Marketspace Advisor

Three Gems From IT Conversations

via Phil Windley's weekly message:

The Future of Entertainment - Web 2.0 2005 (Rating: 3.0)

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A diverse panel of players in the current and cutting edge of entertainment discuss the future of entertainment at this panel discussion from Web 2.0. Mark Cuban, Michael Powell, Evan Williams, and Reed Hastings share insights about the effect of the increased availability of broadband on entertainment delivery and discuss the conflict between the forces of control and the forces of freedom. They also discuss the future of content delivery, the inherent differences between audio and video, and the trade-off between convenience and quality.

http://ipost.com/rd/9z1z3e58m4ii8v9q5b4q17v6f4rdkp38uk91k2qbj60

Social Applications - Where 2005 (Rating: 3.2)

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The future of social mobile applications is wide open, according to the Where 2.0 Social Application panelists. They expect to see many new applications with clean, rich client interfaces that provide significantly more functionality and managability than is currently available. However, they are all quick to point out that the future is as much about social aspects as about the technology. The discussion focuses on breaking down barriers and energizing participation, as well as controlling usage and unforeseen behaviors.

http://ipost.com/rd/9z1ztr9e45hqvj68ntqo935ju9kna9r8dg28gi5hceg

Seth Goldstein - Applications for the New Attention Economy (Rating: 3.7)

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The new Attention Economy is grabbing the attention of alpha geeks and businesses hoping reap the rewards of innovation in this emerging marketplace of clickstreams. In this talk, Seth Goldstein introduces us to Root Markets' Root Vaults, one of the first applications to make use of the data provided by the AttentionTrust's Attention Extension. These new applications and analytical tools help individuals take charge of their own attention data in order to understand patterns, share with others, and harness attention's growing economic value.

http://ipost.com/rd/9z1z2ig3bga9pm3udphaf7g1nsbdt7l8pmnurvb82mg

Web Futures: Vast and the Abstraction Vector

Nik Cubrilovic posted today over on TechCrunch about Vast, a "meta"-Edgio.  I posted today on my personal blog about how Vast represents an evolution along something I'll call the "abstraction vector" that can be used as an input to predicting how Web 2.0 applications might unfold.

Web 2.5 Application Ideas

I just posted over on my personal blog about some ideas that the Edgeio launch suggested.  The core that drove the ideas:  if a "listing" tag can be used to define structured data for commerce that can be aggregated, parsed, and usefully presented by services like Edgeio, what other tags could define other forms of structured data that could also be usefully exchanged this way?  My post suggested "events" as one such possibility.  Others?

Edgeio Launches: Who Needs eBay and Craigslist?

Edgeio, http://edgeio.com, launched last week.  Edgeio allows blog publishers to use their own sites as ecommerce storefronts, and uses tags and RSS to aggregate blog publishers' listings.  On the buyer side, it provides a purpose-built interface for browsing these listings to find what you need.  I think this is a good example of a "Web 2.5" application in some respects, in that it follows some of the principles of Structured Collaboration (see http://www.octavianworld.org/octavianworld/2005/12/what_can_web_15.html).

Edgeio was covered in Business week's blogs earlier in February:

http://blogs.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2006/02/edgeio_edges_ou.html

Nik Cubrilovic's post in TechCrunch (a great resource) was also excellent, and the comments provide invaluable market feedback for the Edgeio team (rendering a lot of what I might have had to say superfluous).

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/02/27/edgeio-launches/

Finally, Nick Carr's post on Rough Type, skeptical but partially right on:

http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/03/getting_it.php

What he misses, for my taste, is that these services are not intended to grow to the sky.  They are experiments that ultimately make sense only in the context of a larger partner that builds or buys them.

Parsing Terry Semel

I just finished listening to this IT Conversations podcast of an interview with Yahoo's Terry Semel from the O'Reilly Web 2.0 conference last year:

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-844.mp3

Semel was knocked by the digerati as too old-school to help Yahoo compete effectively with Google.  He does apply a "the-way-you-win-is-to-have-both-great-content-and-distribution" framework to Yahoo's strategy, but what this interview reveals is an appreciation of the equal importance of technology in the mix (for aggregating and syndicating that content), and an open-minded aggressiveness about balancing deals to scoop up others'  innovations with Yahoo's own home-grown stuff.  Also interesting to hear him comment on Google, its evolution from a search tool to a portal, and how that compares with what Yahoo has done so far.

More on Yahoo:  this podcast of Paul Levine's (GM of Yahoo Local) talk at Where 2.0 on the "architecture of participation" (a term he borrows from Tim O'Reilly):

http://www.itconversations.com/audio/download/ITConversations-807.mp3

If you're not familiar with Web 2.0 stuff like map APIs and tagging, this might be useful to help familiarize you with these services as Yahoo implements them.  If you are, this will be less interesting and feel more like an ad for Yahoo's experiments.

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