everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: web 2.0

  • Web 2.0

    Web 2.0

    I realize I’m getting liberal with the “Milestone” tag but it truly seems as if we are living in historic times. I just got off of an amazing three days in San Francisco where I saw history being made all around me at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. Maybe I’m still new to this industry but checking with others around me, they also shared my view that the mood of the crowd was upbeat and excited for the possibilities of the future. What was nice though is that despite the potential to go wild-eyed and overboard there were enough scarred veterans in the crowd to keep things realistic. Many of the things being discussed have been done before during the heady bubble days but this time it looks like we’ve got the platform to really make it happen.

    Remember moreover.com? RSS before anyone knew what to do with it. Geocities was like weblogs 1.0 but instead of letting people subscribe to an RSS feed, you had a small text entry box where you would ask for an email address so you could push out a notice when the page updated. One good line from Martin Nisenholtz of nytimes.com is that the promise of RSS is that he can now send content directly to the reader without having to cut bad deals with Biz Dev execs at portal companies. Web 2.0 is all about cutting right by the intermediary.

    There’s a lot of good coverage of the conference already but I’ll post on some personal tidbits and takeaways:

    I listened in on the interview behind this article with Google’s Peter Norvig in eWeek and later talked to him about sentiment analysis as it might apply to blog posts. He said that Google is applying techniques to skip over indexing spam comments such as “I really like your page, have you seen www.spampage.com?”

    I asked Jerry Yang if he had any advice for a software startup interested in going after the corporate market. Yahoo had an enterprise portal group that eventually threw in the towel and turned their customers over to Tibco. His advice was to stay away from corporate IT because they have a vested interest in avoiding the new and different.

    I witnessed as Brewster Kahle struck a deal with the folks from Morpheus to work together. “I’ve got this great archive of all this wonderful stuff and you’ve got this great mesh of a distribution network.” Ok, I egged them on a bit.

    The most inspirational talk was by Lawrence Lessig who railed against the specter of old world copyright law that threatened our ability and right to mix and mash digital content to express ourselves. Something’s not right when you can teach your kids to write creatively and encourage them to quote and incorporate styles & nuances but cannot teach them how to remix music or video to make a point, political or personal. Indeed. For an mp3 of the speech, click here.

    The conference was organized by publisher Tim O’Reilly and MC’d by John Battelle who have been noodling over the theme of the Web as a Platform/Web as an OS theme for the past year or so. This conference brought together the best and brightest of that conversation and put them on stage for a number of interesting and insightful discussions.

  • Web as Platform

    In the initial post that kicked off this blog, I said that I would focus on how the promise of the ASP/Web Services vision is being realized with the connection of various web-based APIs into a new type of platform which lives on the internet. One way to experience the power of this vision is using outputs of each of these services and embedding them into your weblog template. Once you learn how easy it is to pull together a page of contextually related information that updates every time it’s refreshed, you start to think how other things can be connected together.

    Outputs of one service can act as inputs to other services to further process and refine information via relationships that we set up in advance. It’s basic programming but using web services instead of self-enclosed objects, classes and libraries.

    Jason Kottke brings the meme up-to-date with some of the latest services out there and thinks how a bundle of them could make for a comprehensive personal information management system:

    TypePad for weblogs
    Flickr for photos
    Upcoming for your public calendar
    iCal for your private calendar
    Gmail for email
    Feedburner as an agent to look for updates to any of these services

    Kottke goes on to say:

    Think of it like Unix…small pieces loosely joined. Each specific service handles what it’s good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars, TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it doesn’t much matter…whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice. New services can be inserted into the process as they become available. You don’t need to wait for Gmail to output RSS…just pipe your email to Feedburner and they’ll hook you up.

    One other benefit that comes to mind as I move my identity from one PC to another and one ISP to the next as part of a job change and relocation – distributed data is ubiquitous and never needs to moved from client to client.