Konfabu-device. O’Reilly says Yahoo’s acquisition of mini-application “widget” maker Konfabulator is evidence of a “long term platform shift that I’ve been calling Web 2.0.” He goes on to say that “the expectation that web companies will only buy other web companies should be put firmly into the trash bin.” Yes, that makes sense. If one extends this thinking, perhaps it’s not just about extending the internet from the web to the desktop, but even further as well? Does this mean that Ambient Devices – which makes actual physical devices connected to the internet – is next on the list?
Tag Me Funny. If you start browsing http://del.icio.us/tag/funny, you won’t be able to stop. Trust me. My favorite find thus far is the thirty second bunny reenactment of Pulp Fiction.
WhiteFeed. Feedmail – the next evolution in “email-like” communication or merely an overly-elaborate and overly-complex way to create an email whitelist to avoid spam?
“The New Black” is the New Black. Soon after I declared “tagging” as the new black, Paul Kedrosky (also on the VC Channel) declared “focus” the new black. Tagging’s reign ends after merely two days. But then I found this post (through Wikipedia) and realized that everything is the new black.

For past two weeks since Mossberg’s article in the Wall Street Journal, cookies continue to get slammed in the media while the debate rages. Some are equating them with spyware, as cookies are increasingly receiving a bad reputation that I think is undeserved. With nearly 60% of consumers deleting cookies according to JupiterResearch, I believe that the average consumer is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Unlike spyware, you can’t cast cookies as wholly “bad.” Nor is it completely fair to say that they are “completely harmless” and “good.” The value judgment should rest on the application of the technology, not the technology itself. Adam Marsh astutely and accurately identifies the heart of the issue in his two posts (here and here): it’s really about personally identifiable information (PII) and how it’s used. And different people are going to have different tolerances and preferences for the benefits that cookies bestow and the amount of anonymity that one gives up for those advantages.
For me, I like going to Amazon and receiving personalized recommendations. Or going to Netflix and the site remembering my Queue without me logging in. To be honest, I think it’s helpful for online marketers to show me ads that are more relevant to what I would like. Yes, cookies are good enough for me.
I understand why some people who wish to retain an extreme sense of privacy may want to delete some cookies after giving the notion some thoughtful consideration. But I truly think that for most consumers (including myself), the benefits of cookies vastly outweigh any privacy concerns. Sure, different people have different preferences. But let’s not over-simplify this issue and cast cookies as evil, bad, spyware.

As I worry about next-generation consumer internet services becoming increasingly difficult, the Denver Post’s NewsHound service, which launched this week, takes a nice step in making things easier for the average non-techie. You can download the stand-alone client here. It’s a private-label RSS reader built on top of the NewsGator Media Platform, and the application definitely simplifies finding and reading content feeds for people in that area of the country (as it’s tee’d up with local content). That’s good news for consumers just learning about new ways to get fresh syndicated content, and not needing to worry about technical jargon like RSS/Atom/etc. And from a business standpoint, this deal is just one of many to come for NewsGator powering media companies’ RSS offerings.
(Disclosure: Masthead Venture Partners is an investor in NewsGator. See my previous post on why I like this investment.)

I like John Herren’s thought (in his comment on Jeremy Zawodny’s recent post),

“http://del.icio.us/popular is the new Slashdot.”

Yes, tagging is the new black.

With all of the innovation of Web 2.0, I am a little worried about the usability and consumer-friendliness of it. Yes, blogging can be the most straightforward way to publish on the net and vertical search engines make things like looking for a job easy.
There are a lot of activities, though, which just aren’t that user-friendly – at least not yet. Does a non-techie like my aunt understand what it means to tag content, let alone want to do it? Is registering for so many social networking sites helping me connect or wasting my time? Why is it that subscribing to RSS feeds often really isn’t simple?
One of the rotating quotes on the Web 2.0 conference website is from Jeff Bezos, “Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers.” Really? Is that good? I think the Internet should be for people.

We meet with a number of companies as Masthead that either provide ad-supported consumer content or technologies to enable/facilitate consumer applications. In both of these case, the leaders of these startups sometimes haven’t given much thought into who truly is the customer.
With ad-supported content sites, is the customer the reader/user or the advertisers? Or both? What about if the content is advertorial in nature? Many start-ups providing an enabling technology, a middleware component, or other type of infrastructure to support a consumer-facing business have the same difficulty. Is the company’s “customer” the true end-user of the product or merely the channel to the end-user? Examples of companies that run into this challenge include gaming infrastructure firms, music personalization companies, and mobile application providers who sell to the carriers, along with many others.
Why does this matter? While one party is a customer, and the other one can be an important constituent, there are times when decisions need to be made which will help one but adversely affect the other. Early on at Sombasa Media, which published consumer-facing e-mail newsletters, we struggled with who our customer truly was. But once we identified ourselves as an e-mail marketing company devoted to offering services to advertisers, our confusion subsided and our focus intensified.
I don’t think that that there isn’t a one-size-fit-all approach identifying the true customer. In fact, it’s something that is integral in defining the business model of the firm. And yes, it, like many other things in a startup, can change and evolve over time. But the entrepreneurs who we’ve met with who have given deliberate thought about and focused their company around clearly articulated customers make an impression with us and leave a trail of success that those who clearly haven’t don’t.

In two of my recent posts (“Musing on Three Not-So-Fully-Baked Ideas” and “Social Networks: The Network or the Service?”) , I expressed my desire for a open and central repository system for social connection data. It looks like I just ran across a system that seems to address these wishes. XFN, the Xhtml Friends Network, “is a simple way to represent human relationships,” as one of the extensions of the microformats standards effort. In line with and similar to my own theoretical vision of a system, their “delusions of grandeur” state,

“1. XFN provides the basis for a world-wide distributed network of personal connections. Proprietary data-owning services like Friendster could be superceded by XFN crawling and searching sites —a sort of “Friendorati,” as it were. The advantage of a Friendorati-style network is that it allows every individual to fully express themselves through personal weblogs and web sites, instead of to the limited degree permitted by a proprietary service’s user interface.
2. Commercial services like Amazon, which currently ask users to manually register all their friends in order to make “wish list” and other information sharing simpler, may find it easier simply to crawl XFN relationships on the open Internet. This would allow a user to enter the URL of their site, and let the service programmatically analyze XFN relationships to build a list of friends.”

I love it. If we as a community were able to adopt this type system, it would indeed transition connection data to just that – data – forcing web-software networking applications to focus on creating valuable services, as opposed to building and retaining walled-in proprietary networks. However, as I commented previously, I do realize that this would take huge collective action to build a critical mass of users.
To start in this process, though, I have followed the Global Multimedia Protocols Group’s steps to get started and have (hopefully) successfully made my blog site XFN friendly. As such, my blogroll (maintained by BlogRolling) should now include metadata for which people in it I have met and consider a business acquaintance. (I’ve included their XFN friendly logo in my blogroll as well).
I would welcome anyone else’s ideas and reactions to this one (including tips if I haven’t executed on the setup correctly). Especially since I am still wrapping my head around the idea.

Like Steve Rubel, I missed Kevin Hale’s essay The Importance of RSS when it was published a month ago. In it, Kevin provides an in-depth hypothesis on Google’s perspective of RSS.
A few excerpts follow, but the entire essay is well worth the read,

“I don’t think Google really feels threatened (or has ever felt threatened) by portal strategy. I think what they’re afraid of is the rise of applications that seem to be tracking importance and trends better than search. In the race to find what deserves face-time, services like del.icio.us, Technorati and Digg.com in combination with the rapid adoption of web apps like bloglines, newsgator, feedster and kinja are making Google’s search seem very, very slow. And it’s all being accomplished with RSS technology.
But what’s Google’s plan for RSS? Well, the thing is Google’s been working on an RSS strategy for a long time now. Matt Mullenweg and a host of other savvy / obsessive stat watchers have noticed Google’s bots have been searching for the location of index.rdf and atom.xml since at least April of 2004.
This preemptive crawling, I believe, will be the basis of their own version of a tagging system that replaces search terms for tags.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve read about the notion that Web 2.0 technologies are threatening search. But I think we need to be careful about describing what aspect of search is vulnerable and why. In its purest form, I view “search” as looking for something which I know I am looking for. By subtle contrast, I would call “discovery” looking for something which I don’t know I am looking for. I’ve alluded to this distinction before, and I am sure others have more articulately expressed it as well.
The importance of the difference is the ramification of new approaches to “looking for” information. With “search” in its strictly defined form, RSS adds the component of timeliness to relevance and cardinality/page-rank in determining the most appropriate ordering of results. However, I don’t think it RSS fundamentally changes the way that people look for information that they know they want; it just adds another dimension. On the other hand, when I want to find information which I don’t know I am looking for, there are now an in increasing number of possibilities: tagging systems like del.icio.us, personalized RSS feeds from Findory, and even merely reading others’ blogs.
The difficulty for “traditional” players like Google isn’t that search is going to be replaced by alternatives, but that the line between search and discovery is often barely noticeable. No, classifying “finding something” as search or discovery isn’t a binary proposition, but rather placing it along a gradual spectrum that exists between the two. In this fuzzy grey area lies both the opportunity for new alternative approach startups, but also the power for Google to merely extend its current offering. In his conclusion Kevin Hale is right, “I think RSS has a very promising future and Google is going to make sure they do everything in their power to be the ones to usher it in.”

It’s no secret that there is a lot of innovation happening right now in the online space. The problem is that there are a number of terms being thrown around right now labeling this trend, the most popular of which (I think) is Web 2.0. To be honest, I am not a big fan of this term. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly that I don’t like, but it just doesn’t sit well with me.
When I first launched this blog, I posted about the transition from the “Reference Web” to the “Incremental Web,” as Topix.net’s Rich Skrenta has dubbed it. But I now realize the current developments are more than just that.
An article in this month’s Technology Review, “Social Machines” calls Web 2.0 “the transformation of the original web of static documents into a collection of pages that still look like documents but are actually interfaces to full-fledged computer platforms.” Wikipedia summarizes the term as “ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users.” (Apparently this innovation is “full-fledged,” regardless of what you name it.)
And it looks like the term “Web 2.0” is gaining popularity, as indicated by this Blogpulse chart. But some of those peaks are distorted by O’Reilly conference and Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 (un-coincidentally) sharing the same specific nomenclature as the generic term, further fueling my (and others’?) confusion about what we are really talking about here.
To me, the term, “Internet Operating System” better captures the essence of this ongoing change, which I believe was coined by O’Reilly three years ago, but just never caught on. I think it’s just because IOS doesn’t sound as sexy as Web 2.0.
But do either of those above terms really encapsulate ideas like the increased importance of vertical search, the rise of user-generated content, and the oncoming integration of the mobile platform into the open internet? I am not so sure. Somehow, those trends aren’t necessarily fully included. And that’s nothing to say about the huge force in how “traditional” search is still changing our world.
Yes, there’s a lot of disruptive change occurring in the digital media space, but I am just not sure what to call it. I guess I’ll have to stick with Web 2.0 for now.

Today’s buzz surrounds the announcement that of Colin Powell becoming a Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers strategic limited partner.
So is there a story here beyond the preeminent venture firm connecting with preeminent leader? Is it that the blurring of lines of what a “partner” means in a VC firm, with the role of “strategic limited partner” wedged in between LP and GP? Is it that the venture business is “institutionalizing,” as Paul Kedrosky suggests? Are we returning to the days of celebrity VCs? Is this a story about branding? Can we really extrapolate an industry-wide trend from this one datapoint?
I disagree with the portion of the NYT article which says that the “the looming question is what the 68-year-old Mr. Powell, who served in the military for 35 years and rose to the rank of four-star general, can offer a venture capital firm that specializes in the financing of biotechnology start-ups and technology companies.” To me, the answer is indeed clear: unrivaled leadership experience and the ability to mentor CEOs, a vast and deep network of extremely influential people around the globe, and domain expertise in security. Many are criticizing the fit, but wouldn’t every VC firm want someone with the above characteristics involved with it?
Rather, I see the real story here not in that Kleiner chose Powell or vis-versa, but rather that Powell chooses to become active in venture capital at all. Here is a four-star General and former U.S. Secretary of State. A man with seemingly limitless options (after all, he at one time was a likely contender for the Presidency) opts to spend his time helping to build start-up companies. Yes, there’s money in it – but there are plenty of other things that Powell could do to build wealth. The move doesn’t surprise me, but I believe that the deepest part of the story is why he would chose this (albeit part-time) route above everything else that is an option for him.