Monday, October 10, 2005

Web 2.0 This Week (October 2 - 8). Web 2.0 This Week October 2 - 8 What a week! Web 2.0 was absolutely terrific. There were hundreds of smart and interesting people milling about and cross pollinating their ideas. Our focus was on the new companies, of course, and we briefly wrote about each and every one of them in our two part post �gThe Companies of Web 2.0��. See Part 1 and Part 2. Here�fs this week�fs wrapup: 1. TechCrunch Profiles This Week 1-800-Free-411, iKarma, Ning, zvents (update), Flock (update), Attention Trust, Attention Trust #2, edgeio, Google Reader, Sphere, Yahoo Podcasts 2. Fred Wilson Thinks about Web 2.0 Companies I had the chance to meet Fred Wilson at the Web 2.0 conference - I only wish I was able to pick his brain for a longer time. He writes a much-discussed blog post on �gpoint�h v. �gend-to-end�h solutions. A point solution is a stand alone web service - think Flickr before its acquisition by Yahoo. An end-to-end solution is a group of services under one roof - think portals like MSN, Yahoo, etc. Generally, mass users like portal type solutions, but point solution are almost always better. Investors and entrepreneurs need to think about this, of course, when deciding on their eventual exit strategy. Must they aim to be bought by portals? 3. Will you be at TagCamp? If you are near Palo Alto, a must-attend event is TagCamp on October 28-29, 2005. Will you be there? Speaking of tagging, Barb Dybwad links to a Wired article on the subject that is worth the read. 4. How Much is Your Blog Worth? Tristan Louis analyzes the Weblogs, Inc. acquisition and comes up with some very interesting thoughts on the value of blogs. Richard MacManus and Om Malik take the analysis even further. Bottom Line: Inbound links are worth $564.54 each. I�fd like to see the analysis done from a different angle - how much is an RSS reader worth? See # 6 below. 5. Visualizing Del.icio.us Brian Benzinger writes a great post listing all of the various visualization tools for del.icio.us data. Hey Brian, per my #4 above, you owe me $564.54. :-) 6. Bloglines Feed Data Bloglines released some great data and insights on their blog. While there are lots and lots of blogs, Bloglines says a blog is important if it has at least one subscriber - a fair measurement if you consider Bloglines�f market position (still dominant) and if you discount the fact that just about everyone subscribes to their own feed. By this measure, there are about 1.3 million �gimportant�h blogs. Four months ago there were 1.1 million such blogs. This makes up the �glong tail�h. Things drop off quickly from there. Only about 37,000 blogs have 20 or more readers, and only 437 have at least 1,000 readers. The scientific term they use for the big guys? �gTotally Sweet�h. :-) 7. CNet Top 100 Blogs Thank you, CNet, for picking TechCrunch to include in your list of the Top 100 blogs. I�fm not sure we belong, but it makes us feel great! Tags: techcrunch, web2.0, web+2.0, ajax, tags, tagging, tagcamp, web2con, del.icio.us, rss, bloglines [TechCrunch] 10:35:28 AM