Web Stories 2007-08-31

Three stories noticed in the Drive-By section for this week: Scott Rosenberg on the strategic case for NYT adding updated corrections to its resurrected pages (from the newspaper’s recent SEO effort)….The Economist explains Web 3.0, the Semantic Web…Cringely predicts telepresence in our homes next year, and Apple will bring it to us

The Justice of Truth and Money

Who better to correct the incorrect stories of the media than those wronged? Who better to receive payment from the value of our personal data than we ourselves?

Both these themes find a home in current thinking by Nicholas Carr, Tom Foremski, James Cherkoff, Jeff Jarvis, and Ross Hunter, as down-and-dirty Web 2.0 begins to yield to the bright new Web 3.0. We are foreshadowing the Semantic Web, with its promise of clean data, crowdsourced to a shine by all of us.

Mining Habbo Data

Could you conduct market research in a week and come back with the buying and spending habits, and brand preferences, of 42,000 teenagers around the world? Sulake Corporation, developer of the Habbo virtual world for teenagers, did this very thing. And they’re going back in September for another data mining run.

Cringely Follows the Money

Robert Cringely concluded his three-part tale of political corruption and corporately veiled greed in his story, The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen. The US telecommunications industry, particularly in its Internet service, has been degraded from a world leading system to a backward mediocrity that can’t compete globally - all in less than two decades.

George Colony Gives Free Advice

Forrester CEO George Colony is someone that other CEOs ought to listen to when he talks at them. which he does in a recent column at ZDNet. Here’s what he’s saying (hint, it’s all about Web 2.0, and Cluetrain):

Second Life Ages - To 1997 From 1993 - In One Week

Last week I reported IBM’s view of virtual worlds, Second Life Works When You Pretend It’s 1993 - which says essentially that Second Life today is like the Web was in 1993 or maybe 1995. Now this week Nick Wilson is upping the ante a couple of years, giving us 7 Reasons Why Virtual Worlds Are Like the Web Circa 1997. Those two years make all the difference, as anybody who remembers 1997 can attest.

If IBM says virtual worlds are ‘95 then most of us except the infrastructure developers can relax a little - but if Nick says it’s ‘97 then it’s time to pay attention, because that was the year that money started flowing to the Web, and the fledgling operators who were already there began their decade of prosperity.

The Second Best Way to Make Money With a Blog

Seth Godin advances the two best ways to make money with your blog, the first being to build rep and parlay it into access. This is basically getting by on your blag, and it’s what the blog is best known for, the simple leverage of forging degrees of connection out of prior separation.

His second best way is one I admire immensely: you set your blog up as your shop. Seth Godin links straight to a new article, the most useful guide to doing this I’ve ever seen, Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of Ecommerce Solutions for Bloggers, by John T. Unger, at TypePad Hacks.

Podtech Embedding in Self-Hosted WordPress

Does anybody know how to embed a PodTech video in a self-hosted WordPress install, i.e. one that is NOT hosted at wordpress.com? PodTech make it so easy for the hosted blogs to embed one of their videos with a few clicks, but it’s not so simple for the WP blogs in the wild.

I’m hoping that Jeremiah - whom I read as a strategist but never quite realized he was with PodTech - will pick this up in his Google alert and supply the answer as rapidly as he did for Thomas on his wordpress.com blog. I guess I could email him, but it would be nice to get this info out in the world for others to use.

Second Life Works When You Pretend It’s 1993

If you think of the virtual world Second Life as being like the Internet was in 1993, you have a fair sense of the development path that virtual representation has yet to travel down. And perhaps this helps to imagine just how big its future will be.

To gain this sobering perspective you should watch this video of Robert Scoble and Larry Magid interviewing IBM developer Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who specialized in IBM’s ventures into virtual environments.

It’s 21 minutes you have to set aside if you want to be able to think clearly about Second Life and the virtual economy, and I highly encourage you to watch it for that great sense of perspective. I’ll highlight some points from the interview for you here.

Second Life Quick Reference For Business Strategy

I’ve been wanting to write an actionable summary view of Second Life for you, and now I did. I’ve kept it brief, with a handful of key references you can take to the bank. Virtual is a long development path, and today the game is for developers and savvy entrepreneurs and marketers, it’s an easy place to waste resources on unwise strategy.

Second Life is important, but it has a lot of people puzzled - should one jump in now rather than miss the next big thing, or should one wait to see if it’s actually a bust? Instinct says it doesn’t seem possible for such a thing to be simply meaningless, yet a lot of corporate money is seeing no return there. Really, though, the answers are quite simple.

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