One of the blogs I read on a regular basis in TraderMike.net. He made an interesting post today on the growth of visitors he had had to his weblog. Click on 50,000 visits below for the full post but the chart below tells the story.

50,000 Visits

I just realized that some time yesterday I crossed the 50,000 visits (as defined by SiteMeter.com) threshold on this site. When I started this blogging back in April 2003 I never imagined I'd have as much traffic as I get now. Currently I'm averaging 300 visits per day and 660 page views per day. It wasn't long ago that I was averaging well under 100 visits. At least now I'm at the point where the ads are covering my hosting costs plus enough extra to buy some trinkets.

Qumana is a team of seasoned entrepreneurs and information technology professionals who are involved in bringing next-generation capabilities to the basics of shaping and communicating information on the Internet. The Qumana team is:

Fred Fabro – President and CEO of Thoughtshare, a knowledge management software company that was one of the “100 KM Companies That Matter”. Fred also co-founded and built a telecommunications network services company that eventually became Sprint Business Services.

Jon Husband – Blogger and futurist focusing on the sociological impacts of the Internet on knowledge work and organizational structures. Jon is the creator of the concept of Wirearchy, and focuses on the concepts and strategy behind the mass customization of information, which has large implications for the ways we all will work in a constant flow of new information.

Victor Aberdeen – A marketing guru who was responsible for the marketing strategy and implementation of marketing campaigns for IBM Lotus Notes in western Europe. Victor is a highly regarded marketing strategy consultant in western Canada.

I pulled this quote from Venture Blog not so much about its topic, but about how blogging has opened up the world of conversation and dialog on somany different topics. Below is a nice example.

Quote:

Man has Venture Blogging come a long way since we started VentureBlog a year and a half ago. At that time, the only way that there would be robust discussion and debate about venture capital related topics in the blogsphere would be if Andrew and I took different sides of an issue and duked it out on VentureBlog. Now folks like Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital and Fred Wilson from Flatiron Partners are discussing and debating VC issues of real interest and import. While Venture Capital still remains quite individualistic and, at times, enigmatic, VC bloggers have gone a long way to help demystify what has for years been a bit of a black art.

It struck me just how much information was being shared these days as I read a set of posts about Participating Preferred Stock by Brad and Fred. While there are real world implications to decisions made by VC's and entrepreneurs about Participating Preferred Stock, this is still a pretty esoteric topic. As recently as a year ago, the posts about venture financings were pretty rudimentary (here's what Joi was talking about, and here was my effort to just put the terms in context). Brad and Kevin Laws (at VentureBlog) upped the anti with deeper analysis of Preferred Stock. And now there is a debate raging online about the use and appropriateness of Participation in Preferred Stock. The real debate, mind you, is in the comments of Brad's and Kevin's pieces (we VC's are far too gentle on one another but entrepreneurs are more than willing to call BS when they see it).

Source URL: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs

 

I pulled this quote from Venture Blog not so much about its topic, but about how blogging has opened up the world of conversation and dialog on somany different topics. Below is a nice example.

Quote:

Man has Venture Blogging come a long way since we started VentureBlog a year and a half ago. At that time, the only way that there would be robust discussion and debate about venture capital related topics in the blogsphere would be if Andrew and I took different sides of an issue and duked it out on VentureBlog. Now folks like Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital and Fred Wilson from Flatiron Partners are discussing and debating VC issues of real interest and import. While Venture Capital still remains quite individualistic and, at times, enigmatic, VC bloggers have gone a long way to help demystify what has for years been a bit of a black art.

It struck me just how much information was being shared these days as I read a set of posts about Participating Preferred Stock by Brad and Fred. While there are real world implications to decisions made by VC's and entrepreneurs about Participating Preferred Stock, this is still a pretty esoteric topic. As recently as a year ago, the posts about venture financings were pretty rudimentary (here's what Joi was talking about, and here was my effort to just put the terms in context). Brad and Kevin Laws (at VentureBlog) upped the anti with deeper analysis of Preferred Stock. And now there is a debate raging online about the use and appropriateness of Participation in Preferred Stock. The real debate, mind you, is in the comments of Brad's and Kevin's pieces (we VC's are far too gentle on one another but entrepreneurs are more than willing to call BS when they see it).

Source URL: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs

 

 Wow!

According to Forrester, e-commerce will amount to some 12 percent of all retail sales in 2010, up from about 7 percent today.

"Significant behavioral changes by consumers and retailers will fuel online retail growth over the next six years," says Carrie Johnson, a senior analyst with Forrester. "While consumers continue to become more comfortable buying a variety of items online, retailers will apply what they have learned in the early days of online retailing to implement site enhancements that provide a greater return on investment and a better experience for customers."

The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday edition that after reporting disappointing results this month from selling services to businesses, Telus says it will consolidate its two enterprise sales units and trim jobs to boost efficiency. The Globe's Simon Avery writes that Telus plans to combine responsibility for sales to small, medium-sized and large businesses under a single division by October. Management expects immediate benefits from the move. The news comes about two weeks after the company said it expected growing losses from attempts to sell voice and data services to businesses in Ontario and Quebec and warned of possible cuts to boost productivity. Although Telus was the first national carrier to offer businesses combined voice and data service over a single, secure network built on Internet protocol, the company is still refining its marketing efforts. Selling new services based on Internet technology to businesses in Ontario and Quebec is key to the company's future growth. But so far, Telus's push into a market dominated by BCE Inc.'s Bell Canada has met with only limited success, and the management shuffle is just the latest in a series of attempts to gain traction.

"Microcontent" seems to be one of the buzzwords now. So, what is that, really?

---

Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed.

Via Ming the Mechanic's blog, a post on microcontent that points us to Syncato, which then points us to Kim Staken and Jon Udell.

As I read Jon Udell's post (below) I got quite excited, because the latest additions to Qumana take us directly into this territory for working with and managing microcontent.


Kimbro Staken's XPath-searchable blog

Kimbro Staken's new blog software, built on top of Sleepycat's Berkeley DB XML, echoes a theme I've been working with myself for a while. A collection of well-formed weblog entries is, implicitly, an XML database whose contents can be searched and intelligently recombined. I've been toying with a simple file-based solution that creates an XPath search interface to my blog content. Kimbro's approach takes the next step:
Now the really interesting feature of this system is that it's really an XML database Web Service. I exposed an XPath query facility through the URL so that the database can be queried via HTTP GET. [Inspirational Technology]




Kimbro gives this example:


http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//a (all links)


But I can change it to, for example:


http://www.xmldatabases.org/WK/blog/item//table[contains(.,'Annie Lennox')] (tables containing 'Annie Lennox')


Very cool! As Kimbro points out:
The possibilities of this are endless, especially as you add more meaningful markup to your posts.
I just love this idea of incorporating XPath into RESTian URLs. With Kimbro's approach, you get immediate use of the markup you create -- just the kind of incentive that's need

Socialtext closed its Series A round with existing investors such as Joi Ito, Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus and Freedom Technology Ventures -- and new investors Jun Makihara and Omidyar Network.

Found on Nick Lewis' blog Net Politik ... a description of an imaginary product he is calling Fluid


Beyond Google

Yesterday, I spent the day swimming with my friends at a hidden paradise about an hour outside of Austin . It was there that an idea hit me: it's called Fluid. What is Fluid? Its a syndication service, a metadata encoder, an index, a site tracker, a link mob, a meme propagator. ect. Sound complex? It isn't, in fact its designed to be easy enough for grandma.

Fluid's users would have three tools at their disposal: A composer, a browser, and an index. First let me describe the composer.

The composer is basically a word processor with two modes which are used to encode separate layers of metadata into the document. Here is how it works: Lets say a user types up an essay on word, and cuts and pastes it to Fluid's composer. The first mode would have two steps:

1.the user would pick the document's general topic (i.e. Political Humor, Social Software, ect.), priority (high, medium, low), and purpose (i.e. proposal, editorial, clarification, criticism, general information ect.).
2. The user would then use a color coded sidebar, that would highlight the document's thesis, points, support, ect.

After completing these two steps, Fluid's engine would automatically encode the metatags for the above values into the document without requiring the user to know a trickle of HTML.

The second mode of the composer would allow users to cite sources, and trackback other people for feedback, questions, or whatever. So say I were trying to get a hold of Nova Spivack to ask him, "did I just reinvent the wheel?" I'd follow three easy steps.

1. I would select his name from a people list (or a whole group of people who were interested in social software.)
2. Then, I would either highlight a specific place in the document, or the entire document. This would allow me greater freedom to ask small questions if need be.
3. A dialog box would open which would allow me to enter the specific question, "Would this be possible or practical?".

This brings us to the second tool of fluid, the add on browser. The user would be able to create a homepage with various components. One of which could display the most recent articles which other users classified as Social Software and Knowledge management. The metatags that were encoded by the composer would allow articles to be expanded or collapsed like so (the colors represent how the metatags would be integrated into the system):

-Beyond Goggle by Net Politik (0/0 ratings, 0 citations)
Fluid's users would have three tools at
their disposal
-The composer is basically a word
processor with two modes that encode separate layers of metadata into the document.
+The Browser
+The Index
This would allow readers greater ease in exploring large amounts of information. Call it a super newsreader.

These articles could also be rated by readers either anonymously, or publically. A good rating and citation would show up as "Beyond Google by Net Politik (1/0 ratings, 1 citations)." If the rating is done publically, than the author would receive a message (Bob.com rated "beyond google" as good. Bob.com has rated 1 Net politik article. The author could than view Bob.com's profile to see who bob has cited or rated as good or bad. The user could also find out who likes or dislikes bob's content. This would create an algorithm similar to Amazon's "users who liked this album also liked...". Furthermore, there would be incentives for rating other articles, such as showing up higher on the search engines.

The browser would also contain a message center for recent questions. So if Nova Spivack was using this system, he'd see a message that looked like:

From Net Politik: Did I just reinvent the wheel?
Fluid's users would have three tools at their disposal: A composer, a browser, and an index.
Note from Nick: Would this be possible or practical?

He could either give a reply publically or privately, he could also choose to ignore the message or block the user.

Another component of the browser would allow readers to ask specific questions about various points. Using the Fluid browser, the reader could highlight a section of text, and hit a hot key. This would initiate a macro that would record the URL, the text that was cited, the user, and the time. A little dialog box would pop up, and the user could type in a brief message such as, "watch your grammar" or "what the hell are you talking about?" The message would be sent to server that would appear to the author as:

From Bob regarding your article "Beyond Google":
Statement in Question: A little dialog box would pop up, and the user could type in a brief message such as, "watch your grammar" or "what the hell are you talking about?"

Bob asks: Would there be a feature that would allow other readrs to see which points were commented on? Furthermore, could the authr decide who was allowed to comment?

Nick Replied: Yes, and Yes. Users who enable the displaying of various color coded tags in browsing mode would see questioned statements in purple.

The final component, the Index, would resemble Yahoo. You could do searches such as "George W. Bush" and enable options such as:
1. Editorials only
2. Most Questioned
3. Highest rated
4. From sites that are hated by users that like my site

The users could than browse the results in ways that are similar to the expanding and collapsing menus in the browser's homepage.

Or click through indexed topics such as News/Politics/Republican/Liberal Hate fests. These indexes would also allow users to find the appropriate topics to file their articles under in the composing mode. Algorithms could also be developed that would allow the users to recieve suggestions for topics. Furthermore, various parts of metatags could be intergraded into search engines such as google using automatically generated link collections in the user profiles. So if 15 people rate my site, thats 15 links in 15 profiles.

Hollywood -- always in search of hip, influential people who can get others to go see a film -- is spending an increasing portion of its collective marketing resources online, shifting budgets and attention from traditional media like television and print toward the Web.

While the major movie studios spent just 1.3 percent of their $6.76 billion advertising budget online in 2003, the portion will balloon rapidly in coming years, industry executives say. Hollywood doesn't have a choice. Young men and other desirable audiences are not watching television, and they are relying less on newspapers to find reviews and movie times, according to industry research.

"This is a big topic that is making everyone sweat right now," said Juliana Deeks, an analyst at Jupiter Media. "It's an important flag for everyone in the advertising industry, insomuch as it's indicative of changing habits."

According to Deeks, one-third of all adults now prefer to get movie reviews and listings online over newspapers, television, magazines and radio. Among younger adults, the numbers are even bigger. Deeks said 47 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds prefer the Web to traditional media for information about movies, versus 33 percent of 35- to 44-year-olds and 24 percent of 45- to 54-year-olds.

New digital technologies are creating a crisis in the business models of the companies that depend on having a monopoly on distribution. Look at MP3 blogs: We're now seeing bands that are saying, "Please pirate my material. Here it is." They make money from that. They get bookings from that. They build an audience on that.

There's also Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers. It has 500,000 articles in 50 languages at virtually no cost, vs. Encyclopedia Britannica spending millions of dollars and they have 50,000 articles.

From my prospective, the threat is also an opportunity. There are many start-ups today that understand the points above very well and are building new business models around them. It won't be long until these companies are head-to-head with old, slow and stuck in their ways companies who may find themselves with an outdated business model and a ship that's too slow to turn around in time. This will be fun to watch.

From: Common Craft - Online Community Strategies Busines

I found this neat comment on Joi Ito's blog. How the web has changed our behavior!

Quote:

I had a breakfast meeting with Professor Hirotaka Takeuchi about my doctorate program and I was taking notes in my moleskine notebook. I was jotting down just names and keywords and I think the professor thought it was a bit odd. I realized that taking notes with the intention of googling everything later is very different than taking complete notes. I had never noticed that I had started doing this.