Category: BlogStreet

Eric Rice writes:

Lately, Ive been paying attention to an onslaught of new applications and how they fit into my normal flow of must-read-every-bit-of-information-that-exists-EVER. Such apps involve conversational presence web sites like Twitter and Jaiku.

Everyones experience may vary, as well as peoples loyalties. A good number of the hot, cool web sites out there are very clique-driven, while other hot, cool web sites, are driven by the general public (and the hipster kids hate em (read: myspace, youtube, et al).

Mark Glaser has an excellent tutorial: “Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called Twitter , which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.”

Dina Mehta points to a comment by Jeremy Wagstaff which is so apt: “A blog isn’t a publication. It’s a person.”

Dan Farber writes: “Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have published a report, “Social Technographics,” ($279) that identifies six levels of participation in the realm of social media or the social Web in the U.S. based on a recent survey.”

Doc Searls writes:

[The Live Web is] the one with verbs such as write, read, update, post, author, subscribe, syndicate, feed and link. This is the part of the Web that’s growing on top of the old Static Web of nouns such as site, address, location, traffic, architecure and construction. Nothing wrong with any of those static nouns (or their verb forms). They’re the foundation, the bedrock. They are necessary but insufficient for what’s needed on the Live Web, which is where your paper needs to live and grow and become more valuable to its communities (as well as Wall Street).
Lemme unpack that a bit. The Static Web is what holds still long enough for Google and Yahoo to send out spiders to the entire universe and index what they find. The Live Web is is what’s happening right now. It’s dynamic. (Thank you, Virginia.) It includes all the stuff that’s syndicated through RSS and searched by Google Blogsearch, IceRocket and Technorati. What I post here, and what others post about this post, will be found and indexed by Live Web search engines in a matter of minutes. For those who subscribe to feeds of this blog, and of other blogs, the notification is truly live. Your daily paper has pages, not sites. The difference is not “just semantic”. It’s fundamental. It’s how you reclaim, and assert, your souls in the connected world. It’s also how you shed dead conceptual weight, get light and nimble, and show Wall Street how you’re not just ahead of the curve, but laying pavement beyond everybody else’s horizon. It’s how your leverage the advantages of history, of incumbency, and of already being in a going business.

Web Worker Daily reviews web-based mobile aggregators. “The bottom line: If it were possible to take the full browser version of Google Reader and sync it with the mobile HTML version of Bloglines, I would be a very happy camper. That said, I have to give the edge to Google Reader for the best all-around cross-platform browser feed reading experience.”

[via Thejo] Here. From the introduction:

In this report, we look at the first generation of traditional-media innovators in community engagement online. Well be talking about what worked, and what didnt, in this early round of experimentation.

If youre interested in the movement towards crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, or user generated content by traditional media organizations such as newspapers and television news programs, you’ll find information about some of the major efforts underway today.

WSJ has this interesting analogy:

Think of information as water. A library, therefore, is a lake. The information is just poured in there, as books and periodicals. Those who want to use it wander in and scoop the water out. There’s water coming in and going out, but most of it just sits there: still water, that we have to go to in order to enjoy it.

Web pages are much the same. Information is added to the lake that already exists, but for the most part it’s a pretty static, if not stagnant affair.

Email is different. There the water comes to us in buckets. Much more useful, because the water is no longer stagnant, and we don’t have to go and scoop it out ourselves. But we are still dependent on someone sending the stuff to us — filling the buckets, as it were — and we also have little control over when, how and what kind of information we receive. No surprise, then, that one of the shortcomings of email is that we find ourselves receiving lots of waste water — spam — along with the potable stuff.

If information is water, surely there must be a way to pipe to our house just the kind of water we need, when and where we want it? This is RSS: a way to deliver information to us in a way that suits us. RSS is the piping and the faucets that let us order and manage that information flow.

[via Veer] Here.

FeedBurner provides an overview. One stats: “The top 4 aggregators as measured by clicks – My Yahoo!, Google Reader/Personalized Homepage, Bloglines and Netvibes – account for 95% of all web aggregator clicks to FeedBurner publisher’s content.”