Web’s Best Blog

Main man Aaron Brazell says People don’t want the stinkin’ RSS, in large part because they don’t understand it. He has a point. I guess I view RSS as being easy because it’s easy to me. But we all know that things that may be easy to someone in a technical field is not so simple to regular people who don’t work on computers for a living. Those are the people who have to be reached in order to make RSS even more accessible.

My man Gomer from Interwebmarketing makes a good point about his personal experience showing people RSS. They’re impressed with it, but they dont show a tendency to run right out and get it. He suggest Yahoo take the lead and use the mass media to educate consumers. Undoubtedly, that’s a great solution.

If all the major web companies teamed up to educate people on RSS you could have a seminal change. This would be an event where e-mail could be left in the dust, once and for all. RSS with many more robust features could become the standard. But this would take a lot of money, co-operation, and effort to achieve. I don’t think anyone is committed enough to consider the idea yet.

Anyways, it’s an interesting discussion and one that deserves more follow up. In order for blogs and Web 2.0 to evolve anymore, more people need to be hipped to RSS.

The success of MySpace continues to amaze everyone, but we now may be at the point where the party is definitely over. There are huge numbers of estimated child predators visiting the social networking site for teens, and one mother launched a massive $30 million lawsuit against MySpace after her daughter was raped by a man she met on the website. Casting another negative light after another teen headed to the Israel to marry a man in the West Bank.

MySpace had no policies in place to protect teens using their service. It’s not hard to imagine corporate lawyers are scrambling to cover the company’s back in the event of anymore horrific press coverage.

MySpace will also start to allow all members to designate their profiles as private and thus available only to their named list of friends. MySpace had allowed and encouraged those under 16 to set their profiles to be private, but profiles of anyone older than that have been available for any visitor to the site to read.

In reality, the current measures don’t seem like they’ll stop much from happening. The bigger concern is how obvious it appears to be that the company hasn’t dealt with these potential problems in that timely of a manner. Stories of massive infusions of predators have been reported for quite some time.

This shows us all one of the downsides of Web 2.0: over-trust of the user, especially while using “free services”. What binding agreement do you have with a user who’s using fake registration information in order to abuse your service? Sure the service has been scaled massively, but chinks in the armor are starting to appear.

This Palestinian man used MySpace to find a new underage bride.

Now we’re starting to see the merging of several different web business models. Mog.com launches a new social networking site, which is geared specifically for music lovers. The idea was launched by David Hyman who is a former marketing exec at MTV. The site uses a special software that customers download to help with ratings.

The software is fairly complex, and even creates specific user pages, which contain a lot of the data that’s been recorded concerning their music tastes. These pages will be open to the public on the main website.

“There are music lovers who want nothing more than to tell the world what they are listening to,” MOG.com spokeswoman Dana Smith said. “This is really exciting to people who want to see what other people are listening to and to people who want to show off their stuff.”

Mog.com is counting on this fact. Music lovers will likely follow suit. How far the reach of Mog.com is right now can’t be measured, but the software is worth a look.

Danny Sullivan has an interesting article about AOL attempts to turn Netscape into a Digg or Slashdot clone. I agree with his comments about Digg being a snarky community (reading the link to where he was “Dugg” is hilarious. He’s attacked by an angry mob, which isn’t uncommon at Digg.

Looking at the new Netscape interface I’m struck by the fact that it’s slick, but looks almost like something we’ve seen before. It’s similar to Yahoo in a way, but not quite as crisp. I’m not even sure from looking at the first page how the entire article reputation system works.

One hilarious fact is that the top news is “AOL Copies from Digg”. It shows they really don’t care who knows where they got the idea. They did change the word “Digg” to “Vote”, so I’m sure that will be enough. It’s not like Digg actually invented the concept of “online polls” themselves either.

The “click vote” sites are apparently a darling of Web 2.0. How realistic it is to think the internet will support a lot of these types of sites, I have no idea. The “democratic” nature of these sites has already devolved into self-promotions, IMHO, so I doubt it will get much better soon.

What do you think of the new Netscape Site?

Obviously, anyone can learn a ton from studying this company. They’ve managed to excel in the online business in a way that very few other companies could. I think their acquisition of Skype has them positioned to make an even more feature rich environment for their users. Despite the fact that Skype cost a ton, E-Bay is starting to integrate them into their business model.

The Skype Me button solves several business problems at once. It helps spread the Skype service to the massive 200 million account userbase at E-Bay, and it helps legitimatize the entire auction process, by adding the “voice” at the other end of transactions. Auction comes full circle in this instance.

What can we learn from E-Bay?

1) Be innovative
2) Don’t be afraid to adapt your business model
3) Find more ways to sell your current customers more products

All these lessons seem obvious, but you don’t always see examples of them. It remains to be seen how well the Skype integration does for E-Bay, but it seems like they have a lot of good ideas that other online companies don’t seem to.

What do you think of E-Bay and Skype? Do you use either of them? How about Paypal?

The last few days there have been a huge number of ebullient posts concerning Web 2.0 startups. People are either landing more money or getting their first round of financing. People are leaving their jobs and starting “Web 2.0″ companies. The hype machine is in full bloom, but I see nary a mention of the numbers behind any of these deals. In fact, a number of the websites that are launching would be very hard-pressed to find viable business models.

It appears that Google Adsense has spawned tens of thousands of sites looking to cash in on the idea of driving eyeballs to the site and having Google monetize the pages for them. But is it really bringing in any money? YouTube running AdSense ads on video pages seems particularity counter-productive. It’s almost beginning to look like people are attempting to put round pegs in square holes just to get a website funded. Good luck to all of them, but their survival will still rely on their performance over time.

One thing about big money is that it chases after big money. The more people who are spending to fund startups, the more likely the trend is to continue. Even vloggers are rushing to get paid. If you’re into organizing a team of people, you might want to draw up your business plan and see if you can get a project funded. There’s probably still plenty of time left to join the fun.

The interesting thing will be to see what becomes of these companies in the immediate future. More will likely fail than succeed, especially if they aren’t adept at monetizing their traffic.

Good news for blogger who are hoping to get some exposure from Digg.com. BusinessWeek reports that Digg is opening up their service to other subject matters besides just tech. It’s not hard to understand why. The tech crowd is fine, but the bigger money in advertising will have to come from much broader audiences like politics and finance.

It’s an interesting move by Digg. On the one hand you have the attempt to appeal to a broader market, but you have to balance the needs of your current readership. If the current crowd is into technology, they may have very little interest in politics.

There’s no word on whether this makeover will involve a new design, or even breaking the website into different categories. It will be interesting to see the application. Digg is already a ridiculous popularity contest, I can just imagine who much of a cess-pool it could be when it opens up to even more fields.

The most exciting aspect of “Web 2.0″ to certain people has to be the ease and speed of adaptation that’s been seen by the biggest players. When a company can become an overnight sensation without paying millions for advertising, this savings goes straight to the bottom line. Systems that draw in other users from referrals of existing users are inspirational to anyone who develops websites.

The new framework of websites is really exciting. The more fluid the user experience gets, the more likely you are to attract users en masse.

Almost every popular Web 2.0-style website has a very easy to navigate website, with clean designs and fast-loading pages. It’s a must. The less much the better, or so it seems, until you give the users a chance to add their personality to the site (I’m thinkink of MySpace Profiles here). But the basic premise seems to be:

• Find a solution to an existing problem
• Make your solution something easy to understand
• Make it extremely easy to use
• Encourage your users to tell others about your service
• Be reliable
• Add features
• Make most of your features free, but charge for the really premium ones

All of these are principles that I either have or will begin implementing into my websites as quickly as I can. I missed the boat for awhile by sending most of my traffic to the context sensitive ad places, but as their payouts seem to be declining, I’m attempting to convert more one-time visitors into repeat visitors. That should make the marketing job easier overall.

What do you think of the potential of Web 2.0 as it relates to free advertising? Some of these companies are HUGE from word of mouth. Are you attempting to exploit these opportunities?

Great news for fans of Bloglines. According to Techcrunch today, Ask.com is releasing a new blog search for their Bloglines.

This should produce some additional value for Bloglines, and it also helps establish Ask.com as more of a leader in search. It’s a chance for them to showcase technology in the blogosphere.

The search utility for now appears underwhelming. They appear to be pulling data from a limited universe of sites. However, it’s not bad for a start and they conveniently list related feeds at the right. I don’t think we’re breaking any ground here, but perhaps as Ask.com delves deeper into search, they’ll be able to improve upon their seach strategy. They’re big believers in using reputation system style ranking, so their results may at least look different than the others.

The best way for you to find out if you like this blog search is to use it. Give it a try and give feedback to Ask. The more competitors in the search space, the better, as far as I’m concerned. The more big companies out there promoting blog readership, and building tools to help people find blogs, the more likely your blog is to be found. We’ll see how Ask does in the blog search space.

What do you think of the new Bloglines search?