Internet Marketing Design Innovation ...

Yahoo goes Indian : Pipes is out

To check it out : http://pipes.yahoo.com/

Its like a strange Mix on RSS, FreeMind, Visio +  Google ....

This is the front page :)

Now for the FUN page - editing a Pipe

Digg to big to dig?

" Digg grew from a tight community of power web users and fans of founder (and former Tech TV star) Kevin Rose. Now it's a popular destination that sends hundreds of thousands of users to dozens of sites a day. As Digg's role on the Internet has changed, Rose and his team have had to adapt how the site works. But some changes seem counterintuitive. What does it mean that this week, the site stopped honoring its "Top Diggers"?

Rose announced on Digg's blog Thursday that he would pull the site's "Top Diggers" list, immediately setting off a wave of commentary. TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington noted that seven of Rose's nine paragraphs discussed fighting spam and system-gaming on Digg.

Gaming the system, wherein a user diggs an article with fake accounts, paid users, or a tit-for-tat cabal, has been the site's most public headache. More pernicious for a social site than problems like downtime, a surly userbase, or even mediocre content, it violates the spirit of a community site. Rose calls it "a normal dynamic of a growing site," and he's right: Google, for instance, recently fixed its search system to curb the practice of "googlebombing" with phrases like "miserable failure." Google said that the practice seemed harmless until the public started thinking that the company had colluded in these gamed search results. Similarly, Rose was accused of taking part in gaming his own site (an illogical accusation that he denied). Still, Rose says that Digg has done well keeping its top feed pure through users who "bury" bad stories and algorithms that keep fake diggs from pushing items to the front page.

Digg killed the Top Diggers list to kill spam. Presumably, the companies and organizations that try to game Digg first seek out top users. They seem like power users willing to make some cash or favors by spending more time on their favorite site. But Rose cites a slightly different reason: he says that Digg's top users have been blamed for gaming the site, and he made this move to protect them.

Of course, these users add a lot of value to his site. Killing their most public bragging-rights list kills some of the glory of being a top Digger. Can the site afford to risk alienating those users? Well, yes.

Digg is big. Alexa.com has ranked the site among the top 100 traffic-getters since last October. Even accounting for systemic bias, that puts Digg around the 10s-of-millions-a-day range. Digg is on track to top one million registered users in a few months. At this scale, the most valuable users aren't the ones who submit the most to the site. Normal algorithm changes at Digg have already lessened their impact. Instead, the site most values users who anticipate hot stories and users who submit unique content.
"

Read it all : http://valleywag.com/tech/digg/how-digg-outgrew-its-top-users-233727.php

Web 7.0

Some cool definitions :

OWL - Web Ontology Language - is a markup language for publishing and sharing data using ontologies on the World Wide Web.
OWL is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans

RDF - Resource Description Framework (RDF) is a family of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications originally designed as a metadata model using XML but which has come to be used as a general method of modeling knowledge, through a variety of syntax formats (XML and non-XML).

FOAF - FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is a project for machine-readable modelling of homepage-like profiles and social networks.

SIOC - Semantically-Interlinked Online Communities Project (SIOC) is a Semantic Web technology. SIOC provides methods for interconnecting discussion methods such as blogs, forums and mailing lists to each other. It consists of the SIOC ontology, an open-standard machine readable format for expressing the information contained both explicitly and implicitly in Internet discussion methods

SPARQL -  is an RDF query language; its name is a recursive acronym that stands for SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language

SSCF - Social semantic collaborative filtering

Email conference

A nice place to visit to get info on Email and Email Management

http://www.ceas.cc/

Battle of the WEB : they Killed Bill?

" Former internet analyst Henry Blodget slams Microsoft's faltering efforts to compete with Google. An excerpt:
I agree that the "Live" brand is confusing and that Microsoft has not clearly explained what it is trying to accomplish.

What I disagree with is the implicit idea that Microsoft KNOWS what it's trying to accomplish on the web (short of somehow miraculously vanquishing Google)--and that it has any reasonable chance of achieving it.

I argued a year ago that the web war was over and Microsoft lost. This seems even clearer with every passing day.

The only question in my mind is whether Microsoft can build enough of a wall around its crown jewels--Office and Windows--to survive over the long haul.
Microsoft's confusing Live branding clearly is a mistake. As Henry says, it is one of the more glaring examples of Microsoft's lack of focus with their internet strategy.

Henry calls the Web war lost at this point. I would not be so quick to dismiss the Redmond giant.

Some opportunities may have past. For example, I think Microsoft could have competed with Google on technical innovation if they had started in 2003, but that seems less likely to work at this late date.

In 2007, with Google so far ahead, I think Microsoft will have to use its market power to win. They will have to lock up web advertising deals to starve Google's revenue growth. They will have to exploit their control of the experience on the Windows PC desktop and eliminate opportunities to go elsewhere. "

The full story : http://glinden.blogspot.com/2007/01/is-microsofts-web-war-lost.html

SNS round up

MySpace vs Yahoo - Users spend the most time on MySpace, followed by Yahoo, says the stats company Compete. That also relates to the claim by Hitwise that MySpace, MySpace.com and www.myspace.com are the most popular searches. Not only are web users trying to navigate to MySpace, they’re also spending a lot of time there once they arrive - much longer than on search engines, which aim to bounce people away quickly.

Amapedia - Amazon meets Wikipedia. Amapedia is a new project released by Amazon, says Rogers Cadenhead.

MyYearbook Funded - We just got a press release through from MyYearbook to say they’ve raised $4.1 million from US Venture Partners and First Round Capital. We tried it last year, and although it’s pretty good, it doesn’t seem to have masses of traction. They’re reporting 1.7 million registered users, which isn’t too shabby. That said, even Tagworld is allegedly struggling, despite having user counts in 7 figures. Where we have seen a few mentions of MyYearbook is on MySpace, where their quizzes seem popular (via Mashable Labs).

CarGurus - Launching officially next week (but in beta since March 06), CarGurus is a wiki-type site for call lovers. Includes reviews, forums and the ability to ask car-related questions. Other social auto sites include Motortopia and AutoSpies.

Via : http://mashable.com/

Google is not alone anymore ?

Searchme Inc., a new search company launched by venture capital firm Sequoia Capital, will take on Google and Yahoo with the launch of a search engine at www.wikiseek.com.

The company claims Wikiseek is a vastly improved search engine for the popular, user-edited reference Web site, Wikipedia. Wikiseek is available as a destination site as well as part of Wikipedia as a Firefox extension.

“Wikipedia is a fantastic sandbox for exploring the intersection of community editing and vertical search,” said John Holland, founder and chief marketing officer of Searchme, Palo Alto, CA. “Wikiseek functions as a showcase for our search tools, as well as a living laboratory for improving our search technology.”

Wikiseek is based on technology developed by Searchme, which uses recommendations of thousands of vertical search engines to deliver relevant search results, resulting in a faster, richer Wikipedia search experience.

Wikiseek is being released in beta. It will be updated and improved continuously based on user feedback and new pages from Wikipedia.

The service is expected to have significantly less search engine optimization spam because only “authoritative” pages, approved by Wikipedia editors, will be included.

The search engine is available under a GPL or open source license, contains no advertising and works with the Firefox browser.

Wikiseek is accessible from any browser and features keyword ads. Wikiseek will donate a majority of the site’s advertising revenue to the Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia .

“The major challenge in search is that as the Internet grows, horizontal search engines are delivering less relevance, and more spam,” Mr. Holland said. “Instead of searching the whole Web, Wikiseek improves relevance by only searching Wikipedia and sites that have been approved by Wikipedia editors. This means higher quality search results and less spam for users, as well as more efficient ad targeting for advertisers.”

Via : http://www.dmnews.com/cms/dm-news/search-marketing/39781.html

The Web4 : by Seth

Well, after the Web2 then the LE WEB 3,  Seth Godin images the Web 4

" The opportunities of the semantic web are limitless, and I can't wait. But that's not Web4. Web4 is what I'm really waiting for. And it's entirely possible that Web4 will get here before the semantic web even though Web 3 makes it work a lot better.

We start with this:

Ubiquity
Identity
Connection
We need ubiquity to build Web4, because it is about activity, not just data, and most human activity takes place offline.
"

Via : http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/web4.html

WebTrends 2007

Via : http://www.informationarchitects.jp/

SNS and making money with them

Via Reuters :)

Reuters has details of a new report from Deloitte that looks at media trends for 2007. Part of the report focuses on how successful mainstream media will be at integrating user-generated content. The biggest problem appears to be how they’ll make money from user content.

Howard Davies, a director of media strategy at Deloitte explains why it’s tough to make money from social media.

“There’s something about the social user … community that is absolutely not professional and so the community doesn’t want it to be commercialised,” he said about advertising around Web sites dedicated to the content.

That certainly seems to be the case with many popular social media destinations. If you look at those that are highly successful - Digg, YouTube etc - they’ve managed to grow their user-base by not ramming ads down their throats. It’s a good approach for a young company, looking to build its audience - sacrifice profits for users and hope that Google acquires your company before you run out of cash. Unfortunately, at some point, those networks do need to figure out how to make an income. If they’re lucky, they will have sold out before that time, leaving the problem for their new owner to tackle. If they don’t grab their sugar-daddy in time, they’re forced to start monetizing their content in order to survive, which usually starts alienating users.

What do you think? Any social media sites out there that have successfully managed to monetize their content without sacfricing user-growth?