Yoick - Hightechwire

It had to happen sooner or later — sights set, guns aimed…let’s mash them up and see if we reach equilibrium.

Huh, you may well ask? Techcrunch, the uber buzz builder for new high tech apps, is facing off against Valleywag, the tech hq goss rag.

Read more here and here.

I’ve got a lot of respect for both Mike and Nick – come on guys, kiss and make up. 

Web 2.0 pundits can learn a lot from MMOGs like World of Warcraft, according to a great post from Paul Scrivens.

I wholeheartedly agree with Paul that WOW and other MMOGs offer great food for thought around the essentialia of Web 2.0, namely communication, creation and sharing.

Here is a snippet from his post:

There are other sites that let us connect with people as well and chat with them, but people on WoW stay on for hours on end. On MySpace and YouTube you might get caught up in the just one more picture/video syndrome for a long period of time, but I doubt it is 3-8 hours a day. Maybe its not fair to compare an online game with static sites that don’t offer the interactivity of an online universe. But sit back and take a look at how great some of these sites could be if they implemented what WoW does just a bit more into their fold.

• An Online Economy. Imagine only getting to see secret pictures of someone on MySpace if you trade them some pictures of your own. Or maybe you want to create some widgets for your MySpace page and the only way people can get to them is by making you a friend and writing a comment. Lame examples for sure, but an online economy becomes addicting no matter which way you look at it and it draws people in even more. Cyworld allows you to buy more acorns so you can customize while Second Life has become the king of producing a virtual economy.
• Real Time Chat. Remember IRC rooms? 9rules has one and whenever I dive in it becomes a great time due to the conversations that can startup at will. However, with social sites we have gone backwards and conversations aren’t even close to being synchronous or in real-time. There might be modules that add IM features, but where are the large rooms with people talking about specific topics? Why can’t we have those. Hell that might be a great idea for 9rules, but to a lesser extent where we only open the rooms up for certain hours so there isn’t dead time at 1am.
• Customization. This is where MySpace won the battle of social network supremacy. Facebook will make a charge, but users have to sacrifice the ability to customize with a clean interface that everyone shares. In WoW you get to customize your character and overtime dictate what he wears. You can even customize the UI so the game really does become your own. There are restrictions to what you can do so things don’t get out of hand, but allowing customization in a controlled environment can be a very, very good thing.
• User Feedback. The WoW Community is both strong and vocal and its good to see when a lot of people agree on changes that should be made, many times Blizzard (the creators of the game) implement those changes in one of their weekly patches. Which brings us to…
• Frequent Updates. Updates don’t necessarily mean features, but even small tweaks allow your users to know that you still care about your site and are working on things. However, don’t tweak just because you want to look fresh, tweak for improvement.

The more I think about the size of WoW and how much is going at once I am marveled at how successful a company could build an online environment that people get sucked in versus some companies that can’t take the time to get their UIs looking crisp on their web apps. We should all play video games.

 Good one, Paul!

We’ve been digitally inspired by Amit Agarwal to bring you this list of advertising rates on some of the more highly trafficked blogs:

TechCrunch.com - This blog generates over 2 million page views per month and advertisers can rent prominent 125×125 banner space on Techcrunch for a fee of $10,000 per month which translates to a $5 CPM. A skyscraper on Techcrunch available via Federated Media is priced at $20 CPM which is roughly $40k for a month.

Lifehacker.com - The average CPM for image banners is $8 while a 7-day text link on Lifehacker is available for $100. Lifehacker receives around 200,000 views per day so a month long banner campaign on Lifehacker could cost you $48k @ $8CPM.

BoingBoing.net - This blog handles close to half a million hits per day. A 125×125 text ad on BoingBoing costs $350 for a week while rectangular banner ads are available at $20 CPM. If you advertise via Adbrite, a text link for a week on BoingBoing will cost you $500.

The company behind Touchstone, Faraday Media, will announce later today their latest initiative, namely an intent to create a new standard in the Attention Economy: the Attention Profiling Mark-up Language (APML).

We recently called for the implementation of an Attention Profiling standard and intimated that APML was on its way. It’s exciting to see what we hope will be the kernel of an ecosystem of attention technologies coming into existence.

In essence, APML will allow users to export and use their own Attention Profile in much the same way that OPML allows them to export their reading lists from feed readers.

Chris Saad, CEO of Faraday, posits the following use of APML:

“Imagine being able to export your Attention Profile from Amazon and plugging it into Digg to get an instantly customized view of the top Digg stories most relevant to your interests.”

Well done guys, APML may well be the inflection point the Attention Economy has been seeking!

Further coverage of APML can be found here and here.

Widgets seem to be popping up everywhere. Om Malik wrote recently on Business 2.0 that “Suddenly everything’s coming up widgets“. It’s a good article, but it is arguable about the speed at which widgets have fragmented the webpage. It’s been a growing trend, but admittedly one that has intensified recently.

What is a widget?
One can define these phenomena as tiny apps that offer a web service in a package that is able to be frictionlessy integrated into a webpage or desktop.

Om is very excited by these tools - his take is that, “Widgets are absolutely where the action is today.”

Widgets alone are fun, but it’s really the simultaneous evolution of widgets, AJAX and other technologies and their ability to feed off of each other that’s creating a powerful new ecosystem [Web 2.0 Journal].

Who are the players?

Mashery - founded by former VP, Bus Dev at Feedster, Oren Michels, this company is more than a widget outsourcing service.

Netvibes - Paris-based Netvibes bills itself as a custom made Web 2.0 home page solution. They recently closed a $15m Series A round from Index Ventures and Accel.

Xin - Swedish start up Xin Company allows users to personalise their desktop through widgets and synch up calendars, files etc. You can read an interview with their Founder, Mikael Bergkvist, here. 

WidgetBox - Founded by Ed Anuff, a co-founder of Epicentric, WidgetBox bill themselves as an open web widget marketplace and syndication platform.

This blurb about them is a good summary of the world of widgets:

WidgetBox serves both the developers who create widgets and the web publishers who use widgets in their sites.

A web widget is a small piece of interactive content (like an ad or a game) that can be dynamically embedded into a web page. Widgets allow for a new level of expression and creativity as personal web publishers use them to create value and interest in their blogs, social networks, personal home pages, and web sites. In addition, widgets give large-scale online services a greater reach and visibility into the off-domain consumption of their core web services across mulitple platforms. As a trusted marketplace and syndication platform, Widgetbox enables developers to easily build, distribute, promote, monitor and monetize widgets. It enables web publishers to easily find, configure, integrate and manage widgets.

Widgetbox’s unique Widget Syndication Platform™ is central to the power and simplicity of the service. Developers use simple tools to turn their web application into a widget with no coding. The developer does not need to worry about the widget installation or configuration. Widgetbox manages the widget installation to any platform, including TypePad, WordPress, MySpace, etc. In addition, Widgetbox captures and stores the developer’s widget configuration to manage each subscriber’s customization. If the developer changes the widget’s code or configuration parameters, they will be propagated to everyone subscribing to their widget.

Web publishers can search the Widgetbox gallery and use the categories, ratings, and reviews to find the right widget. Once a widget is selected, Live Preview™ enables the web publisher to see the widget exactly as it will look configured for their site. The configuration is done without coding and the installation to the blog or web site is a visual process. In addition to this ease of use, Widgetbox has unique capabilities that make widgets smarter and more useful:

• Live Widgets: Widgets are always “live” within blogs and web pages. They can be re-configured instantly and without touching HTML code.
• Smart Blogs: Widgets can be “tag aware”, meaning a web publisher can make widgets react to the content of their web site. For example, an image widget might display images related to the content of the most recent blog post. 
• Widget Panels: Drag & drop placement makes it easy to install and manage widgets within Widgetbox.

As a trusted marketplace, Widgetbox provides a security layer around widgets to prevent such things as Cross Site Scripting attacks. This solves solving one of the bariers barriers bloggers and social networks have with embedding web widgets. 

Currently all Widgetbox widgets are free, but as business terms are set by developers in the future, the Widgetbox platform has the underlying technologies to provide robust widget analytics and e-commerce features to support monetizing widgets. Widgetbox will always provide a free service even as for-pay features are added.

Widgetbox was founded in early 2006 and has completed extensive private and public beta releases. The public launch was September 25, 2006.

It remains to be seen what business models crystallise in and around widgets. Keep reading Yoick - we’ll aim to apprise you of developments in this exciting area.

Yip, it’s true - the burgeoning Yoickpire is seeking Ajaxians. Now we could’ve written a position description, but in the spirit of openness and web 2.0 collaboration we purloined this from another Silicon Valley company - let hear from ya!

If you have the passion to develop revolutionary web software, the skills to do it, and the desire to get in on the ground floor of a start-up with an outrageously bold ambition, then jump on board as we strive to change the way consumers use the internet to get informed, stay informed, and communicate about topics of interest. Founders are experienced execs who’ve worked in the industry and will now change it.

But we need you – super-bright, super-passionate, and super-motivated AJAX aficionados.

Think you’ve got what it takes? So dump your stale gig and join us for the ride.

You may well ask me wire I’m fired up by all the goings on in and around Web 2.0.

Having pioneered the wilds of Web 1.0, this line from Ed Caggiani sums up why I’m back in the saddle:

The Wild West was fun, but it got better when they invented plumbing.”

What’s up with vertical search? There has been a plethora of activity in this space in the past 12 months, but has anyone really found the VSE killer app? Is VSE a threat to Google?

Alex Iskold has blogged a post headed: Watch Out Google, Vertical Search Is Ramping Up! in which he gives a clear overview of some vertical search areas and the players in them. However, none of these plays individually or as a group look like being anything more than a mosquito bite on an elephant’s rear.

I agree with Alex that there is a place for both generic and vertical search engines, but disagree that VSE is ready for prime time and will materially affect revenues at the GYM (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft).

My take is that the winner in VSE will be the company that can create a tightly integrated, infinitely vertically scalable suite of VSEs that fit hand in glove with a range of horizontal apps.

The Web 2.0 Journal has an article outlining the architecture for an attention platform.

Here is the crux of Alex Iskold’s piece:

This platform is designed to bring together attention capturing services, attention storage and attention applications that deliver end user value. The key aspects of the platform is decoupling between the services allowing various vendors deliver different implementations, yet communicate via common protocols.

A common set of protocols aka an IEEE-like standard (think 802.11 a-z) would certainly expedite the creation of an open attention platform and lead to more rapid growth of the Attention Economy.

I am aware of some very interesting work being done in this area. I’m sworn to secrecy right now, but will bring you ‘breaking news’ as soon as I can.

TechCrunch reporting on a MediaWeek story has blogged about Facebook placing ads into the newsfeeds on user’s front pages. Marshall Kirkpatrick goes on to explain how this will be used:

When one user clicks on an advertisement in their feeds, all of that user’s friends will be notified that the ad was clicked on and will be given an opportunity to join a group led by the advertiser, apparently. Mike Murphy, Facebook’s chief revenue officer, told MediaWeek the following: “Up until now, most advertising on social network sites hasn’t leveraged social networking behavior…This offers a viral opportunity that is unique for advertisers that is not disruptive.”

This is interesting as it could lead to group buying or flocking…you may follow a friend’s advertising trail or that of a member of your social network, or even sign up to be given the ability to flock with someone influential to you.

OK so I had already bought my Sanyo Xacti High Def Videocam, but what if, now I say what if - I found Robert Scoble to be hugely influential to me. Assume I’d signed up to flock with him…so when the scobleizer and his podtechnet mates head off via a Sanyo ad (this is hypothetical remember) to buy themselves Xacti’s, I could very well be influenced to do the same.

This flock advertising could go one step further - Facebook or whomever, could sign deep discount deals with advertising retailers who would offer a discount to any buying flock - the ultimate benefit to users being group discounts in real time.