Web 2.0 This WeekAugust 14 – 20
It’s late on Sunday night and I have so much to write about – this last week was absolutely amazing. I met so many interesting people at Bar Camp and added their blogs to my Pluck reader. I am now reading over 320 blogs and loving the Internet more than ever. I’m tired, but full of energy!
This week’s summary is below. As I’ve mentioned before, Richard MacManus writes a weekly wrapup as well that takes a different angle than us. I highly recommend subscribing to his blog.
I also want to point quickly to Weblogswork, the creators of ElfURL. Nice blog! There’s some good stuff going on over there.
If you are serious about Web 2.0, you’ll also want to subscribe to Clarence Wooten‘s site. He doesn’t write often, but when he does it’s required reading.
1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week
Delicious (Update), Vemail, Kahuna, BittyBrowser, VitalSource, Goowy, Technorati (Update), Blogtronix, Protopage, Rojo (Update), Bar Camp, Skylook, Pandora
2. Nielsen Releases New Blog Study
Last Monday Nielsen released a new blog study called “Understanding the Blogosphere”. Key stats from the study:
- The top 50 blogging and blog-related sites grew 31 percent to 29.3 million
unique visitors during July - 11 percent of blog readers use RSS
- 50% of respondents have at least heard of RSS
For another study published this week (on tagging), see Smart Mobs post here and Libary Stuff’s post here. PDF here.
Additional Reading: TechWeb, Weblogswork, Jeff Nolan, Editor&Publisher, Burnham’s Beat, Jeff Clavier, RexBlog
3. Hunter S. Thompson’s Funderal
I really loved his books (my favorite was The Rum Diary). I like to think that Mr. Thompson would be very much a blogger if he was still writing today (that’s my web 2.0 angle for this).
He requested, and received, a spectacular funeral that involved mixing his cremated remains with fireworks and firing them off. I wish I could have been there.
4. Is Plaxo Evil? Is it a Web 2.0 Company?
Robert Scoble met with Plaxo last week and wrote a post about it. I was in a cranky mood that day and got into it with Plaxo employees in the comments section. I regret writing those comments, and I plan on profiling the positive aspects of the service sometime this week.
By the way, shortly after this post (although I forgot to ask Robert what the actual catalyst was), Robert changed the name of his comments area to the “mudpit”.
Since I’ve segued into talking about Robert Scoble, see his brilliant posts here and here as well. :-)
5. Ice Rocket puts Blogger on Ice
Mark Cuban announces that Google’s Blogger is creating huge blog spam problems for his IceRocket search engine and the blogosphere in general:
What makes the problem particularly frustrating is that it doesnt cost anything to setup a blog on what is probably the most common blog host, blogger.com from Google. Its fast, its easy, its free and it can be automated. So blogs are coming at us left and right. We are killing off thousands a day, but they keep on coming. Like Zombies. Its straight from Night of the Living Dead. Brain dead splogs. Coming at us by the thousands.
Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they dont seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs. Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel. Can we get some help on this Google ? (you can check out weblogs.com to get a feel for just how much splog we are talking about )
Additional Reading: Shel Holtz (great guy, I met him yesterday at Dave Winer’s OPML Editor Road Show), More
(I love IceRocket’s new Link Tracker Tool)
6. Feedster 500
Scott Rafer at Feedster announced the Feedster 500 on August 15 (wiki here). What makes the list so great isn’t the list itself, but rather the fact that he is so open to discussing it’s flaws and taking feedback. Nice one, Scott (and Feedster). See Scott’s blog for additional posts.
Additional Reading: Jason Calcanis, Richard MacManus, Ross Mayfield, JKontheRun, More
7. Brian Benzinger’s Social Bookmarking List
Brian Benzinger, who has a terrific up and coming blog called Solution Watch, goes the trouble of writing a great list of current social bookmarking services.
Congratulations on the Blog Herald post Brian!
8. Naked Conversations is Available for Purchase
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s new book is available for pre-ordering. Buy it (this link also gives affiliate credit to Robert and Shel).
9. Fedex got Dell’d
If you haven’t read all about the fedex furniture guy yet, read here and here (multiple posts in second link) to get started. Bad Fedex. Good Stanford Law School (who is defending him).
10. Major Congratulations are in Order
Dave Winer and Adam Curry have been podcasting for a year. Happy Anniversary!