MediaPost: MediaDailyNews 04-23-03

Greg Stuart, IAB CEO, thinks the increase is "indicative of a larger trend at work. Of late, major marketers such as McDonalds have announced they intend to pour more dollars into the interactive space, and I'm certain their counterparts and competitors are also too smart to ignore that interactive is an integral part of the media mix."

There might be some cool aid sipping here but a little optimism never hurt anyone. Let's just hope his, and others, optimism turns into reality.

AlwaysOn: About Google's Eric Schmidt

The interview discusses Google's acquisition of Pyra Labs (Blogger), and gives further insight into their take on blogging.

AlwaysOn: Did the blogging sector get to a certain critical mass where you felt Google had to pay attention to it?

Schmidt: I think it was more a question of the right opportunity came along. We’re extremely interested in getting more information published on the Web in any kind. A relatively straightforward analysis says that a lot of the digital authoring empowerment in people’s hands is at a stage where people do not appreciate how powerful this is. I’m not just talking about computers. I’m talking about digital cameras and those types of things.

I believe that this notion of self-publishing, which is what Blogger and blogging are really about, is the next big wave of human communication. The last big wave was Web activity. Before that one it was e-mail. Instant messaging was an extension of e-mail, real-time e-mail.

Phil Pearson:

A minor (but very handy) change to the Internet Topic Exchange today: it now supports ENT (spec), which means suitably equipped aggregators will be able to pull topic information straight out of the RSS feeds.

Making this actually useful is a new RSS feed: all posts on the site. If you want to keep track of everything, subscribe to that one (traffic on the Exchange is still not awfully high, so you won't find yourself overwhelmed). An aggregator which understands topics will be able to just pull down this one RSS feed instead of heaps of individual topic channel feeds.

The most interesting bit is yet to come: I've been contacted by Scott Johnston and Greg Gershman, who both seem interested in using Topic Exchange information to do some sort of classification of search results. Sort of like the way Google uses dmoz to give you links to relevant categories when you search. This functionality is yet to come, but the hooks are there in the Topic Exchange, so any developers are welcome to start using them from now on!

For people who are interested in using this, I've written a page to explain how to handle the data. Enjoy!

Speaking of the ENT standard, David Sifry has a review up. I should get around to looking more closely at this interesting new development sometime.