Blip.tv is a video sharing site. has already made headlines by winning a deal to provide video services to support media companies including CNN. As Marshall Kirkpatrick pointed out in TechCrunch's August 15th Blog EyeSpot has partnered with Blip.tv. The two startups offer services that are highly complimentary.

Strength: Sharing

Veoh is a video sharing site. While it is possible to view video online the real power of Veoh comes from the downloaded client for PCs and Macs. The client creates a peer-to-peer network for sharing video and allows subscribers to view high quality, full screen video. The benefit of this approach is the distribution of video becomes highly scalable. Veoh is definitely attracting interest and investment. They recently raised $12.5 million in a B venture round from investors including former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and Time Warner.

VideoJug appears to be a video sharing site with a mission. To explain life on film. VideoJug is seeding their site with educational videos but is encouraging the Internet community to contribute instructional video. It will be interesting to see if they can differentiate themselves from the likes of YouTube and build up a critical mass of educational content.

Flurl is a video sharing and search site. It allows media to be uploaded anonymously in a variety of formats. There is a 20MB cap on uploads that limits the size of video content. The service is advertising supported. The terms of service prevent linking to media files directly. Links are made to links that serve the content. This enables Flurl to serve advertising to viewers.

YouTube is now one of the top ten destination sites on the Internet serving over 100 million videos each day. It has achieved this position by making it exceedingly easy to upload and share video. YouTube hosts videos converting them from multiple sources to flash movies. Video is limited to 10 minutes in length or 100MB in size.

The site is worth a visit. Register (its a quick process) and enter a couple of your favorite movies. MovieTally demonstrates many of the traits of a Web 2.0 application where network effects make the site more valuable as more people use it. I have reservations that people will really take the time to enter in Movie information, such as actor, director and plot summaries when Amazon is just a click away - but at the outset very few people expected Wikipedia to grow in to the extensive resource that it has become. I think this issue can be addressed by pulling information from Amazon using their web services toolkit.

The developer, Hayden Metsky, has certainly paid attention to building a participative architecture with cross linkages embedded throughout the site. I intend to keep an eye on the evolution of this site in the coming months. There is an opportunity for MovieTally because people are looking for a movie recommendations and ratings site that they can trust - one that reflects their perspectives and those of their friends.

It's been a whirlwind week of Web 2.0 events and I've had a chance to meet a lot of new folks in the last few days and discuss Web 2.0 and how it applies to life and business.  The biggest and most significant event was undoubtedly Wednesday's The New New Internet: Web 2.0 for Business which I helped organize and run here in the DC/Virginia metro area.  Held at the Tysons Corner Ritz-Carlton, the event showed clearly the sustained interest there is in Web 2.0 strategies for business and related topics , and I'm pleased say we had a terrific bunch of speakers and a great audience both.

Though Web 2.0 as applied to business definitely interests a smaller group of people than a general Web 2.0 discussion, it was felt that the topic is still just in the beginning stages of growth, has been underrepresented due to the general consumer hype Web 2.0 gets, and was especially suitable given the conference's proximity to the nation's capital, particularly given the number of large companies and government agencies locally which have expressed interest in how Web 2.0 might apply to them.

It's worth giving a run-down of the particulars of the conference and some of the terrific blog and news coverage of the event for those that weren't able to make it.  Also, I'd like to thank leading-edge Web 2.0 technology firms JackBe and Nexaweb for their terrific support of the conference as well as numerous other sponsors which helped make it possible.

A Fast-Paced and In-Depth Day of Web 2.0 and Business

The day opened up with a rousing speech by Secretary of Technology for the State of Virginia, Aneesh Chopra, who gave quite a talk about technology, the state government, and how they are Web 2.0 capabilities on the state's Web sites for things like online support communities for Iraq veterans and improving job prospects for the less affluent in the south of the state.   Aneesh introduced the day's first keynote speaker, Jobster CEO, Jason Goldberg.

Jason provided a pretty compelling video introduction of the television coverage Web 2.0 has been getting on major media including CNN and then launched into an exploration of Web 2.0 and what it means to him.  His layperson explanation of Web 2.0 (Web 1.0 = Get it online and Web 2.0 = Make it work) came in at a good level for an audience that seem squarely mixed between business folks and technical people.  See below for more details about Jason's talk from Web 2.0 local Ken Yarmosh.

Jason was followed up by Rajen Sheth of Google Enterprise who gave quite a lucid and far ranging overview of the way Google looks at Web 2.0 as well as where the online software market is going including open platform-based application hosting, something Google has been getting increasingly involved with as they release more and more business software online that range from Writely to Google Spreadsheets. Best Concept Discussed: Search has become the most effective navigation paradigm.

After this and right before lunch I hosted a panel to discuss where Web 2.0 is taking business.  We had a great cast of Web 2.0 CTOs and CEOs including Chris Heidelberger of Nexaweb , John Crupi of JackBe , David Temkin of Laszlo Systems , and Jeff Crigler of Voxant .  Our hour-long discussion ranged far and wide and included how rich Internet applications are fairly resistent to indexing and search, to the trend of businesses using software as a service and outsourcing over the Web to solve business problems instead of asking IT deparments for help.  We also touched on whether adding social features to business applications is considered too at risk for distracting employees and much more.

To keep the energy level up, the conference didn't break for lunch and had it served while Web 2.0 ubberblogger and up-and-coming "media 2.0 baron" Michael Arrington of TechCrunch spoke to the audience on "What's Next".  Mike gave one of the more humorous presentations of the day that was also packed with informative analysis on the good, the bad, and ugly of Web 2.0 software today (Good: Digg , Bad: Jigsaw ).  He also presented some terrific analysis of how to be successful in the Web 2.0 era (unfortunately, being lucky topped the list).  Best line (paraphrased): "Be warned that I tend to make blanket incendiary statements when someone asks me a question about something I said in my presentation."  See links below for more coverage.

After lunch, Hart Rossman of SAIC gave an in-depth presentation on Enterprise Web 2.0 and its convergence with service-oriented architecture (SOA), a topic that I find important and write about frequently.  Ross especially dived into the details of how mashups and bringing outside Web services into the enterprise are going to have unique and difficult security challenges and he tackled a tough subject head-on and introduced the new SafeSOA initiative to the audience, which aims to solve, among other things, the issues around using Web 2.0 APIs and platforms within the enterprise.

Microsoft's Michael Platt , from their architecture strategy group, came up next and gave an hour-long tour that ranged far across the landscape of the Internet, the history of computing and how things like Web 2.0 (like the PC and minicomputer revolutions) are recurring phenomona.  Mike talks about user generated content, mobile Web 2.0, Microsoft's Live intiative, the Red vs. Blue videos that young people are generated by recording XBox Live games, and much more including the Chevy Apprentice campaign, one of my favorite social computing stories.  Microsoft has the responsibility of successfuly guiding hundreds of millions of consumers and millions of businesses through the increasingly social jungle that is the Web's next generation and Mike gave a great overview.  And given the time, Mike wasn't even able to discuss major MS-related Web 2.0 news like Soapbox , Microsoft's new YouTube play.

After that, Jeremy Geelan hosted a highly-interactive panel on Web 2.0 and monetization that featured TJ Kang, founder & CEO of ThinkFree , Ben Elowitz, CEO of Wetpaint , Robin ‘Roblimo’ Miller, Editor-in-Chief of OSTG , and Sean Frazier of KnowNow.  The panel provided a "front row seat" to leaders in the Web 2.0 space and Robin Miller, inventor of the Slashdot new format, was clearly in fine form on the panel.

The last speaker was Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee , whom I'd invited as one of the leading thinkers of how to apply Web 2.0 to the enterprise , a vision he currently calls Enterprise 2.0.  Andrew gave a riveting talk on Enterprise 2.0 and freeform, emergent tools like blogs and wikis to truly enable collaboration and capture discoverable enterprise knowledge, and more.  Citing the success of Wikipedia and its early experiments that encouraged them to make it as easy as possible to contribute and edit entries, McAfee went on to discuss the challenges of getting users to adopt technologies more difficult that e-mail, currently the easiest way for most people to collaborate, and unfortuantely also one of the most private and non-scalable collaboration models.  See blog coverage below for more details. (MP3 Recording)

News and Blog Coverage of The New New Internet

Blog and news coverage of the event was very good, here is some of the best write-ups I've been able to find so far including some good video.  Be sure to add others in the comments below.

• Ed Yourdon writes up his impressions of the conference with plenty of details.
• Dennis McDonald did a bunch of coverage, here's one of the best.
• Ken Yarmosh did a series of great on-the-spot blogs from the event including coverage of Jason Goldberg, video of Rajen Sheth, an exclusive video interview with Michael Arrington, and great coverage of Mike's talk.
• Andrew McAfee did a terrific roll-up of the conference on his HBS blog.
• CNET did a round-up of speakers and panels in Web 2.0 entering corporate world slowly.
• Michael Wade has graciously posted recordings of most of the speakers here.

Turnout was great and interest was high so it looks like we'll do this again next year as well.

Are you looking to apply Web 2.0 to your business? Why or why not? 

It's been approximately 18 months since Jesse James Garrett fatefully coined the term that would go on to nearly reinvent the face of Web development.  A lot has happened in the last year and a half, including the Web 2.0 phenomenon getting into high gear, the creation or resurrection of many a company building or using rich Internet technologies, and the proliferation of really great dynamic, online software.  It's clear that Ajax as a name, a concept, and a popular browser development technique is here to stay, and our Web applications will never be the same again.

While most of us know that the Ajax approach was fairly well known before the term ever came about, the timing was apparently just right for the idea of Ajax to capture our imagination and apply such a pithy name to an important new development trend.  And just as powerful browsers, high-speed connections, online software trends, and development tools were reaching the sweet spot that needed to form for Ajax to be popular, so also came the embrace of a world extremely interested in turning their boring, static Web pages into full-blown, sophisticated applications.  Since then, I've heard of or seen literally hundreds of Ajax products, tools, utilities, debated the disruptive potential of Ajax, speculated about how Ajax will be the face of our SOAs , and even watched as RIA technologies in general have risen up that truly complement the few things that Ajax does not do well, such as multimedia.

Along the way, the Web development community has learned a lot about Ajax including its strengths and weaknesses, appropriate uses, and its inevitable foibles.  So to inaugurate the first print edition of a dedicated Ajax print periodical (see below for details), I thought I'd share my perspective on what I think we've learned in our 18 month journey to remake the face of the Web and the browser.  Ajax has indeed helped give us the next major new platform for software, almost certainly forever surpassing our desktop operating systems as place we develop and use most of our software applications, consumer and business both.  As always, this merely represents my opinion...

What Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax

1.  The Browser Was Never Meant For Ajax.  About a week into your first Ajax serious application you'll discover that Ajax pushes the browser nearly beyond its limits and there are definite lower engineering tolerances to get used to. The fact is, without powerful 3rd party development tools, designing clean Javascript software of any size requires some genuine discipline and effort.  So too does Ajax debugging applications in multiple browsers (a real headache), and doing any serious background processing or threading can require heroic measures, particularly if you're mixing in other components that use the rather limited number of simultaneous timers available.  The good news: Simple Ajax -- sprinkling in a little DHTML -- is much less daunting than Ajax In The Large.  But be warned and be prepared to scale up your level of development and testing effort significantly with each doubling or trebling of your application size.
2. You Won't Need As Many Web Services As You Think.  I used to think that going the Ajax route required the development of a bunch of new Web services in order to feed the application data and provide a backing store.  In reality, I'm finding a great many projects are quite happy to scrape HTML and/or use plain old HTTP POSTs to existing service endpoints that have no formal Web service structure.  This is further turning the tide towards Ajax by making it very, very easy to "dip your toe" into Ajax development and reuse almost any preexisting HTTP service on the back end instead of SOAP or REST/WOA.  While this can encourage poor architectural choices, it does make very incremental conversion to Ajax almost effortless and turns out to be a natural thing to do, though it can certainly lead to headaches later.
3. Ajax Is More Involved Than Traditional Web Design and Development.  The loss of HTML user interface conventions, the almost limitless potential for hidden or latent functionality, the programmatic creation of page elements instead of declarative, and other intrinsic aspects of the Ajax approach throw out much of what we know about Web design and development.  Web designers must much more deeply understand the capabilities of the DOM, Javascript, CSS, and how the browser renders graphics, layouts, and elements.  Developers find testing both difficult and tedious.  Though tooling is continuing to improve across the board, it will take years for the industry to develop best practices, lore, patterns, and shared knowledge to make Web application development straightforward.  Huge kudos to folks like Yahoo!'s Bill Scott for trying to fix many of these problems -- particularly the loss of GUI standards -- by actually moving the state of the art considerably forward with things like the Yahoo! UI Design Patterns library.  The bottom line: Ajax development, at least for now, usually takes quite a bit longer than traditional Web development and requires a higher level of skill.
4. Ajax Tooling and Components Are Still Emerging and There Is No Clear Leader Today.  Though Dojo is getting one heck of a running start, the race is very far from over.  For instance, the Dojo framework itself is still just at version 0.3.  And close at its heels are an amazing range of tools, frameworks, and component libraries.  Though OpenAjax will make this mosaic of products play nicer, most developers will get deep experience with two or three of them and stick with them. For now, I would say deeply committing to a particular product is usually not the best idea.  Innovation, competition, and market leadership is likely going to bounce around for a while.  In the meantime, be sure to check out script.aculo.us, Prototype, Google Web Toolkit, Yahoo! UI Library, JackBe, Zapatec, Bindows, Nexaweb, General Interface, Backbase, ActiveWidgets, and last but not least Microsoft Atlas. There are many others and I encourage you to look at Max Kiesler's roundup of 50 Ajax frameworks, with many others in the comments (and growing).  Finally, Microsoft's Harry Pierson has diligently taken me to task for my Ajax spectrum comments, noting that Microsoft actually has more serious experience fostering an interoperable component community than just about anyone else.
5. Good Ajax Programmers are Hard to Find.  Zimbra's Scott Dietzen has lamented recently about the real difficulty in finding good Ajax talent.  See point #3, but building sophisticated Ajax applications requires more computer science skills much more than it does Web design skills.  And I find that experienced programmers tend not to enjoy Javascript programming and debugging. This too shall pass, but not for a few years, and not for a good while in the Bay Area. :-)
6. One Must Actively Address Ajax's Constraints of the Browser Model.  Though the final result can be very rewarding, Ajax is not a perfect Web development approach and it has a few genuine weaknesses.  One is that it tends to break the model of the Web including preventing users from bookmarking content, breaking the use of the Back button, and more.  Fortunately, smart folks like Brad Neuberg have addressed much of this, as long as you're willing to put out the effort and understand why it's important to recover this functionality.  Ajax also lacks much of what still makes desktop software a strong contender; the ability to run disconnected from the network and access to local disk storage, though Flash local storage and the upcoming Apollo platform can help address this.
7. Ajax Is Only One Element of a Successful RIA Strategy. As I've written before, the addition of RIA platforms such as Flex, OpenLaszlo, and WPF/E to a RIA strategy is virtually required to properly exploit the range of capabilities you'll want robust online applications to have.  This is particularly true around rich media support such as audio and video -- which Ajax is virtually incapable of -- but even such mundane things as good printing support.  These are all things that the more sophisticated Flash-based RIA platforms really shine at and are easier to program in to boot.  Ajax will increasingly get a serious run for its money from these platforms, particularly as they provide back-end server support for things like server-side push, formal Web services, enterprise environments, and more.

There are certainly other things software projects should know about Ajax but this is plenty of crucial food for thought.  Looking ahead, we see the growing trend of in-browser mashups which is making the habit of combining pulling together -- entirely on the fly -- sets of Ajax components, Javascript snippets, and Flash widgets from all over the Web into a new set of often user-generated ad hoc software .  Backed by the growing Global SOA , online Ajax components such as Google Maps, that can be referenced over the Web by a line of Javascript, and you have a recipe for an increasingly emphasis on assembly and glue instead of "green field" development of RIAs.  This is an important use of the Web that I've called the "mashosphere " for the lack of a better term, which ushers in a whole new era of dependency and configuration management problems.  The rich palette of software components and high value services on the Web will be a irresistable siren call for developers and expect more and more Ajax applications to be mashups in one form or another.

But all of this talk of the evolution of Ajax does bring up some exciting new industry events... 

Announcing The Premier Issue of AjaxWorld Magazine - Print Edition 

Please do pardon the shameless self-promotion here at the end of this piece, but this is also important Ajax community news.  I've been the editor-in-chief of SYS-CON's AjaxWorld Magazine for a while now and to herald the rise of Ajax, we've just expanded it to a full blown print magazine with the premier issue coming out at the all-star AjaxWorld Conference and Expo and Ajax Bootcamp next week in Santa Clara, California.

For the cover story of the premier print issue, I worked with the OpenAjax Alliance -- a big thanks to IBM's Jon Ferraiolo and Joseph Becker -- to get a premium article series on both the strategic and technical direction of this significant and important new development in the Ajax world.  OpenAjax holds the promise of true Ajax component interoperability, consistent tool support, and much more.  I've urged Microsoft to consider joining -- they're one of the major holdouts -- and they've promised to seriously consider it after they get Atlas shipped, so hopefully we'll see nearly 100% industry support soon.  Thus, the story of OpenAjax has been one of the bigger Ajax stories of the year as the number of vendors on board continues to grow in leaps and bounds, never mind the relatively light hand and welcome avoidance of a heavyweight standards approach to Ajax interoperability.

I'll be blogging more about Ajax and less about Web 2.0 here in the next week or so as coverage of AjaxWorld and the many exciting announcements and information begins to flow forth.

Happy Ajaxing and hope to see you next week in California!

The next Web 2.0 Conference will be upon us in early November and things are busier than ever in the Web 2.0 world.  Along the way, I've managed to miss the one year anniversary of this blog, which I began back in late September of last year.  There have been over 2.5 million direct hits on this site since inception, a large percentage of it due to my Web 2.0 lists such as last year's Best Web 2.0 Software List , but I also get e-mail frequently from die-hard readers as well.  Most importantly however, from all my conversations with people all over the world, it's clear that Web 2.0 remains more than ever a topic of major popular interest and industry fascination.

While the general understanding of Web 2.0 is improving all the time, we have a ways to go before we have a concise, generally accepted definition.  My favorite is still networked applications that explicitly leverage network effects. But while most of what we ascribe to the Web 2.0 name falls out of these definition, it's fairly hard for most of us to extrapolate meaningful ramifications from this.

People that read this blog know that I'm in the camp of folks that try to look beyond Ajax and the visual site design aspect of Web 2.0, and try to capture the deeper design patterns and business models that seem to be powering the most successful Web sites and online companies today.  Though concepts such as harnessing collective intelligence and Data as the Next Intel Inside, as described by Tim O'Reilly , most directly capture the spirit of the Web 2.0 era, it does seem to me that there are a few other elements that we haven't nailed down yet.

At the AjaxWorld Conference and Expo earlier this month, I gave my usual talk about how to formally leverage Web 2.0, with plenty of examples coming from things happening out on the Web.  If you accept that it's the power and size of the Web today , particularly the number of highly interactive network nodes (who are mostly people), give them extremely low-barrier tools, and we should be able to find plenty examples of emergent behavior; significant events happening suddenly and unexpectedly.  Tipping points are getting easier and easier to reach as site designers learn how to create better network effect triggers, draw large audiences suddenly, and as those same audiences increasingly self-organize spontaneously, such as in the KatrinaList project (suddenly) or Wikipedia (slower but bigger).

And it's the arrival of Web 2.0 "supersites" like YouTube , which appear suddenly, often riding the coattails of other major Web 2.0 site's ecosystems, and apply aggressive, viral network effects that show us the true, full scale of the possibilities.  Building a Web site worth over one billion dollars in 18 months is a very impressive result, but it's really only a single axis upon which Web 2.0 can be applied successfully.  Another axis upon which to apply Web 2.0 focuses less on pulling in every single user possible with a horizontal network effect, but on building a difficult to reproduce but highly valuable data source, such as the Navteq mapping database, or Zillow's real estate database.  One might argue that these are still very horizontal but these are merely just well known examples.

The variety and depth of the Web is such that not every Web 2.0 site will have tens of millions of users, nor should it.  An effective Web 2.0 site is largely powered by its users, whose feedback and contributions, direct and indirect, make the site a living ecosystem that evolves from day to day, a mosaic as rich and varied as a sites users would like it to be.  In other words, creating a high quality architectures of participation is becoming a strategic competitive advantage in many areas.

I'm often asked, particularly after one of my presentations on Web 2.0, to articulate the most important and effective actions a site designer can take to realize the benefits of Web 2.0.  As a result, I've created the list below in a attempt to catpure a good, general purpose overview of what these steps are.  My plan in the near future, is to dive into each one of these as much as time permits and explain how they make highly effective Web 2.0 sites not only effective, but often possible at all.  In the meantime, please take them for what they're worth, I believe however that they are instrumental in making a Web site or application the most successful possible.

The Essentials of Leveraging Web 2.0 

• Ease of Use is the most important feature of any Web site, Web application, or program.
  
• Open up your data as much possible. There is no future in hoarding data, only controlling it.
• Aggressively add feedback loops to everything.  Pull out the loops that don’t seem to matter and emphasize the ones that give results.
• Continuous release cycles.  The bigger the release, the more unwieldy it becomes (more dependencies, more planning, more disruption.)  Organic growth is the most powerful, adaptive, and resilient.
• Make your users part of your software.  They are your most valuable source of content, feedback, and passion.  Start understanding social architecture.  Give up non-essential control.  Or your users will likely go elsewhere.
• Turn your applications into platforms. An application usually has a single predetermined use while a platform is designed to be the foundation of something much bigger.  Instead of getting a single type of use from your software and data, you might get hundreds or even thousands of additional uses.
• Don’t create social communities just to have them. They aren’t a checklist item.  But do empower inspired users to create them.
  

Of course, there a lot of work in the details and these are just some of the important, general essentials.  Unfortunately, a lot of careful thinking, planning, and engineering goes into any effective Web 2.0 site and it's having these ideas at the core of it, which can help you get the best results.

Final Note:  I'll be on the road the next two weeks and will be at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco from Nov. 7th-9th.  I'll be there writing coverage for the Web 2.0 Journal and here as much as possible.  If you're going to be there, please drop me a line if you'd like to meet. 

It's the final day of the three day long Web 2.0 Summit , the leading confab for the Web 2.0 era.  It's been a bustling and busy three days in San Francisco with sessions and discussions on a wide variety of Web 2.0 topics, from Advertising 2.0 and Net Neutrality, to the World of Warcraft and Enterprise 2.0.  Given that the Web 2.0 Summit is an executive level conference, the discussion of business models and company strategies around Web 2.0 has dominated the conversation and not the specific techniques and approaches for actually designing and implementing Web 2.0 services and products.  Those subjects have been moved to the upcoming Web 2.0 Expo next April, which will be a much larger event expo-style conference at Moscone Center.

The leadup to the conference was John Musser's great 100-page update of the famous five page Web 2.0 description from Tim O'Reilly (John's comments on the new report here) and the conference also had an exciting Launchpad event to unveil a series of interesting new Web 2.0 sites.  Richard MacManus has the details with links to the sites here on ZDNet.

The two topics that seemed to come up the most often these last three days was 1) how existing major players on the Web can continue on in their leadership roles without significant changes in their business strategies and 2) the need for Web sites and platforms to be as open as possible in order to draw the broadast range of audience and adoption.  In a profiled afternoon conversation on day two, AOL's Jonathan Miller seemed to clearly understand these issues -- which are actively facing his company today -- as it heads into the world of user generated contact and social networks, two forces that are growing large new Web startups, and hence competition, very rapidly.  These new fast growth site models , such as the ones used with YouTube and MySpace, are not however providing clear paths for way for public company to please their investors (net revenue.) Miller also observed that many large companies are not in a position to acquire hot properties like Google did with YouTube.

In another public conversation in the main ballroom right after Jonathan Miller was Microsoft's Ray Ozzie delved into the issues that Microsoft is facing, that started out by focusing on the challenge of how to adapt Microsoft's flagship operating system product, Vista -- as well as their most profitable product, Office -- more effectively to the Web.  The Internet, particularly with Web 2.0 sites, has become the pre-eminent new "superplatform" and it's a significant challenge to Microsoft to stay relevant in a world where the browser is increasingly the center of attention for the software experience.  Ray seemed sanguine about the opportunities however and Vista certainly has many features, such as pervasive built-in syndication, that will certainly pull Vista closer to the Web.

But it was openness that was clearly the most prevalent topic, with discussions on how companies should free their content and services to be used a wider range of situations, particularly from 3rd party entities, even forming the foundation of other products and services offered by entirely different companies.  Openness can also take many forms, from syndicating content to providing well-defined and monetized Web service APIs, and if you don't provide a technical and legal basis for doing so, challenges will only increase as the limited numbers of ways that content and services will reduce the number of overall business opportunities available.  And it puts companies that don't do this at a competitive disadvantage to companies that do open up.  Finally, openness creates the potential for unintended uses, particular as small, more focused content is opened up (smaller chunks are more reusable and general purpose).  It was clear in many discussions, such as with Jonathan Miller, that it's well understood that walled gardens just aren't a viable online business model any longer.

As culled from Web 2.0 Summit discussions and other known best practices...

1. Liberate content and services via a public, open API.  Content will continue to be separated from the experiences that mediate access to it, this makes adaptable experiences possible. Example: RSS readers let users consume content in the ways they choose and have control over.  Doing this turns your Web application into a platform and is one of the most important habits of highly effective Web sites .
2. Syndicate as well as use Web services to open up data. Each method has clear strengths such as discoverability, ease of consumption, or on-demand control.  Example: This means RSS or Atom as well as REST or SOAP.
3. Make it legal to reuse content.  Don't charge if you can help it, consider monetizing it via advertising, transaction fees, or subscriptions.  Don't cripple unintended uses, such as Yahoo!'s limits on their APIs, vs. Amazon's profitable emphasis on unlimited use.
4. Diligently build trust and credibility.  No one will use your open data or services unless there is trust and credibility in the site.  This is very hard to establish and is easily lost.  This is one of the hardest intangibles of openness to manage.
5. Expect the unexpected.  Opening up a site means that others will dream of ways of using your data and services in ways you couldn't imagine.  Often this means they'll use it as a free resource to achieve something that wasn't possible before in terms of scale or volume.  Be prepared for extreme situations and be sure to monitor your feeds and open services and be prepared to throttle them for mailicous or inadvertant waste.

There were plenty of other good sessions at the show and I attended one of the best ones late on the morning of the first day, a great talk from IBM about enterprise mashups, situational software , SOA, and Web 2.0, which are all colliding and combining to make it easier for companies to clear out their application backlog.

Also see great coverage by Stowe Boyd, Richard MacManus , and I hate to say it but ValleyWag, who has relentlessly live blogged the conference.

Announcing Web 2.0 University 

Finally, and pardon the shameless self-promotion, we did have our own big news at the Web 2.0 Summit, namely that O'Reilly Media -- the company that coined the term "Web 2.0" and described the trend to the world -- and my firm, Hinchcliffe & Company, jointly announced on Wednesday that we've formed strategic partnership to join forces on a series of premier services around Web 2.0.  You can read a complete overview of our first major new service, which is already available, called Web 2.0 University. We believe this full series of education and consulting solutions around Web 2.0 will bring intensive, hands-on services around the specific design patterns and business models of Web 2.0.  The premise is that companies are increasingly becoming aware that they need to apply Web 2.0 models to the core of their existing products and services and these services will help them get there quickly and with a minimum of disruption.  So far, early interest has been intriguingly high.

The Web 2.0 Expo will be upon us before we know it.  The deadline for proposals is tomorrow, November 10th, so get them in if you're interested in presenting. See you there!

I was traveling most of last week and so was unable to weigh in on the Web 3.0 mini-tempest that occurred when John Markoff published his exploratory piece in the NY Times last Sunday.  The premise of the article is that we are finding new ways to mine human intelligence which can be exploited by building a new layer of "meaning" on top of the accumulating mass of global collective intelligence that is growing by leaps and bounds every day on the Internet.  Collective intelligence of course is one key aspects of Web 2.0, namely an Internet that is continually improved by constant and sustained contact with hundreds of millions of users contributing content.  These users can either contribute explicitly via a conscious act or implicitly by their very interaction with the Web which then leaves behind useful behavioral "tracks" that can be fed back into the system.  In this ways, hundreds of millions of people are adding to what we know every day, even if individuals contributions are often minor.

Markoff's description of Web 3.0 was ostensibly prompted by something I'm seeing as well, well beyond pure play Web mashups we're beginning to witness a number of companies building end-user solutions that can automatically navigate the Internet, weave together tapestries of online information to generate new, useful results. They can even take it a step beyond: dynamically generated situational Web applications that fully interact with the Web ecosystem.  Such applications -- self-assembled by these tools -- can perform useful tasks such as planning vacations, managing personal schedules, or even orchestrating complex, collaborative business processes for example including entire real-world projects.  The vision is stunning and futuristic yet and the rich fabric of the Web today, with hundreds of open APIs and even vaster reservoirs of content and raw data, now opens the door to the possibility.

Background Reading: Take a look at eight end-user mashup platforms available today 

I've written a lot recently about the trend of user generated software, applications developed by end-users that use the openness of the Web 2.0 era to interact with high value Web services.  But already we're beginning to see the emergence of the next step beyond that: applications developed and tasks completed intelligently by software itself.  Tim-Berners Lee himself envisioned this as the coming Semantic Web which he brilliantly espoused in Scientific American a few years back and has been the goal of great many companies ever since, but which has been relatively unsuccessful on a large scale even up until now.  The reasons for this are complex but seem to lie in what we learned from Web 1.0; a priori solutions often aren't the right ones, emergent ones are .

So while many might say that the 1,200+ mashups currently listed in the trend graphs on Programmable Web are mostly NOT user generated, one only has to look at the widespread use of badges and widgets on MySpace and other major social networking sites to see that everyday people are getting more and more comfortable with "turfing" their blogs and spaces with content, code, and feeds from elsewhere on the Web.  So while much of the end-user mashup activity we see today is probably shallow and don't represent sophisticated functionality, the new tools we're seeing every day are getting better and better and allowing users to take it deeper, creating a true mashup ecosystem.

The shortage of developers and application backlogs: Not finding the app you need

Here's an significant fact, if you look at the number of professional software developers out there today, they are dwarfed by the number of end-users with the time and motivation to describe the solutions that they need.  And interestingly, the same population is dwarfed by the potential output of computer systems that can be directed to create the applications or carry out the tasks we need, with minimal continuous attention on our part.

If you only look at the enterprise IT space you will see that users usually have a long list of things for which they'd like software solutions, but can't get satisfied by the traditional purchase or build processes in place in most organizations.  Every CIO out there is painfully aware of this application backlog but hasn't had the tools to address it.  And out on the Web, there's a different problem: Lots of Web sites, but little software that will do the specific things that a users needs to get accomplished.  As Steve Borch says , "sit back, relax, and let your customers create your products."

Like IBM is realizing with their exploration of end-user driven development products like QEDWiki, most of us today are already conducting much, if not most, of our software integration manually, by re-entering or cutting and pasting data endlessly between our applications.  This implies that 1) there's demand but not enough access to software that does exactly what people want and 2) there is a very low level of integration between the dozens of pieces of software that we currently use on a daily basis.

And in fact, there really is at least two ways for Semantic Web technologies (and its myriad offshoots, many of them proprietary) to improve the way that we use the Internet.  The first is in fact to provide that "layer" of meaning; making the underlying intent services and content to be made clear to programs and not just developers.  And the second is to actively exploit that layer; building software or carrying out processes intelligently on the behalf of users. 

Traditional software isn't adaptable enough: Mashups and Semantic Web Apps are a better way to do things on the fly  

Need a piece of software to manage the process of planning a wedding and its long list of attendees, suppliers, and dependencies?  How about something to coordinate the delivery of construction materials to a job site for the least total cost including materials and shipping, just in time and in the correct order as the items on the construction schedule are completed?  The possibilities in the consumer and business worlds both are truly endless and reflect that such software can at long lat perhaps fill The Long Tail of IT software demand , which could never cost effectively serve the thousands of mass customized applications that would potentially make using software a dream instead of the chore that it often becomes due to the fact that processes and not just data is what needs to be managed.

And while this -- and by "this" I mean recombinant, self-assembling software that exploits collective intelligence -- is certainly the cutting edge of software development, many companies are beginning to map out this terrain closely and I encourage you to begin tracking them along with me.  Startups and initiatives such as JackBe, Teqlo, OpenKapow, Itensil and a great many others are either wholly or partially enabling the automation of software creation and process management. Interesting, they are usually not via true Semantic Web technology, but by virtue of open, simple, easy-to-describe-and-consume services of the Web 2.0 generation .

This brings us to my last point.  In a panel earlier this year with Adam Bosworth and other notably Web lumuniaries, I responded to an audience question about the difference between Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web by saying "Web 2.0 is what happened while we were waiting for the Semantic Web." And that highlights an interesting point, that this latest generation of tools appears to be built on simple yet proprietary approaches and not on the open but formal Semantic Web technologies.  Whether this points to underlying issue with the usability of Semantic Web 1.0 is hard to say but RSS 1.0 ran into the same issue.  Thus I call this next generation of approaches the "Pragmatic Semantic Web." But I am a bit concerned about the lack of standards and this will be something to watch as we see if this next generation of online software is truly ready to sprout wings and fly. 

What other Web 3.0/Pragmatic Semantic Web companies or projects do you know about?

One of the things I'm doing this week is preparing for a presentation at Web Builder 2.0 on how to monetize mashups in Las Vegas next week.  Consequently, I've been pulling together notes, talking to mashup creators, and studying real-world examples of how companies are applying innovative ways of generating revenue with Web 2.0 applications and open APIs.  Though there are all sorts of interesting emerging stories, such as the new Second Life millionaire, product developers are increasingly trying to explore the options beyond the obvious: namely big value acquisitions ala YouTube or the often fickle, if mostly workable, online advertising route.   But the biggest question that comes up is that if you let your users generate most of your content and then expose it all up via an API, how can a profitable business be made from this?

This has been the question from the outset, and though you can build enormously successful sites in terms of numbers of users and amounts of content using Web 2.0 techniques, the best means of monetizing this remain a larger unproven endeavor.  I wrote a while back on the struggle to monetize Web 2.0 where I explored in detail the strategic and tactical methods for making next generation Web sites financially viable, even successful.

If you refer to my original article on monetizing Web 2.0, I identified three tactical means for generating revenue (advertising, subscriptions, and commissions) and a series of strategies that can support them.  While it's usually fairly clear how the direct revenue models work, it's usually less clear to people how the indirect strategies can directly influence the opportunities.

Strategies for Making the Most from Web 2.0 

• There are direct (the 3 items above) and numerous indirect ways to monetize Web 2.0 that often go unappreciated
• Some of the indirect ways which lead to revenue growth, user growth, and increased resistance to competition -- which in turn lead to increased subscriptions, advertising, and commission revenue -- are:
• Strategic Acquisition: Identifying and acquiring Web 2.0 companies on the exponential growth curve before the rest of the market realizes what it's worth (early exploitation of someone else's network effects.)
• Maintaining control of hard to recreate data sources.  This is basically turning walled gardens into fenced gardens:  Let users access everything, but not let them keep it, such as Google providing access to their search index only over the Web.
• Building Attention Trust - By being patently fair with customer data and leveraging user's loyalty, you can get them to share more information about themselves that in turns leads to much better products and services tailored to them.
• Turning Applications into Platforms: One single use of an application is simply a waste of software.  Turn applications into platforms and get 5, 50, or 5,000 additional uses (Amazon has over 50,000 users of its line of business APIs) for example.  Online platforms are actually very easy to monetize but having compelling content or services first is a prerequisite.
  
• Fully Automated Online Customer Self-Service: Let users get what they want, when they want it, without help.  Seems easy but almost all companies have people in the loop to manage the edge-cases.  Unfortunately, edge cases represent the The Long Tail of customer service.  This is hard but in the end provides goods and services with much tighter feedback loops.  And it's also a mandatory prerequisite for cost effectively serving mass micromarkets.  In other words, you can't directly monetize The Long Tail without this.

Lying directly in the primary tenets of Web 2.0 however, are a series of two-edged issues from a revenue perspective.  Though the concepts and ideas are powerful when applied appropriately, they can also pose significant short-term and long-term challenges.  Below are the basic principles of Web 2.0 along with the positive and negative revenue implications for most companies on the Web today, even ones that aren't fully embracing it yet.

 Revenue Implications for Web 2.0 Principles (not meant to be exhaustive)

• Principle 1: Web as Platform
• Upside:  Revenue scalability (1 billion users on the Web), rapid growth potential and reach through exploitation of network effects
• Downside: Competition is only a URL away, often requiring significant investment in differentiation
  
• Principle 2: Software Above a Single Device
• Upside: More opportunities to deliver products and services to users in more situations
  
• Downside: Upfront costs, more infrastructure, more development/testing/support (costs) to deliver products across multiple devices
  
• Principle 3: Data is the Next "Intel Inside"
• Upside: Customer loyalty and even lock-in
• Downside:  Lack of competitive pressure leading to complacency, long-term potential antitrust issues
  
• Principle 4: Lightweight Programming & Business Models
• Upside: Dramatically reduced production costs, easier integration with partners, suppliers, faster product cycles or more features
• Downside: Unexpected scalability demands, unpredictable capacity, potential security issues, lack of control
  
• Principle 5: Rich User Experiences
• Upside: More productive and satisfied users, competitive advantage
  
• Downside: Higher cost of development, potentially lower new user discoverability and adoption
  
• Principle 6: Harnessing Collective Intelligence
• Upside: Much lower costs of production, higher rate of innovation, dramatically larger overall content output
• Downside: Lower level of direct control, governance issues (increased dependence on user base), content management issues, and legal exposure over IP
  
• Principle 7: Leveraging The Long Tail
• Upside: Cost-effectively reach thousands of small, previously unprofitable market segments resulting in overall customer growth
  
• Downside: Upfront investment costs can be very significant, managing costs of customer service long-term

While a great many startups are not generating revenue in huge quantities yet, the companies that have been diligently exploiting open APIs such as Amazon and Salesforce are in fact generating significant revenue and second order effects from opening up their platforms and being careful not to lose control.  This is actually a large discussion, and as large Web 2.0 sites continue to emerge, we'll continue to keep track of what the successful patterns and practices are.

What other implications are there by putting users in control of content generation and opening everything up? 

The end of 2006 is nigh upon us and this blogger for one had a terrific time covering Web 2.0 for those of you that are interested in following the topic.  Love or hate buzzwords, there's little question that subjects related to Web 2.0, from its convergence with SOA , to the rise of rich user experiences including Ajax, to a flood of exciting new largely user-powered online applications both inside and outside the firewall and much more, were all very popular with our readers and covered here in as much detail as possible.

2006 was filled with significant events for us with regards to the next generation of the Web.  During the year we participated in Microsoft's SPARK event, helped organize The New New Internet conference with great appearances by Michael Arrington and Andrew McAfee, launched AjaxWorld magazine in its print edition as editor-in-chief , and delivered numerous talks around the country on RIAs and Web 2.0 design patterns and business models for conferences including Interop, AjaxWorld, Office 2.0, and many others. 

A quick look at the trends tell us that 2007 is shaping up to be even bigger than last year as an even larger, more general audience continues to develop interest in the possibilities of applying Web 2.0 patterns and best practices deeply into the core of their products and services both existing and new.  Harnessing collective intelligence via network effects and feedback loops became generally understood as the dominant design element of the Web 2.0 by most accounts.  This was palpably reinforced by new and old companies alike including YouTube and MySpace gaining market dominance over industry leaders in just a score of months while Google and Amazon continued to use their years old network effect advantage to maintain leadership in their sectors.

But much of this entire story was driven directly by the increasing scale, size, speed and interconnectedness of the Web, making it easier than ever to reach out to tens of millions of potential users practically overnight via the 1 billion+ users that reside there in the biggest single marketplace in history.  Continued performance improvements in a number of metrics has also made much of the Ajax and RIA phenomenon possible.  This includes not just the speed of the Internet itself but the speed of the computers that the average user has as well.  Thus, the dramatic performance improvements in the overall physics of the computing experience will just continue to push the envelope of what's possible on the Web in an essentially continuous fashion.  Hopefully early adopters of the Internet such as the United States will continue investment in Internet infrastructure improvements and not let this trend languish.

While I'll save the predictions for where all this will lead in 2007 for another upcoming post, it seems clear that users, businesses, and other organizations that deeply embrace the fundamental nature of the Web as a communications-oriented platform without any single owner except all of us, will be the only ones able to fully exploit the possibilities of online applications.  Because until now actionable ideas and techniques that directly explain what the most successful ways of building online software weren't well understood or easily accessible to most.  The continually evolving model of what works and what doesn't in online applications design is currently labelled Web 2.0.  And our tools and techniques finally started to adapt to these models this year and the rise of simplicity and optimization for Web-oriented systems as exemplified by the new applications stacks like Ruby on Rails, the growing adoption of lightweight protocols like RSS, ATOM, JSON, and REST, and network effect-powered business models including building hard-to-recreate sources of data and fully leveraging The Long Tail will become the norm.  For now, the early adopters will be able to use techniques potentially heads and shoulders above their competition.  What this will mean for those that fail to embrace this is something I'll cover in a my 2007 predictions post.

With a hat tip to Rod Boothby's idea of the same, here is a summary of our most popular material on Web 2.0 this year as judged by our readers.  These are the top read posts of 2006 on this blog site with over 10,000 page views.  I do hope you enjoy:

Top Web 2.0 Blog Entries for 2006 

11. Thinking Beyond Web 2.0: Social Computing and the Internet Singularity (10,131 page views)

10. All We Got Was Web 1.0, When Tim Berners-Lee Actually Gave Us Web 2.0 (10,203 page views)

9. Notes on Making Good Social Software (10,485 page views)

8. The Ajax Spectrum (10,544 page views)

7. Why Ajax Is So Disruptive (11,320 page views)

6. Seven Things Every Software Project Needs to Know About Ajax (11,346 page views)

5. Web 2.0 Predictions for 2006 (16,531 page views)

4. Ten Ways To Take Advantage of Web 2.0 (21,666 page views)

3. Ruby on Rails 1.1: Web 2.0 on Rocket Fuel (29,204 page views)

2. The Most Promising Web 2.0 Software of 2006 (44,125 page views)

1. The State of Web 2.0 (50,147 page views) 

Stay tuned for Web 2.0 Predictions for 2007 and The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2006, coming next week.