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Most people tend to agree that Web 2.0 implies a feedback loop between companies and customers. Dialogue has never been a big feature of corporate communications. Generally they’re happier issuing sales-speak then engaging in criticism of their businesses. But more and more corporations are heading out into the cyber-arena, determined to open the dialogue up with their customers. But what happens when the customers tell you suck? What then?

Netscape has been an example of the criticism this month. The new Calacanis-inspired Web 2.0 Netscape drew heavy criticism from their old users. Effectively, the complaints were allowed to stand, but utterly ignored. Obviously Netscape planned on changing the page, and has no intention of changing it back. Okay, we seem to have a counter-intuitive problem brewing.

If you encourage interactivity at your website, and allow customer comments, and the comments are largely negative towards YOU, do you have an obligation to listen to your visitors and respond to their complaints. I think you do. Whether you want to hear what they’re saying, they’re the very people who make up the lifeblood of the website. If my only regular visitor, Gomer, started complaining, you better believe I’d modify my behavior! It’s lonely talking to yourself at a blog.

The whole Netscape issue is interesting to me. I sort of applaud them for being brave and directing the website into future, but the other part of me thinks pissing off the regulars is certainly a dumbass move, especially when you consider that many of them were probably people that AOL paid a ton to acquire as customers.

If Web 2.0 interactivity only means getting users to click and view pages, and not really listening to what they’re saying, it won’t live up to its’ promise. As more and more of these type of sites launch, we’ll need to keep an eye on how they handle the feedback, and what becomes of the ones who ignore it.

It seems that Yahoo is competing with RocketBoom now with The 9. The show is hosted by the lovely and upbeat Maria Sansone. The show does indeed look similar in format to the few versions I saw of RocketBoom, albeit with higher production quality. Maria’s presentation is relaxed and cheerful.

The websites they picked to highlight were strange, with an emphasis on self-promotion for Yahoo. The design is pretty slick, with a tabbed calendar system that allows you to easily navigate between recent shows.

The new Yahoo homepage has less and less references to external websites, and it definitely looks like they’re taking a further stab into the burgeoning field of web media.

I have no idea how long they’ve been working on the project. The option just sort of appeared on the new Ajax-y Yahoo home page. Maria’s 360 profile also looks new, but her WikiPedia page has more information. Her career has been steeped in old media work, including her record breaking stint as the world’s youngest TV reporter.

The new Yahoo homepage is getting very Web 2.0 in it’s appearance, and they’re doing interestng things to attract internal clicks. It’s almost as if Yahoo has gone the route of “vertical integration” and has taken every aspect of the web in-house. I’m sure similar projects are in the works for all the major web portals.

Have you seen the show? What do you think?

I’ve seen some divergent viewpoints this week concerning how well FIFA World Cup coverage went for the old and new medias. The NYTimes, a bastion of old media power, says old media won it big. The conclusion isn’t surprising, people love to WATCH soccer. TV viewing was way up in all of Europe. The World Cup held up to the fragmentation that’s occuring everywhere. More channels generally means less viewers. Not true this time:

While most people still watch soccer on television, in their living room or in a pub, the 2006 tournament was the first World Cup in which some realistic alternatives emerged. In several countries, live video was available on the Internet. Elsewhere, games or highlights could be watched on mobile phones.

New media of course is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to video presentation. The technology is getting better, but isn’t perfect. To watch an entire soccer match, you’d have to assume almost everyone would prefer to sit on their big asses and watch on the largest screen they can find. HDTV comes to mind, as the FIFA was a big display of high-definition. But to discount the very real accomplishments of Yahoo and others for the tournament is not good.

The July 10th edition of Investor’s Business Daily portrays a much rosier portrait of Web 2.0 FIFA coerage. Yahoo’s Fifaworldcup.com displayed more than 70 million video hightlights of the event. They also reported that 1.13 million people visited the site daily. By any stretch of the imagination, the FIFA World Cup website (Yahoo ran it in partnership with FIFA) was a huge success and shows the future of media: a mix between old and new.

I’ve been following the complaints about Netscape for a few weeks now, and my position is starting to harden. The main complaints have been that “old users” don’t like the new page. They were forced to register, they can’t find their old page and now they have their panties in a bunch. The change was several weeks ago, yet the “Old Netscapers” are still there, threatening to change their home page.

I understand what type of folk these are. They’re the same people who try and order “hamburgers” when they go out for dinner in a new restaurant. Why? Because they’re afraid they might not like something new. They’re the type of folks who read an opinion on a website, and erroneously decide that the company that published the comment has a “lefty leaning”, when in reality they could add their opinion and reduce the “bias” they see. They’d rather complain than participate.

I think why I know why these users are like this. They came up on one of AOL’s different account options and had Netscape set as their homepage. Now it’s different. And they’re mad. These are the same people I used to call “AO-Yellers” back when I ran an ISP business, because they typed all in capital letters, and could rarely make heads or tails out of even the simplest technical solutions. How do I know these are the same folks? Easy, I can follow all the clues:

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Web 2.0 as a buzzword is red hot. It’s so hot, in fact, it’s a word that INFLATES expectations. According to TechCrunch, Hitwise says NY Times is still way ahead of Digg. Michael Arrington has made the argument that Digg could soon outstrip the venerable NY Times in page views. If it all sounds a little implausible: that’s because the numbers are based on data culled from Alexa.

What is Alexa, you ask, if you’re like most people alive? It’s a Toolbar (categorized as Spyware by many popular Anti-Spyware programs), which resides in the browser of a small percentage of tech-savvy people who visit websites like TechCrunch, Digg, and go to Web 2.0 conferences. In other words, it’s of major importance only to a small percentage of overall users. Most people have never heard of Alexa, and even fewer would run it on their computer, for fear of having all of their internet activities tracked for no gain.

Using Alexa as data in an argument leaves too many questions for my liking. The skew is always towards a savvy crowd. This is no different than Technorati (where websites like “Matt Cutts Blog” and “Shoemoney Skillz to pay the Billz” end up in the Top 100, despite the fact that almost no living humans have ever visited those websites).

To be fair, it’s probably time to do a poll of what average people really know about the brave new world of Web 2.0. I asked 11 non-technical people I know what they thought of Digg. All looked at me with a blank look. Hardly definitive, but I’m betting that polls of more respondents will turn up similar responses.

If the main source of Alexa data is the “sophisticated user” who uses toolbars (an oxymoron I fear), then the skew is too significant to use for direct comparisons between vastly different enterprises. No doubt Digg is a great little company, but they’re not on the same level as the NY Times which is a major US corporation, which trades publically and employs thousands.

There’s nothing wrong with some of the “Pie in the Sky” arguments we hear of the rosy path of Web 2.0, but some of these comparisons need to get more in depth concerning methodology, or they should come back down to Earth.

Apparently the Vlog “Rocketboom” has a lot of fans who are upset because the show’s host Amanda Congdon has left in a dispute with her partner. Amanda herself even gives a heartfelt goodbye in a vlog entry. They should have fed her onions so she at least teared up a bit.

Several claims mention a “TiVO partnership”, 250,000 daily viewers and a $40,000 per week advertising allowance for this show. Impressive indeed. Despite the $2 million per year pace, the show’s creators managed to have a tawdry spat that ends up with the business imperiled?

1) This could be a publicity stunt, but it certainly wouldn’t make a ton of sense
2) These people are really this emotional and come across as a-holes. Since they’re 51% and 49% partners, this will require some sort of legal resolution, so stomping off the show most likely couldn’t be the right way to go.

I would have encouraged them to sell it, rather than launch attacks on each other. I’ve never actually visited RocketBoom’s home page, before today, but I was greeted with an odd, unprofessional message there. If this is the best vlogging has to offer, the industry may be in a lot of trouble.

The debate rages on. Right there is the main point of a phenomenon that’s now called “Web 2.0″. The term has come to mean active community websites where users are responsible for the ultimate content creation of the website. This model is successfully being used at such immensely popular websites as MySpace and Digg.com. The old Netscape was, in all fairness of description, an also-ran that lost the portal wars a long time ago. The new Netscape has a chance to go much further, and perhaps be the top site in a totally different category, one that involves masses of people contributing on a daily basis, in order to shape their vision of what a website can be.

All change involves pain, and this change has been no different for users of the old version of Netscape. Many individuals have expressed outrage at the new direction of the page, and some have threatened to switch if Netscape doesn’t go back to the prior design. Other commenters have even mentioned problems with Netscape email and the Netscape browsers, which aren’t at issue here. I’d like to summarize the debate to this point:

Fair points in the discussion so far:

• “I hate the new design” – fair enough, it’s your opinion
• “I wish I could get to the old Netscape” – you can here
• “I don’t care about some idiot’s opinion on news” – okay, this is a person who’s content with the old media, and not likely to switch to the new

Opionions that might be mostly BS:

• “The new site has a liberal/conservative bias” – I think it’s way to early for that
• “Your new website sucks” – It’s not my website, but thanks for the mildly constructive criticism. Make the website better by outlining your grievances instead of issuing snappy reactionary one-liners

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I know there’s a bunch of people who don’t agree with me. Right now. But I feel that just might change. So far the Old Netscapers “hate the change”. I think it’s safe to say that based on anecdotal evidence of people commenting. Users have mentioned that they really liked the old site and wanted a choice of using it, instead of the new one. Okay, fair enough, I have no idea who’s decision that was, but I’m sure everyone can move past it, if given a choice of using the old page.

Well, Netscape has solved that dilemna. You can access the Old Netscape if you really hate the new one.

However, I get a sense that the majority of people don’t comment when they’re happy, they merely continue to use the service. I’m sure a great number of Old Netscapers will become New Netscapers. In fact, they’re using Web 2.0 right now. They’re being presented with brand new opinions from non-traditional media sources. They’re expressing their opinions in blogs, which some of them have never done before.

They’re emotional right now, but this too shall pass. Let’s look at how improved features can help a user’s Netscape experience:

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I never used the old Netscape, so I don’t have any complaints about the new one. I tried out the new Netscape recently, and found it easy to navigate, and simple to use. It’s similar to Digg, but not an exact copy. The site allows the users to decide which news stories are important, by voting, just like Digg, but has some additional features you won’t find elsewhere.
One nice feature is the random story that gets rotated on certain pages. This will give your website a bit of exposure, even if it hasn’t garnered a ton of votes.

A couple of annoying things stand out also. The visit the site in a Frame bit doesn’t seem too kosher, although you can break the Frame with a click of a mouse. They’re probably doing this for visitor tracking purposes, but I’d rather have my article appear without a Frame. The Framed page doesn’t have Title at all in Firefox.

Other bugs I noticed: being sent to the wrong confirmation page after entering a story and allowing double posts. There doesn’t appear to be a duplicate story checker installed yet.

There are plenty of good things about the new Netscape, as well. Two good things are the activity log, which shows what’s happening on the system, and the fact that a decent community appears to growing quickly. It’s great to have another option to just Digg, and it looks like the Netscape people got quite a few details right on this version. As they add features and remove bugs, I’m predicting this site will end up being very successful.

It looks like over 10,000 people have already registered on the new Netscape, so the launch is off to a decent start. No idea of the effect of being “Scaped” is yet, but hopefully I’ll find out very soon. Don’t forget to click if you enjoy this article.