summit was hearing the roar of the schmoozing, networking crowd out in the hall every time the door to main conference session room was opened — there was the distinct sense that there was more excitement outside the conference than inside the conference. If you wanted to meet […]

In a moment of deep irony at Web 2.0, I’m listening to the Corporate VP of Global Foundation Services at Microsoft preach that it’s all about the infrastructure, and at the same time struggling with the sponsored WiFi network, which has been crapping out all morning. I’ve got draft posts on Google Docs — and […]

Publishing 2.0 will be covering the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week — drop me a line if you want to meet up. Look for live blogging dispatches across the week.

The Web 2.0 ideology wars are back, with Lawrence Lessig arguing that YouTube is a “fake sharing” site because you can’t download the videos and Nick Carr telling him he’s full of ideological crap (always entertaining).

As tempting as it is to dive head first into the ideological fray, I’ll limit myself to this question:

If YouTube […]

I’ve been thinking a lot about media brands and whether they still matter in the new media landscape. The more I think about, the more it seems that brands are the only thing that still matters in media. What’s changed is not the importance or the role of media brands, but rather what defines a […]

What content category benefits greatly from digital, web-based organization and distribution, but is best appreciated offline? If you said art photography, then you understand intuitively why JPG Magazine is such an interesting Publishing 2.0 play.

The idea is elegantly 2.0: give the new breed of digital-technology-enabled pro-am photographers a place to showcase their work and […]

On Wednesday, I’ll be blogging The New New Internet Conference on Web 2.0 for Business in lovely Tysons Corner, Virginia for two reasons.

First and foremost: relative to coverage of Web 2.0 in the consumer space, I’ve seen much less discussion of Web 2.0 applications for business — other than endless coverage of the emergent […]

There is a fundamental tension in Web/Media 2.0 between openness and control — openness is required to leverage the network effect of the Web and harness the power of socially-connected users, but control is required to get a share of any money that changes hands.

Google has been most successful in walking this line — […]

I’ve advocated that media should evolve into marketing services — according to lastest Veronis Suhler Stevenson Communications Industry forecast, that’s increasingly where the money is going.

NON-ADVERTISING-BASED FORMS OF MARKETING - especially newer sectors such as branded entertainment, event marketing and experiential marketing - have emerged as the fastest growing segment of the media economy, […]

According to Web 2.0 ideology, all sharing is good, by definition. Users will run to embrace any feature that increases their ability to share information with their community. Sharing. Community. It’s all so warm and fuzzy — what could be wrong? But Facebook discovered the hard way that there are limits to Web 2.0 sharing […]

When I predicted a social networking privacy backlash a few months ago, most everyone scoffed. Young people have grown up online. They are used to exposing their lives. They are willingly give up their privacy. They aren’t concerned about the risks.

Well, it turns out that the digital generation does care about their privacy (and they […]

There’s more inevitable debate over “social” software, Web 2.0, and 2.0ness in general. Is it really new? Is it a passing fad? Is it just for geeks? Does it help us get things done? Does it improve our lives? Has it jumped the shark? (Great commentary from Mathew Ingram, Kent Newsome, Stowe Boyd, Rob Hyndman, […]

Lee Gomes at WSJ and Chris Anderson have gotten into an interesting debate about the validity of Chris’ thesis that the “long tail” represents a significant economic paradigm shift. Unless I’m missing something, there is one element missing from the debate that anyone conversant with Umair Haque should recognize.

The debate between Lee and Chris focuses […]

I’ve been following an interesting trend of power grabs by Web 2.0 companies, from MySpace to YouTube to Google — Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about the “user,” but when it comes to profit making the user is getting shut out:

MySpace

Musicians don’t get paid for music played on MySpace (via Umair):
The most popular […]

The Google Operating System blog has an interesting meditation on the downside of life without Google — which of course begs for a rebuttal speculating on the UPSIDE of life without Google (Garret Rogers also has a point-by-point response):

* our mail account would still have 2MB or 4MB of storage and we would be happy […]

Poor Google — such a short walk from pedestal to whipping post. The PR cycle is now faster than the product development cycle.

Speaking of which, Valleywag has the FUNNIEST post lambasting how Google churns out products faster than candies on the I Love Lucy candy factory conveyor belt — which is now more than the […]

The future of Web 2.0 and the web app revolution will hinge on one critical issue — where the data is stored. The advantages of hosted, instantly upgraded, never-have-to-install applications on the web are obvious and many — anyone who has ever struggled with software installation and upgrading knows this intuitively.

But there is a downside […]

The launch of AOL/Netscape’s multi-channel Digg clone/killer came in the same week as news of new verticals in the soon-to-be-launched version 3 of Digg. As with vertical search, both Digg and its imitators see an opportunity to carve up the community-driven news category.

The same is true of the related memetracker category, with Gabe Rivera […]

On the face of it, the news that AOL/Netscape is launching a Digg killer suggests that if Digg, Reddit, and other imitators had a chance to sell, they should have taken it. It also suggests that Web 2.0 start-ups may be vulnerable to the goliath media companies with huge reach swooping in to eat their […]

Never before in the history of business has the collision of two industries caused so much confusion. According to CEO Eric Schmidt, Google is not in the media business:

It’s better to think of Google as a technology company. Google is run by three computer scientists, and Google is an innovator in technology in our space. […]

The “social” media revolution has everyone letting it all hang out all over the “open web,” so it should come as no surprise that the NSA is taking advantage of all this voluntary disclosure of personal information:

“I AM continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves.” So says Jon Callas, […]

Ideological debates appearing on TechMeme are starting to resemble the extreme polarization of political debates on Memeorandum — take this latest dust-up over 2.0 ideology, sparked by the Lee Gomes article in the WSJ.

Here’s where I stand — somewhere in the middle. I think both sides have valid points, but I also think both […]

So much for blogging as conversation, at least according to Seth Godin:

I think comments are terrific, and they are the key attraction for some blogs and some bloggers. Not for me, though. First, I feel compelled to clarify or to answer every objection or to point out every flaw in reasoning. Second, it takes way […]

If the “long tail” is the organizing principle of web/media 2.0, why shouldn’t we expect revenue distribution to follow the same pattern, with a handful of companies (i.e. Google, Yahoo) controlling most of the revenue and the remaining online players fighting over the crumbs? When Google found a way to monetize the long tail through […]

Just when you thought it was safe, lawyers and lobbyists have taken over TechMeme:

CMP Media Trademarks Web 2.0
Tim O’Reilly is being blamed, which would be deeply ironic — “Web 2.0″ is a “service mark” — gotta love that. Shel Israel hopes it’s just corporate lawyers run amok. Either way, there’s already hell to pay.

Cablevision Being […]

Umair Haque and Jeff Jarvis are engaged in an ontological debate about what constitutes “the edge” and what will ultimately be the winning business strategy at the edge. What struck me about their debate is how little clarity there is on how money will actually be made at the edge — and this despite Umair […]

I’ve always wanted to be able to say I was “live blogging” something, so here’s a live blog of the inaugural Mesh Conference, which I personally think was a smashing success. (There are linkable headings for each session I blogged.)

DAY 1

Om Malik Keynote

Here’s some wisdom from Om (with some paraphrasing, of course):

A lot of people […]

I long since gave up banging my head against the wall of Web 2.0’s solipsism. My argument has always been that Web 2.0 AJAX developers don’t think about the needs of AVERAGE PEOPLE.

Now Josh Kopelman has sharpened the argument:

Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to […]

Randall Stross, in a Times article, wonders who will pay for TV now that ad-skipping DVRs and on-demand broadband video have destroyed TV’s mass media advertising model. I wonder whether late 20th-century TV content production will follow the same path as early 20th-century transatlantic ocean travel, milk delivery, and buggy whip manufacturing — marginalized or […]

It’s official — Microsoft is no longer a software company. With the launch of adCenter, Microsoft will be joining the ranks of Google and other media companies:

“Ad-supported software services are an integral part of Microsoft’s plans to give consumers access to a broader variety of digital media, whenever they want and on whatever device they […]

Yahoo launches a consumer tech site and the blogosphere is not impressed . Why — because they’re all a BUNCH OF GEEKS (with all due respect).

Here’s why I think Yahoo Tech is a serious threat to CNET:

1. “Advisor” Blogs — Sure they’re “hokey,” as Richard MacManus points out, but this is at least an attempt […]

The advent of web-based e-commerce fundamentally lowered the costs of doing business, increasing the scalability (and in many cases the viability) of thousands of small businesses. The introduction of micro-marketing through Google AdWords gave a huge jolt to this trend, making marketing scalable and profitable for these same small businesses. Two companies — Google and […]

Have you checked out the Technorati Top 100 (by unique links) lately? It’s starting to change in very interesting ways.

First, Dave Winer is gone. That’s right — Scripting News is no longer a top 100 blog.

So what knocked him off? Personal blogs by young Asian women, most of them on MSN Spaces:

#18 http://spaces.msn.com/babygal89eunice
#19 http://spaces.msn.com/ringmanchoi
(Both […]

So Digg has been accused of gaming its own system, censorship, and other “undemocratic” behavior — perhaps more evidence that 2.0 isn’t as 2.0 as the hype machines wants you to think it is.

Kevin Rose’s response is positively Bushian in his refusal to admit any possible wrongdoing.

But I was blown away by Jason Calacanis’ […]

There’s so much uncritical, blinders-on optimism in the Web2.0sphere that I savor the rare occasions when I stumble on a skeptic/contrarian after my own heart, in this case Rob May, who writes for businesspundit.com:

A small percentage of the population enjoys doing things just for the sake of learning, exploring, helping, etc, and we hold them […]

Newsweek has launched a web-based RSS reader, i.e. My Newsweek — looks like a reasonably smart move on the face of it. But using the reader requires Joe Newsweek to grok terms like “feed,” “content,” and, “RSS” — which looks less smart.

The real problem with Newsweek’s RSS reader (a private-label version of Newsgator) is that […]

Web 1.0 gave us “internet,” “HTML,” “email,” “hyperlink”, “online,” and, of course, “web.” Web 2.0 has given us “social media,” “citizen journalism,” “tagging,” “blog,” “podcast,” “Web 2.0″ (of course) — and the list goes on.

Web 2.0 is still in the wrangling over terminology phase — especially over Web 2.0 itself. Recently, there’s been some […]

If the low (conscious) adoption rate for RSS brings you down, then don’t look at the new Forrester study on podcasting (via Charlene Li) — the adoption rate for podcasting is a paltry 1%, i.e. podcasting is still just for geeks. And to make matters worse:

And when you include all of the people who are […]

I’ll resist the temptation to say I told you so about big brand advertisers not wanting to take the risk of appearing next to questionable content on MySpace, other Web 2.0 sites, and ad networks (although I did tell you). Articles on this phenomenon are appearing more frequently, the latest from the Wall Street Journal:

Most […]

Everybody’s buzzing about GM’s handing over control of its ads to consumers –- and about the outpouring of negative consumer-created GM ads. And EVERYBODY’S missing the point.

Mainstream media and marketing think that GM screwed up by ceding control of its brand.

The blogosphere and Web 2.0 fanclub think GM did the right thing by embracing consumer […]

Nathan Torkington likes Doc Searls’ conception of Web 2.0 as a “morality of generosity”:

We give. We are open. We love without expectation of reward, or even accounting. (In fact, when you bring in accounting, you compromise it.) Think about how we give to our spouses, our children, without strings. It pays off, too. But that’s […]

A few weeks ago, I got hung out to dry for suggesting that “questionable” content residing on MySpace along with underage users would potentially harm News Corp’s business interests when advertisers refused to assume the risk. Today, we learn that MySpace agreed me, and suddenly it’s fashionable to talk about “questionable” content without being accused […]

It’s happening again — the numbers just don’t make any sense. Facebook turns down $750 million, hoping to hype themselves up to $2 billion. And why? Well, just look at that CASH COW MySpace — it’s making…how much money? I’m on the edge of my seat for News Corp’s first 2006 earnings release, but “in […]

How deeply ironic that, despite thousands of blog pages devoted to Web 2.0, it took stodgy old Newsweek to bring the hype to the masses — and they had to re-brand Web 2.0 as the “Live Web” to make it comprehensible to the average person who doesn’t understand version-speak:

The generic term for this movement, especially […]

Nick Carr did a thought-provoking psychoanlysis of my original MySpace post (the one that caused such a dust storm). He argues that I shouldn’t have shied away for the morality of the issue.

What’s most fascinating about Karp’s post, though, is not his reaction to MySpace but his reaction to his reaction to MySpace. Having […]

Del.icio.us just announced a new feature, created due to popular demand, that allows users to save links privately — this is astonishing, like Starbucks introducing a 4oz decaffeinated coffee that sells for 75 cents — it’s completely antithetical to the whole concept.

Could this be the beginning of the privacy backlash against the Web 2.0 “social” […]

Turns out that Web 2.0 has been using the same goofy name generator as Star Wars, as demonstrated by this hysterically funny (and sobering) quiz on Cerado (via Tdavid via apophenia):

I suspect the those who do well on this test also do well on the geek test.

UPDATE

More evidence that Web 2.0 has jumped the shark […]

The discussion about MySpace on tech.mememorandum this morning is dripping with irony. On the one hand, you have the MySpace apologists, arguing that what teenagers do on MySpace is no different from what teenagers of past generations have done to rebel and be different, and that parents should just teach their children well and not […]

Here’s a quote from an Economist article — guess what year it was published:

Jessica Reif Cohen, a media analyst at Merrill Lynch, reckons that profits from online advertising and paid content could represent up to 8-9% of total earnings for Disney, Viacom and News Corporation in 3-5 years and considerably more for Time Warner, courtesy […]

Kudos to Digg CEO Jay Adelson for having a fairly credible perspective on the alleged stock manipulation via stories on Digg (re: Google’s rumored purchase of Sun) that has been causing such a dust-up:

When you’re empowering the mass, you have to be careful about quality control. It would be unfair to label all of Web […]

So Microsoft is going after IBM with a $500 million marketing campaign, which apparently doesn’t include a large role for blogs or other “hot” viral marketing tactics? Hmm, go figure:

The campaign began yesterday with eight-page advertisements in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and other newspapers. The $500 million to be spent […]

I’ve been dreading this post, but I can’t avoid saying this any longer — MySpace is a DEEPLY DISTURBING place. It’s so disturbing that I’m convinced that the vast majority of the Web 2.0 fan club who gush over MySpace has NEVER actually spent any time on MySpace.

I’m not the first to raise a […]

Ever since I began my “2.0″ indoctrination, I’ve had this nagging feeling that something wasn’t right — I knew it had to do with the problem of too much choice and with the unclear returns on the effort of 2.0 participation. But despite much writing and reading, the hammer hasn’t found the nail.

Then, today, an […]

I’ve read A LOT about Web 2.0 — I haven’t seen so much Koolaid since I was at summer camp. And I’ve taken a stand that Web 2.0 is a long way from Media 2.0.

Kent Newsome has the latest antidote to Web 2.0 hype, invoking Monty Python’s Holy Grail to show that most Web 2.0 […]

I’ve discussed the problem of geek control of Web 2.0, along with many others including Umair Haque, Pete Cashmore, David Beisel, and Fraser Kelton. (Hit tip to Pete for pulling together the threads.)

This new Geeks for Non-Geeks movement got me thinking about the evolving definition of a “geek.” The following is just a first draft, […]

A great synthesis of 2.0 thinking on new marketing paradigms for social media from, no, not a blogger or Web 2.0 evangalist, but from the president of OLD Market Research company Yankelovich Partners:

These days, the best way to get people’s attention is not to engage consumers with a brand, but to host or facilitate a […]

It’s official — advances in communications technology (email, cell phones, voicemail, telework, etc.) have made workers less productive. Rather than make our lives easier, technology is making our lives more complicated and more difficult. From a study by Day-Timers (via CNET):

Unlike a decade ago, U.S. workers are bombarded with e-mail, computer messages, cell phone calls, […]

Media is about conversation and participation. Consumers can create their own media. Value is being created at the edge. You’ve heard all the New Media maxims.

The problem, as many people have stated many times, is that the more everyone participates in content creation and content interaction, the harder it is to navigate the sea of […]

Everyone in Old Media, and many in “New” Media (which isn’t as cutting-edge as it thinks it is), should fear the radically different media habits of the Digital Generation now coming of age. As Jon Fine points out:

Today’s teens are the first for whom self-created content competes with teen-aimed media like videogames. There are now […]

Leave it to Umair Haque to distill down to a sentence what I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to convey about Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 cannot live up to its (enormous) potential to create value that’s structurally disruptive until and unless technologists understand consumer dynamics.

Web 2.0 can’t live up to its game-changing potential […]

Blogs don’t matter. Web 2.0 doesn’t matter. Old Media doesn’t matter, and neither does New Media. So what does matter? — talent, insight, and, most of all, ideas. George Will makes this point elegantly:

The more journalism I read and do, the more convinced I am not merely that ideas have consequences, but that only ideas […]

There is a bubble in the tech industry, but it has nothing to do with the behavior of venture capital, as so many people are discussing. There’s a bubble because the tech industry is trying to be the new media industry, and very few people in the tech industry understand what’s really happening to the […]

Tom Foremski answers “yes” to Dave Winer’s question, “is the publishing industry the new technology industry?” I think that is like saying the printing press industry is the old publishing industry. Web 2.0 applications, like the printing press, enable publishing — but they don’t define publishing. (A distinction that Tom makes.) And the current crop […]

I’ve made the point many times that the bloggerati and Web 2.0 fan club are complete outliers when it comes to media consumption habits. To illustrate this point, I conducted a little informal survey, taking aim at the latest hype over News 2.0. The survey was partly inspired by Om Malik’s quip that “News 2.0 […]

Who decides what’s worthy of your attention — a Web 2.0 application, a newspaper columnist, a talk show host, an editorial staff, an influential blogger, a community of thousands, a community of millions?

(UPDATE: Oy vey, this post is NOT about getting links, although it’s completely my fault that it’s been misread that way. […]

There may or may not be a Web 2.0 crash coming, as Steve Rubel has predicted, but there’s certainly blood in the water, with Yahoo’s earnings miss, Gather.com’s bad reviews, the demise of SearchFox, and the gathering buzz about an impending crash. Steve thinks a key factor is that “online advertising isn’t growing as […]