Archive for January, 2007

Boo.com 2.0? Nooooo!

Boo.com - “New website coming soon!”Oh. My. God. For anybody who has been fearing we are approaching dotcom boom 2.0, here is the definitive proof. I randomly went to boo.com (the famous dotcom failure which managed to burn $120 million in six months) and discovered that a new site is “launching soon”. Argh! 

I really hope whoever is relaunching it reads the book first!

It turns out this was picked up by a few others a while ago by The Register and more recently by Tech Crunch, the latter reporting that the launch is imminent in 2007 . The domain name is registered to a Sinead Mooney based in Dublin, Ireland, but the last known owner of the brand was Fashionmall.com.

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84 websites you might not have heard of - a Web 2.0 showcase

Below is a selection of websites considered by many to be part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Believe it or not, it’s a relatively small selection. Some have been around five or six years, and others make up a few of the dozens of start-up sites that launch each day and have been around about five minutes – but all do something quite different to the ‘old school’ websites you have probably come to know and love. And almost all of them have silly names.

Social Networking
Connecting with friends and whatnot

Social News
News by the people for the people 

  • www.digg.com  – the biggest, full of geeks but covers many subjects
  • www.slashdot.com – web1.0 survivor and the original article – but only tech
  • www.inform.com - world affairs and politics specialist
  • www.newsvine.com – also a serious slant – the pitch is you create your own ‘column’ 

Social Bookmarking / Search
Not only can you keep your bookmarks in one place, you can see other people’s fave sites 

Media Sharing
Searching for ‘funny cats’ on youtube is an hour’s entertainment 

Localisation
Making the global village local 

Knowledge Sharing
Share your experiences, expertise, thoughts, or anything really 

Blogging
Blogging is one of the web2.0 cornerstones – making the Internet a truly read/write medium 

Start pages
Make these your homepage and you’re one click from all your favourite content 

Widgets & Symbiotic sites
Making stuff to stick on other sites 

Web Based Applications
Stuff that might put Bill Gates out of a job? 

Social Music
Share your music, and your tastes - legally!

  • last.fm - simply amazing - free radio and it learns what you like!

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Time Inc ups spend on digital, ’streamlines’ magazine teams

Time Inc is to cut almost 300 jobs as it restructures and prepares to expand its digital activities.  In all, 289 jobs are going including 172 on the editorial side (of Time Inc’s worldwide editorial staff of 3,300) and 117 on the business side, reports Brand Republic.

Progress brings change and we need to continue to evolve to meet the cost pressures and challenges presented by our rapidly shifting industry. While we continue to invest in our core magazines, we are also focused on transforming our workforce and broadening our digital capabilities in order to become a truly multi-platform publisher.
- Ann Moore, the chairwoman and chief executive of Time Inc

Hopefully it’s not going to create a ‘them and us’ feeling around Time. Personally I’m hugely in favour of integrated print and digital teams (except the technical teams which from experience has to sit more central). Let’s just hope nobody stands up in front of all the print editors at tells them that “print is dead” like our editorial director did back in 1999…

Meanwhile, IPC Media [my employer] appears to be recruiting “Online Editors”, but does not specify which brands you’ll be working for - you apparently have to specify on application… But make sure you can “demonstrate Web 2.0 skills”!

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O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Principles & Best Practices report

John Musser (of Programmable Web) in association with O’Reilly Radar and Tim O’Reilly has written a 100 page report on Web 2.0 principles & best Practices. The report claims to explain why Web 2.0 matters and how you can make the most of it.

In 2004, we realized that the Web was on the cusp of a new era, one that would finally let loose the power of network effects, setting off a surge of innovation and opportunity. When O’Reilly’s Dale Dougherty came up with the term “Web 2.0” during a brainstorming session, we knew we had the name our conference. What we didn’t know was that the industry would embrace the Web 2.0 meme and that it would come to represent the new Web.

This report is for those who are ready to respond to that shift. It digs beneath the hype and buzzwords, and teaches the underlying rules of Web 2.0—what they are, how successful Web 2.0 companies are applying them, and how to apply them to your own business. It’s a practical resource that provides essential tools for competing and thriving in today’s emerging business world. I hope it inspires you to embrace the Web 2.0 opportunity.

- Tim O’Reilly

There report is available to buy from $395, or you can download the free excerpt which includes a rather good executive summary.

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21.5% of web visitors still want you to design for 800×600…

The subject of designing for screen resolutions has always been a point of contention, but the trend these days does seem to be designing web sites for 1024×768 and above, even with fluid layout sites. It’s almost de-facto and rarely questioned. But is it right?

Here at IPC we’ve always gone with a compromise - go wider, but still design for 800×600 in a way. The trick is to keep the core content within about 780px and have a few ‘non essential’ elements hanging off on the right - see NME.com as an example. It’s a balance between getting more space (and more ads!) above the fold, and catering for the lowest common denominator - my gut feeling has always been they’re not such a minority.

NME.com - degrades gracefully for those with sidebars open

So I thought i’d test my gut feeling and look at the stats for a range of our sites (Horse and Hound, Web User, NME, Wallpaper, Whats On TV, and Nuts),  and here are the results:

Only 12.5% of visitors have an 800×600 screen resolution - BUT 21.5% of visitors have an actual browser width of 800px or less.

My theory has been that a surprisingly large number of people surf with their sidebars open - eg their bookmarks or history - my Dad included. I would guesstimate this to be as high as 50% across the board.

So despite the vast majority now having a decent resolutionof 1024px and above (640×480 is practically zero these days, thank God), a size-able proportion - higher than FireFox’s market share - won’t appreciate any content being out wider than 800px. For example, the redesigned telegraph.co.uk homepage:
telegraph.co.uk - 21.5% of people will see this - it does not degrade gracefully

As with most things on t’interweb, it all comes down to graceful degradation, or even better progressive enhancement. Bare it in mind please!

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Eight smart Yahoo Web 2.0 acquisitions - update

Emre Sokullu at Read/WriteWeb comments on a Yahoo’s recent acquisitions - and in hindsight it looks like they picked up some real bargains (although most of the prices aren’t public).  What’s surprising is that 2006 saw just three purchases - they were ahead of the curve and the spree was really in 2005. 

Their two point oh round-up looks like this:

  1. Blo.gs - blog pinging service
  2. Flickr - photo sharing
  3. Upcoming - price unknown
  4. del.icio.us  - social bookmarking
  5. Konfabulator - desktop search
  6. Jumpcut - online video
  7. Bix - online karaoke
  8. MyBlogLog - social networking

Yahoo certainly paid less for the whole basket of web 2.0 apps than Google paid for YouTube… perhaps they learnt from the experience of spendingUS$3.6bn on GeoCities in 1999.

Wikipedia has a complete list of Yahoo acquisitions dating back to the (first) dotcom boom.

Update: Pete Abilla has put together a neat timeline of acquisitions by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft using Ajax.

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Oodle to offer price tracking for online classifieds

Oodle, the classified listings aggregation service that powers The Sun’s classifieds section, has launched the Oodle Index as a means to help shoppers better understand pricing trends and find those hidden classifieds bargains.

Oodle Price Index screen grab

Oodle has collected data from hundreds of millions of online listings and using this data they can create pricing charts, allowing users to be able to instantly view listings available in a specific price range and get real time data on availability.

Pricing in classifieds is very inefficient,” says CEO and founder, Craig Donato. “Our vision is to be the shopping tool for classifieds.”

According to Marketing Pilgrim, the Oodle Index will initially provide pricing data for cars, real estate and apartment rentals, but I believe it is only available in the US at present and not on the UK Ooodle website.

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Simple guide to trademarks and Google adwords

Following a rumour that circulated our offices that you can protect your trademark with Google for a fee, I wrote this brief guide to explain the latest thinking regarding trademarks and paid search, specifically Google Adwords.

The latest thinking is that an advert is deemed ‘legal’ if

  • Keyword-triggered ad copy doesn’t display the trademarks. ie Heat could buy an ad word campaign using the key word Now Magazine but if the advert copy that they put up didn’t contain the words “Now magazine” it would be considered “legal”. We could still however complain to Google and try and get it taken down.
  • Search results don’t display the trademarks even though the trademarks were included in the keyword metatags (or similar). This is if a competitor were to come up high in the natural search rankings for our trademark - but again if they don’t use our trademark in their copy - the ad would be considered legal. Again a course of action would be to complain to Google.

You cannot protect your trademark in Google for a fee, to my knowledge. Of course you could pay to advertise on that keyword yourself, paying more per click than the competitor (but please don’t - it just lines Google’s pockets!)

The first thing to do would be to complain to Google about any trademark infringement.

They may consider removing an advert which is triggered on a keyword but are not legally obliged to - however, they will almost definitely remove an advert which includes a trademark within the ad copy.

The exception to this is when an advert is triggered by non-trademarked terms even though the search query contains a trademarked item – for example if somebody has sponsored ‘magazine’ and appear when somebody searches for ‘now magazine’ then they probably won’t pull the ad.

NB: IANAL

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User generated online video - is the honeymoon over?

ScreenDigest have released some research findings into user generated online video (UGOV). Their analysis is that:

Consumer usage exploded in 2006 but revenues will prove slow to develop. The honeymoon period for user generated content is over.

Despite the rather pessimistic headline, their report actually points to video advertising revenues growing from $200m in 2006 to $900m by 2010. However they are predicting that user generated video will contribute just 15% of this despite providing over 50% of the actual video content on the Internet.

They point to five business models currently being used to monitise user’s videos:

  • Advertising
  • Content Licensing
  • D Commerce (digital sales and rental of premium movie and TV content)
  • Subscriptions
  • Technology Licensing

But senior analyst at ScreenDigest, Arash Amel, suggests that:

No one has found a way to make real money from the huge audiences who participate on these sites.

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Matthew Ogston - Will Yahoo buy Flock?

I’ve just started reading up on and playing with Flock, the ’social web browser’ - so more soon - but in the meantime Matthew Ogston asks, Will Yahoo buy Flock?

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