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We have not spend any time thinking about Technorati but over at Work From Home Business Blog. Peter is holding a favorites exchange. This is where we get together to link through Technorati.

You can favorite us here at Add to Technorati Favorites. Please leave a Fav linkback in the comments and we will Fav your blog.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqwJhCPMs4o

Marnia Orlova, Intellectual and all round hottie runs one of the hottest channels on Youtube. HotforWords has been around for two years but rivals even Michael Jackson and Showtime in the number of hits.

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This weeks embrulio about the change in terms of service for the Facebook terms of service has unlined an immutable truth about social networking. Facebook has done an about face on the terms but this has not stopped speculation that Facebook is doing an end run around it’s users.

However of more concern is the longer term impact of Facebook and it’s archive capabilities on a users future. Our perspective of the future at 20 years old, is vastly different from one in their 20s or 30s or 40s. In your youth you are far more inclined to view camera photos, goof off video, or that bong photo can be seriously problematic in the future. The Facebook incident has clearly shown that there is an uneasy alliance between the commercial requirements of the network and the privacy of the users, and without a certain vigilance this is always going to be the case.

Consider the Michael Phelps Mea Culpa:

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” Phelps said. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to…

[New York Times - 1st Feb 2009]

In a statement on Sunday, Phelps said that “despite the successes I have had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way……[f]or this, I am sorry. I promise my fans and the public-it will not happen again.”

[College News- 2nd Feb 2009]

“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” he said in a statement, and he promised his “fans and the public it will not happen again.”

[Greenville News - 15th Feb 2009]

This incident only exemplifies the fact that your information, that your provide online is a permanent record and you need to treat it as such. Although there are rudimentary privacy features and rules in place on social networks, it is unreasonable to expect that this information will not leak out. This is because although you control your friends and their access, you do not control what they do with that photo or video.

The broad rule on the internet is that everything is public and you should treat it as such. Michael Phelps learnt that lesson the hardway.

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One of the beneficiaries of the recession are the word oriented social sites like Linkedin and to a lesser extend Facebook (read what I think about Facebook). According to news.com this weeked, the traffic for Linkedin has grown 22% over December, including a whopping 65% increase in recommendations. Anecdotally this is what I have been seeing on Linkedin, I have been asked on a number of occassions to provide recommendations. On Facebook there has been an increase in the number of links and requests. Indeed most of my colleagues are on Linkedin.

Finding a job through a reference is indeed a good idea (read Guy Kawasaki) however there is a downside to using social tools and that is the HR manager who is interviewing you also is armed for the interview. Just as potential friends can find information about you, so too can prospective employers. Your profile can just as much be a hinderence as a help.

• You need to view your profiles as public commentary about yourself and I include friends with that. Your profile should be viewed in the eyes of people you wish to help you, not from people you like to goof off with.
• Once information is up there it is very difficult to remove thanks to Google Cache and the Wayback machine
• Question everything you want to put up in the context of how can it help you, and how can it hurt you.
• Always assume that your profile is public, even if you set it as private. There are always a way round these.
• Be accurate and honest. It is absolutely fine to put your experience in the best possible light from your perspective as long a it is defendable. For example, I am a keen hiker, but if you can’t answer the last 5 times you hiked and why you like it, then you may get tripped up in an interview.
• Make your profile relevant to the jobs or gigs you are after. If you are in the creative industry, then creative stuff, a sense of humor etc are important. If you are a programmer, a blog about programming and your skill is vital.
• Make sure your Job experience is complete and relevant. Missing gaps, just like your resume are questions. What is even worst you don’t have the ability to respond.
• Just like in an interview, religious and political views should be avoided at all times.  It is highly likely you will get on the wrong side of someone.
• Linkedin and Facebook (and bebo and myspace and twitter) are interchangeable. Even though you split Linkedin as professional, Facebook as family, they do provide clues that an HR person can use.

Social networks are two edged swords, they can be incredibily helpful but they can be your worst enemy. Proceed with caution.

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After the Microsoft purging in early January no one department was left untouched including the team working on the Zune player. All of Microsoft’s divisions are losing money except Windows, Office, Tools and Business CRM

Although they deny it, it is related to the precipitous drop in revenue in the last quarter (down 54%) Microsoft recently announced that it would split the Zune team in two. [TechCrunch Link]

The software and services portion of the Zune team–the bulk of its staff–will be added to the portfolio of Enrique Rodriguez, the vice president who currently runs Microsoft’s Mediaroom and Media Center TV businesses. The hardware team, meanwhile, will now report to Tom Gibbons, who also leads the hardware design efforts within Microsoft’s Windows Mobile unit.

This is because they realize that the Zune cannot drive it’s own market and so it must be made to be relevant to the consumer other ways and that including rationalizing the Windows Media Player and Media Center.Their strategy with the Media Center and Windows Media Player is all over the place, unlike the Quicktime Engine which is in every product that Apple has, from the iPhone through iPod, Apple Tv, Macs and the professional editing tools, so now is a good time as any to bring the groups together.

Microsoft’s portable strategy, although they have possessed one for the last 10 years, is in tatters and they have a very limited window to fix the problem. When they originally created the Windows CE they were in market where they were able to tie it to the Microsoft Office and Exchange. But what is inexplicable is why they let the Blackberry eat their lunch with Exchange integration. The Blackberry Enterprise Server is a truly awful product. (If you have set it up you will know).  Microsoft needs to move fast to tie the Zune Software into the Windows Mobile 7 platform and create an experience close to what the Iphone has. A Windows Media Center/Zune/Mobile 7 integration effort will pay dividends in the future as people will be able to consume their video and music over multiple devices under a single account. Finally as I suggested the Windows Live/XBox Live presence to support all the portable devices as well as Media Center to tie the whole experience together.

Whether or not the Zune Player will survive as a Microsoft product is unclear. There is no reason why they cannot create a reference design and let others develop the hardware. After all the Zune Player is the Toshiba Gigabeat Player. Maybe they can give away the Zune player with the Xbox or tie the Zune together with an Xbox portable player.

Whatever they may do they are running out of time to make a difference in this market and they have many moving parts. No company has every tried to execute on so many levels. Apple has taken 8 years to get to where they are, Microsoft has about 18 months.

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Unlike Linkedin which has been able to successfully charge for a premium service, Facebook does not realize any revenue beyond advertising on their various pages. This means that they are entirely beholden to the fate of the online advertising industry and it’s fate is not that rosy at the moment. I had always been suspicious of any business that relies entirely on advertising for its revenue. This is because unless you own the advertising engine (read Google) you are the lacky that delivers the click throughs. The network affect of an advertising engine like Google online is just too strong (just ask Microsoft).

In June Facebook valued itself at around $3.7Billion:

In a transcript of a June court hearing that was closed to the public, lawyers arguing over a legal settlement revealed Facebook’s own appraisal had priced its privately held stock at $8.88 per share, giving it a market value of about $3.7 billion.

Facebook is probably worth considerably less today because of the downturn in advertising rates and I would be surprised if it is worth $1B or so, however

There are some interesting challenges dealing with Nokia. Firstly Facebook is a North American social phenom, where as Nokia is a European centric supplier. It’s marketshare is no where in North America which is dominanted by RIM and Apple. If Nokia think that this will help them gain traction then they need to think again. My Blackberry has Facebook on it, but that was not even a thought in my mind over choice of smartphones. I am not clear that other than supporting facebook on Symbian, it makes a toss of difference.

However GigaOm adds:

Apparently, I am one of 25 million Facebook mobile users and one of 4 million who access the service on a daily basis. That’s a sizable portion of Facebook’s 150 million (and growing) registered users, and with them lies Facebook’s future. With the rise of superphones such as Apple’s iPhone, the BlackBerry Bold and Nokia’s E71 and N96 devices, we are at the cusp of a new era in which the mobile and the wired web converge. This convergence, when married to location-based services, would create a new real-time and highly contextual Internet experience.

The thing about Facebook is that it is about me, not about us. My world on Facebook is in the context as me as the hub responding to other’s hubs and where we intersect is where the social aspect executes. But first and for most the hub must have utility at the center of the hub, NOT in the social intersections. I think this is the flaw in Facebook’s thinking. This leads me to think that Facebook could be a seriously good Super rich Contact Management System that could replace the incredibly annoying synchronization process that I have to go through with the 5 or so Contact databases I have (I use Apple Sync somewhat but there are holes).

What if Facebook because the defacto device independent contact and group management system that could coordinate all my contact and calendering capability. It would be this organic system that could manage my contacts, organize groups, friends, family, work,  build social IM, micro blogging etc etc.

Wouldn’t that be nice. It would be something worth paying for… Facebook a fancy contact management system.

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It is enormous fun to watch the machinations of the Twitter team, Evan Williams and Biz Stone, walk a tight balancing act between promise and reality. The promise is that Twitter can evolve from a fun tool to a valuable tool, something that people will be prepared to pay for. The reality is that it does not pay for itself, and today they have no clear path to revenue.

It is interesting from the fact that this is now a widely known tool that many people have tried and has enjoyed wide attenion. It is not often that you get to see a company grow up that is allowed to survive without a clear understanding what they are purposed to do for the shareholders. I can just see the VC meetings now. Just like when Jerry and George pitch their show to the NBC executives.…what is your business about…nothing….how to you make money….we dont….it is a business about nothing and we don’t make any money !!!…. brilliant, I’m in. From New Yorker:

He talks about branding, provoking growth, and, yes, “scalability.” Twitter lives in its own bubble of The Future, while the rest of us are barnacles unfortunate enough to scrape by in the present. He sounds like everyone I worked with back in the dot-com days. He has the hot product. He might be right. But back then we all thought we were right, too.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter has no real estate to sell advertising on. The interface with Twitter is through your SMS client on your phone so an advertising supported system faces real challenges. They cannot create a subscription model without potentially alienating their customers. I reason that had they thought that it would have worked, they would have tried it by now. This also means that the value contribution (in the hands of the customer) that they make is not that large to enough people to monetize that value.

I believe that the corner that they got themselves into is that they did start this as a hobby, a means to solve a problem that they themselves did have, and that is how to communicate to a group of people over mobile infrastructure easily. This is a function of SMS capability that is sadly lacking in the mobile infrastructure. It is certainly available in Instant Message infrastructure and should be available inside the SMS infrastructure. Perhaps building a standard business that sells telecom infrastructure to carriers is unsexy, and hence not dignified to

That being said, the opportunity to sell it to wireless carriers as a piece of infrastructure is also a challenge because it is now out there in the “free” internet and you have gotten people used to “free”. Any attempt to modify the relationship between the user and the service will result in some very unhappy customers.

I do believe that Twitter belongs as part of the SMS infrastructure but now the cat is out of the bag, it is much harder to make this angle work although it is not impossible. The great thing about twitter is that it generates extra activity for the carriers, and can be sold as a premium product. One of the carriers will sign up to support a premium product that can be marketed to their customers, perhaps with a corporate angle where a license can be sold to a company to use it as part of their infrastructure.

Twitter can also be used as part of an event alerting infrastructure where components can be tied into public safety networks to provide emergency or other notification services. People can opt into different notification services such as concert tickets or other premium offers. American Express can tie into their Gold and Platinum customers to keep track of concierge type services.

The real value of Twitter is not in it’s social component, but in the infrastructure itself which makes it attractive to build out scalable notification services that could benefit corporates and keep carriers happy. However this part of the business is unsexy and quite frankly difficult, it is much easier to wear designer jeans and dream about changing the world through social networks.

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With release of Google Latitude and the birth of wide spread people tracking technology, we are onto the next stage of improved social tools at the expense of privacy. From the Google Blog:

Latitude is a new feature of Google Maps for mobile, as well as an iGoogle gadget, that allows you to share your location with your friends and to see their approximate locations, if they choose to share them with you. You can use your Google account to sign in and easily invite friends to Latitude from your existing list of contacts or by entering their email addresses. Google Talk is integrated with Latitude, so you and your friends can update your status messages and profile photos on the go and see what everyone is up to. You can also call, SMS, IM, or email each other within the app

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-Oq-9enE-k

With a few simple clicks of the mouse, a whole new world of detail can pervade one’s existence and create opportunities for the less scrupulous of us. With the addition of location information along with credit information, corporations can track to an even greater depth what you can and cannot do.

Recently it was reported in the New York Times that American Express was changing your credit limit based on where and whom you shop with:

In recent months, American Express has gone far beyond simply checking your credit score and making sure you pay on time. The company has been looking at home prices in your area, the type of mortgage lender you’re using and whether small-business card customers work in an industry under siege. It has also been looking at how you spend your money, searching for patterns or similarities to other customers who have trouble paying their bills.

Not only is it possible to see your transactions at the local Cash Converters or Value Village, simply being in the vicinity of a Dollar Store makes you a credit risk. This ability will soon be available to any developer:

In the meantime, with Latitude Google is moving to commoditize both the map information and the location beacon. Google is using triangulation data from cellular networks, and Wi-Fi positioning along with GPS data for its Latitude offering. It is only a matter of time before this location information is made available to other developers for free, especially Android app developers. After all, Google needs apps for its Android platform, and more importantly it needs developers to think differently.

The issues do not stop at intrusive corporations, according to Privacy International it can also extend to unwanted attention from unsavory types:

“The company has a long way to go before it can capture the trust of phone users. As it stands right now, Latitude could be a gift to stalkers, prying employers, jealous partners and obsessive friends. The dangers to a user’s privacy and security are as limitless as the imagination of those who would abuse this technology.”

Couple that with long time Google wannabe, Microsoft Live Maps and you have a potential problem waiting to happen.

Next up, pre-crime….

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In our ongoing series on technology that has gone the way of the dinosaur, this week Polaroid announced the demise of the instant camera with the closure of the manufacturing:

Yesterday, the company behind the iconic instant camera announced it was to stop making the film used by Polaroid enthusiasts, because there is no longer a market for it.

Three factories will close in Massachusetts, Mexico and the Netherlands, resulting in 450 job losses. The company stopped making the cameras for commercial use in 2006 and halted production of the consumer models last year.

If you don’t remember the Polariod One Step Camera you can see it here:

Although they did not know it at the time, the release of the digital camera resulted in the the demise of consumer film camera and the instant camera in particular. The first digital camera was created in 1975 but it wasn’t until 1990 that consumers saw the first consumer digital camera, the Dycam Model 1 (which was also marketed as the Logitec Fotoman). By then the fate of the instant camera was sealed.

[Photo Courtesy of Digibarn under creative commons]

Each time the manufacturers of these products failed to see the shift in technology resulted in consumer tastes changing. The digital camera fulfilled the needs of the consumer even though quality from digital cameras was less than nitrate film. The gratification and ease of use was more important. The same too with the transition from vinyl to compact disc and from cable based diggers to hydraulic based diggers (See Christensen).

Gartner released it’s report “Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2008 and Beyond” this week. Aside from the greening of the enterprise, one particular prediction stood out:

By 2011, Apple will double its U.S. and Western Europe unit market share in Computers. Apple’s gains in computer market share reflect as much on the failures of the rest of the industry as on Apple’s success. Apple is challenging its competitors with software integration that provides ease of use and flexibility; continuous and more frequent innovation in hardware and software; and an ecosystem that focuses on interoperability across multiple devices (such as iPod and iMac cross-selling).

This prediction is less about Apple and more about Microsoft. Basically innovation in and on the Windows platform has stalled and it took Apple to show just how bereft of real progress is on the Windows platform. Vista’s luke warm reception can be directly traced not only to the lack of genuine lack of innovation but the complex pricing model with 5 basic variants of essentially the same piece of software. This is classic monopoly behavior where anemic organic growth in revenue must be goosed with un-consumer friendly pricing models.

Secondly Microsoft are worried that if Apple reaches the psychological 20% market share barrier, it will result in a defection of a large group of developers towards an alternative platform. The developer community is a key barrier to entry in this particular monopoly. Just like presidential candidates momentum is very important part of the game.

Which leads us to the reason for the Yahoo bid this week from Microsoft. Microsoft (Balmer et al) after 10 years have recognized that their web based initiatives (read MSN) have failed and there is no realistic future for MSN in it’s current state. Indeed the new initiatives under the headline “Windows Live” has resulted in lost search share. Microsoft feels that it has indeed lost the search (read embedded advertising game) but has a chance with Yahoo to make a difference.

However the Yahoo bid is more about the limited options that Microsoft actually has to grow it’s business. The share market has been unresponsive to Microsoft largely because it has been unable to move beyond the Windows franchise and it’s enormous war chest has been unable to position itself into the future. The merger of Yahoo will be in attempt to radically change a business that basically has not changed in 25 years.

My prediction that if the merger is approved then the Yahoo business will stay quasi independent and the MSN group will be fed to the crocodiles. This way they can claim success in the web business without overtly showing the world they wanted to get rid of it. If this is correct then the entertainment business led by the Xbox group and include the mediocre will be “spun out” into an independent group followed by business solutions. The trick is to split the company up without looking like it is splitting the company up and turn the company into a conglomerate with independent operating entities.

Which leads to another prediction from Gartner:

By 2012, 80 per cent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment. Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. Embedded open source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years.

The realities of 2008 are not the realities of 2000. 2008 is characterized by the fact that open source is not going away and will form a significant part of the IT business going forward. What this means is that the environment that the business solutions group faces is not a homogenous Windows future but a hetreogenous future of Linux, Unix, Oracle, DB2 among others.

I would argue that the view from Year 2000 was predicated on Microsoft SQL Server being the defacto standard for business solutions, which has not come to fruition. The limited success of the business solutions group must frustrate Balmer et al no end and that it needs some room to succeed.

Microsoft is at a cross roads. Gates is leaving full time employ, and Balmer is tasked with preparing the future, a future where Windows is no longer the linchpin in the IT industry, but one of a number of solutions in the market place. The 2000 vision of a homogenous desktop and server market is dead and the ability of Microsoft to wield it’s Windows hammer has long gone.

These are most interesting of times……

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The late 1990s were a boom time and there are constant reminders of the more excesses over that period. Half.com is an example of a successful exit to an unsuccessful business.

But back in 1999, in its Netflix-like heyday, Half.com was hot. And then it did something quite remarkable. As a publicity stunt, it bought a town — somewhere in Oregon — and renamed it. This news made the wire services, The New York Times and Wired Magazine.

So what ever happened to Half.com, Oregon, the first dot com city in the world?

Design Observer – What ever happened to Half.com

Joe Kopelman, the CEO of Half.com created the publicity stunt to convince a small city to change their name to Half.com in return for cash, computers and stock. No more that 6 months later they sold Half.com, a online “Steptoe and Son” for around $300M. (If you don’t know who Steptoe and Son). This must of being one of the most inspired PR ROI achievement of the nineties.

technorati tags: half.com ebay joe kopelman
del.icio.us tags: half.com ebay joe kopelman

Check out Northvoice Independent Music Podcast here

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There is some great media goings on at the moment especially the likes of Kevin Rose at Digg.com. Whilst they are a very interesting Web 2.0 company and social book marking and meta sites like Del.icio.us and Digg are all the rage, I can’t help but cast a wary eye over business models that have advertising at it’s heart. The reason for this is that there is only limited space for these sites and I suspect will suffer from the “magazine’s law of gravity”. By this I mean that the magazine business is driven by fashion and trends, and as quickly as your audience turns up, it can disappear as well.

We are very familiar with the kings of online advertising, that being Google, AOL and Yahoo. I don’t include MSN because it is not profitable and suffers from being fourth of a very short line. The other large advertising site is MySpace, whose value proposition is clear and stickiness is persuasive.

I have less confidence in sites whose traffic is predicated on social bookmarking (del.ico.us) or the latest craze “voter based bookmarking” or Digging. My reasoning is that the benefit from the user is transient. The benefit of long term participation is unclear because the system has already shown that it is open to manipulation. This has resulted in a small group controlling the bulk of the digging on the site. Over time I suspect that the audience will move away as another trend takes it’s place. Unlike Myspace I am unclear as to whether the network effect is present in Digg, Newsvine and others.

Now there are Web 2.0 companies that I really like. Companies that have a clear revenue model and path to profitability not based on advertising.

SixApart, owns the Typepad, Live Journal and Moveable Type blogging software and sell it on a subscription model based on the number of bloggers in your organization. Although we use competing products from WordPress and Nucleus, they have had great success in building their customer base.

37Signals owns Campfire, Basecamp and Backpack among other web apps. They too sell subscriptions to the online Project Collaboration, Group Chat and Organizer. They are also the inventors of the increasingly popular Ruby on Rails web development framework. Look for someone like Google to purchase this company to add to their portfolio of online web tools.

Liberated Syndication provides fixed fee podcast hosting. It is the service that we use for Gtone and Northvoice. The premise is simple. You subscribe to a fixed amount of hosting space, from $5 to $25 per month. The bandwidth is unlimited. If your podcast takes off then you won’t be faced with a bandwidth bill you can’t afford. Askaninja uses this service and it saved their Shurkin. It is like purchasing bandwidth insurance. The downside is that this service can easily be replicated by other players such as Google or Yahoo.

All of these companies have a good value proposition for their users and have a revenue base to grow. They offer both value to both the user and to large strategic partners.

technorati tags: web 2.0 blogging sixapart 37signals digg typepad basecamp libsyn liberated syndication podcasting businessweek
del.icio.us tags: web 2.0 blogging sixapart 37signals digg typepad basecamp libsyn liberated syndication podcasting businessweek

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With the advent of Digg 3.0 the means the development of Social Bookmarking or my term Social Editorial has moved to another level. Social Editorial implies more than bookmarking or “Digging” but running commentary and a new feature “blog this” which implies an additional participation in the editorial. These new features allows different views of the story with accompanying feedback and commentary. It is the blogosphere that offers a more granulate or tailored view of the story that then feed back into the community.

In a perfect world, Social Editorial would result in a very accurate view of a population’s consensus, attitudes and concerns over a particular story. Given some more sophisticated spying tools, a polling of a populations view can be gauged including their understanding of the interaction between different stories including the newly added ones from blogs that fill out the story.

All these new capabilities to interact with the story creates a new context structure from where the story can grow and take on a multi dimensional view. In fact it is just this view that is currently being planned in a later version of Digg according to Kevin Rose in Twit Episode 59. (About 55 mins in). Kevin talks about the Digg 3.0 visualization tools that has a series of bubbles that represents the activity and the interrelationship between different stories. This will be available some time in July.

Andy Patrizio talks about in on Internet News

Digg Incoming will replace Digg Spy as the means for monitoring what’s being “dugg.” The Visualization feature shows each story as a bar in a bar graph, and several hundred bars can be shown on the screen at once. The new Swarm technology shows which stories users are “swarming” around as they become more popular.

What this means is that there will be some pretty interesting phenomenon we are just about to observe:

• Commentary will change and a wider audience will result in a higher degee of discourse.
• A wider and more diverse points of interest will emerge that will look beyond simple rants and raves of the traditional Digg commentary.
• Digg population will fragment into communities of interest revolving around blogs
• Good bloggers will build out the content and feed it back into Digg (and others)

Vishnu Mahmud talks about fragmentation here:

With Digg 3.0 introducing additional topics and catering to a larger audience, what made it unique may now lead to a morass of links and content. Instead of focusing on technology, there are now a lot more links and news to go through. The site still attracts tech geeks but now they can be further segmented.

To fight this Digg will need to come up with a more sophisticated community categorization system than currently they have that takes into account the diversification as well as the need to better segment discourse.

What does this mean for traditional journalism?. When blogs first appeared, they were isolated. By that I mean you had to find them and they would link back to the story they are commenting on. A great example of this is Washington Monthly by Kevin Drum. We would need to follow is arguments against what he provides as the source.

I believe over time that Digg with its community effect will act as the hub in the community and provide the context to the story by linking and rating all the elements in the blogosphere.

Both Political Powers and the Traditional media will also have a hard time reacting. In Washington Week with Gwen IFil, a question was asked what impact Blogging and the Internet is having on Politics. The consensus is that everyone now aware of this and is trying to make sense of this. A number of senior politicians including Hilliary Clinton have hired blogging “experts” to assist them. This means that the traditional media over time will be forced to react not just to the blogging itself, but the social networking that is going on behind it. Therefore:

• Traditional Media will start feeling the effect of Social Commentary. They will initially ignore this structure
• Traditional Media will recognize the importance of this review process and look for opportunities to increase their exposure.
• Media companies will start to tailor content for this medium and may result in Digg baiting stories to drive traffic into their sites.

However, will this result in a democratization of the news process result in another type of consumer pandering that has existed in TV for a long time, ie. the pandering to the new social structures online? This remains to be seen however at this time in the Web 2.0 history, it seems to be a great vantage point.

Technorati Tags: digg, washington week, TV, leo+laporte, cnet, twit+tv, social+bookmarking, washington+monthly

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Andrea Weckerle from New Millenium PR Blog has challenged me to come up with my favorite social network tools and tagged me meme. Okay I will bite. Here are the five tools I have been work within the social networking realm:

1. Technorati – This tool I have used for a while. Tagging is something that you need to get your head around as a marketer and a blogger. It provides both forward reference, that is being able to add meta tags to your post and have Technorati aggregate them, and reserver reference, where we can see who is linking to you and me.
2. Del.ico.us – Still trying to get my head around this social bookmarking site. One of the exercises I am working on is how to use del.ico.us on the corporate site. You will see the fruits of that effort soon.
3. ITunes – yes Itunes – Our podcasts are used to extend our audience from inside our partner and customer community and yes lots of our customers have Itunes and Ipods. This is a great social reach-out-and-touch-me tool. Audio also has higher attention rates and provides a deep interaction.
4. Odeo – for the same reason as Itunes but you can’t time shift, it makes this real dandy Flash Player
5. Blogpulse – This is Nielson’s Netmetrics site. It has some great analytics tools like the Google Trends site but for blogs.

And on Ann Handley’s post about the Typepad outage recently which I blogged about here. If a blogger blogs in a forest and Typepad is down does anyone hear her?. If a man in a forest blogs and no women is there to read it, is he still wrong?. My meme challenge then goes out to Ramana Guntor from Cistera, Range from memoirs on a rainy day, Tara Hunt from Pinko Marketing, Lisa Deere from Brainwash Café, and Brandon Millard from Call2Recycle.

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I am a hard core believer that innovation almost 100% created from the bottom up. Almost 100% of that innovation in the Web 2.0 space is small companies like Technorati, Six Apart (typepad), WordPress (the Apache of the Blogspace) and delicious among many others. They work on a small problem, it gets popular, then they have to cope with the challenges of growth.

The big problem this week was Typepad’s 10 hour outage on Friday:

But Typepad failed to inform its users that posts they were making during the downtime period were disappearing into a black hole.
“I spent about eight hours on 12 July updating photo albums and captions for an artist friend of mine. All gone. TypePad, which has had a disturbing history of user complaints and losing people’s work, simply collapsed,” reader Bruce Stidson told us.

Typepad goes titsup again – The Register 

Not only did this problem affect us smaller folk, it also affected blogs from people like Brian Williams from NBC, the Times of London, San Jose Mercury News and others.

What is obvious is that these are very small companies trying to cope with very large problems. Web 2.0 is unique in that you can go from a single user to 5 million inside a year and still be required to have the same reliability that a large multi-billion dollar corporation has.

What is not so obvious is that these companies are required to do it on very small budgets. Even the successful ones have total funding in the range of $10M – $15M, the smaller ones have to do this on much less. This means that their budgets for IT are only in the $1M – $2M range, most of that money is soaked up in salaries and benefits. This does not go very far when you are expected to support millions of users 24 hours per day 7 days a week.

This inevitably means compromise. This means buying servers that are lower cost, and skipping on expensive fail-over and storage solutions because “we can fix that later. Cisco equipment does not come cheap, and they don’t subsidize small companies (most that is). I am not saying that this is any different than any other small company building up, it is that their problem is made more acute by the growth issue.

The biggest capital cost for these types of deployments are networking and server costs. The variable costs are bandwidth and hosted environments, but thankfully a lot of money was invested in the Web 1.0 days where that investment has now been written off.

A significant bonus is the proliferation of free or near free tools such as Linux, BSD, Apache, PHP, MySQL, Ingres, Solaris etc to dramatically reduce the cost of purchasing software tools. In fact don’t underestimate how much Open Source has benefited Web 2.0 Companies. A quick Netcraft reveals the following:

• technorati.com – Linux/Apache
• del.icio.us – Linux/Apache
• Digg.com – Linux/Apache
• wordpress.com – Linux/Litespeed
• typepad.com – Linux/Apache with F5 balancers

Most of these sites are PHP, Python and to a lesser extent Perl. The benefit of these scripting languages are that the knowledge how to scale and cluster these are well know and is freely available.

To get an idea of the scope of the problem challenge, David Silfry posted this on his blog:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 37.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

As Web 2.0 and specifically Social Networking sites continue to show these levels of growth, we will expect to continue to see high profile outages, the benefit is however is that a lot of knowledge is building up on how to scale these systems more efficiently.

Technorati Tags: technorati, blog, web+2.0, linux, php, python, perl, typepad, digg, del.icio.us, Internet, cisco, Web, IT

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