Category: BlogStreet

Consumer RSS Readers

Read/Write Web writes in the context of Pluck deciding to shut down: “Consumer RSS Readers are rapidly becoming commodities and will soon be next to worthless – the real business is white label and enterprise solutions. So Newsgator for example is well positioned. And Bloglines and Rojo both got out while the going was still good, via acquisitions. Although it must be said that niche RSS Readers will still have their place – for example FeedDemon (owned by Newsgator) will continue to get an adequate number of subscriptions…As a standalone company, it’s no longer possible.”

Engagament Metric

Robert Scoble writes:

Why should engagement matter to an advertiser?

Well, as an advertiser I want to talk to an audience wholl actually DO something. Yeah, Im hoping to get a sale.

Yesterday Buzz Bruggeman CEO of Active Words, was driving me around and told the story of when he was in USA Today. He got 32 downloads. When he got linked to by my blog? Got about 400.

My audience was (and is) a lot smaller than USA Today, but the engagement of the blog audience got his attention.

How could we measure audience engagement?

We Think, The Book

Smart Mobs points to a new book by Charles Leadbeater:

Google is on the verge of bidding 1bn for Youtube, a business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?

We-Think: the power of mass creativity is about what the rise of the likes of Wikipedia and Youtube, Linux and Craigslist means for the way we organise ourselves, not just in digital businesses but in schools and hospitals, cities and mainstream corporations. My argument is that these new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work. People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines.

Peer Production

[via Veer] CTheory.net has an article by Michel Bauwens: “Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a deeper transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As political, economic, and social systems transform themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P). As P2P gives rise to the emergence of a third mode of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, it is poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways. This essay aims to develop a conceptual framework (‘P2P theory’) capable of explaining these new social processes.”

Perils of UGC

Rashmi Bansal writes about the problems with user-generated content:

The idea of ‘user generated’ content is a great one. And it works when you have millions and millions of people contributing such content – like at youtube.com. From a mountain of boring / mediocre trash you find a few gems and the system is designed such that users push these gems up to the top of the pile.

But when the number of users you attract is fairly low… you don’t have enough gems. And the trash attracts more trash and repels people who actually have quality content. Because you haven’t created an environment where the ego-driven creative types would like to showcase their work.

DIY Content

DIY Media Weblog has a post on a talk by Mizuko Ito on “Amateur Cultural Production in the New Networked Age.”

As part of last year’s Networked Publics program at the Annenberg Center, Ito and her research colleagues have been examining the changing relationship between cultural production and consumption. They have looked at the ways that many-to-many distribution, peer-to-peer social organization, and the availability of low-cost digital authoring tools have lowered thresholds to cultural production “manifest in public culture as increased visibility and mobilization of those actors traditionally associated with cultural consumption.” They see three domains “growing in salience with the turn toward networked public culture: 1) amateur and non-market production, 2) networked collectivities for producing and sharing culture, 3) niche and special-interest groups, and 4) aesthetics of parody, remix, and appropriation.”

RSS Topic Subscription

Read/Write Web writes about ZapTXT:

With the messy demise of PubSub, I’ve been looking for a decent keyword and topic subscription service to replace it. ZapTXT could very well meet my requirements, except for the odd fact that it doesn’t output in RSS (more on that below). You can currently only receive alerts as an email, IM or SMS.

Other than being sans RSS, ZapTXT’s latest release does offer a range of good features. You can now create a monitoring task across multiple feeds or URLs for specific keywords – they call this “task monitoring”, as opposed to per feed monitoring. It also enables you to refine your feedset for any given keyword search, there’s a Zap It! bookmarklet for your browser, a publisher ‘chicklet’ to allow bloggers to let their users receive notifications on interesting topics, nice OPML import/export options, a tag based system around feeds, and more powerful search (for example create a ZapTask using your trusted feeds with Apple, Cisco, Microsoft AND upgrade, downgrade, merger as keywords. You’ll get an alert every time any of these companies make the headlines for an upgrade, downgrade or merger).