The state of Enterprise 2.0

Industry analysts, CIOs, and business leaders around the world are continuing to try to read the industry tea leaves in 2007 when it comes to the subject of Enterprise 2.0, the increasingly popular discussion of using Web 2.0 platforms in the workplace. The primary topic of interest? Whether Enterprise 2.0 brings real bang for the buck by making the daily work of organizations measurably more productive, efficient, and innovative. Investors and executives are just not going to make significant bets on Enterprise 2.0 in terms of resources and risk exposure without good information on the likely returns of implementation.

The increasing pervasiveness of the tools and awareness of Enterprise 2.0 will continue to have a growing impact on our businesses for better and worse.Up until recently, the lack of mature Enterprise 2.0 products, good case studies, and feedback from early experiences that successfully dealt with some of the challenges that these frequently disruptive and occasionally subversive tools introduced. This immature state of affairs was often holding back even corporate pilots of highly promising candidate Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as enterprise blogs, wikis, and even mashups.

However, increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge, having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1 billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.

The big question for many of those on the fence now is: 1) Do we now have the right capabilities in terms of ready Enterprise 2.0 products? And 2) Do we generally understand how to apply them properly to obtain good returns on our investment in them? Knowing the answers to both questions will almost certainly tell us if we’re ready for mainstream adoption of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 any time soon.

Enterprise 2.0 redux

Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School famously introduced the term and concepts behind Enterprise 2.0 last year and it’s had a heady ride across the industry and in the press ever since. Initially defined by McAfee as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”, the broader global community has attempt to expand, reinvent, and co-opt Enterprise 2.0 with varying degrees of success. But the essential, core meaning has largely stayed the same: Social applications that are optional to use, free of unnecessary structure, highly egalitarian, and support many forms of data.

McAfee even coined a menmonic to make it easy for everyone to remember what appeared to be the key aspects of these social platforms. Called SLATES, it was an easy checklist to verify that the tools you were considering had the right essential ingredients. Under this initial definition Web 2.0 poster children blogs and wikis were identified as Enterprise 2.0 platforms (provided that they provided reasonable support for SLATES) as well as more sophisticated tools such as prediction markets and even vertical business applications like customer directed taxi cab dispatching were given as early examples of richer Enterprise 2.0 applications.

Examples platforms that failed to make the cut as Enterprise 2.0 because they didn’t have the qualities that were believed to be important for business business outcomes? These included most corporate intranets and portals, most groupware, as well as e-mail and “classic” instant messaging. Why? They either didn’t provide access to a voice for workers to communicate and collaborate with or they didn’t create results that were persistent and globally visible. In the end, Enterprise 2.0 takes most of the potent ideas of Web 2.0, user generated content, peer production, and moves them into the workplace.

Did the original articulation of Enterprise 2.0 have the right focus and point us in the best direction? And has the conception of it evolved from this vision to reflect that which we’ve learned along the way? Going back again to our two questions that will inform us as to the state of Enterprise 2.0; what have learned from our experiences with the early platforms and initial rollouts of Enterprise 2.0 and what does it teach us?

The state of Enterprise 2.0 – Fall 2007

Here is what appears to be what we’ve learned about Enterprise 2.0 up to this point in time. There is of course no way to make this list complete though I believe it covers most of the big lessons. Also, entirely in the spirit of Enterprise 2.0 itself, I strongly encourage that you add anything that you think I’ve left out in TalkBack below or in a link from your own blog.

Lesson #1: Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you. I’ve heard a growing chorus from organizations about blogs, wikis, and other types of Enterprise 2.0 applications being brought in the back door via use of department budgets and corporate credit cards by virtue of on-the-ground worker initiative. Grassroots adoption of Enterprise 2.0 in this respect is highly reminiscent of the original personal computer days when employee craved better tools so badly they brought in their own PCs and purchased their own software. I’ve both heard tale and witnessed personally the widespread use of hosted wikis in particular but even unauthorized internal installations of MediaWiki, such as at AOL, where their rogue installation of MediaWiki has become enormously popular and has pages for every product, technology, and department and I can cite a dozen other similar stories. Enterprise 2.0 is now happening on its own in many organizations and it’s up to the business and IT to not so much take control but to enable it with things such as effective enterprise search and which helps prevent silos and duplicate, yet unsynchronized data from forming.

Lesson #2: Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis. The discussion often starts with these simple freeform tools but should progress beyond this to other platforms that are better for specific situations. For example, enterprise mashups enable for user-created Web applications what enterprise blogs and wikis for user-created content and structure. Predictive market products such as HP’s BRAIN platform and online innovation facilitators such as Innocentive are other potentially more sophisticated examples of Enterprise 2.0 platforms. I’ve witnessed prediction markets in particular become enormously popular in the last year or so as enterprises seek to better tap into the cumulative wisdom of their workers. Social bookmarking is also starting to gain speed in the enterprise as way of providing a rich information discovery mechanism internally.

Lesson #3: Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase. While a widely covered report from Forrester earlier this year clearly showed that CIOs would prefer to buy one single Enterprise 2.0 suite instead of cobbling together a combination of point solutions for blogging, wikis, RSS consumption, and social networking, the reality is that even the best Enterprise 2.0 suites will be missing key pieces for a long time. To get decent returns from Enterprise 2.0 implementations, organizations will require really good enterprise search, access to enterprise data from within Enterprise 2.0 tools, the ability to create mashups at a low level to the more sophisticated Enterprise 2.0-style products at a higher level. That’s not to say an Enterprise 2.0 suite such as SuiteTwo or Microsoft SharePoint can’t form the core of your Enterprise 2.0 strategy, but other products and integration work will be required to make it provide real business results in your local IT environment. This will include products that will make your Enterprise 2.0 suite support single sign-on, work in your portal environment, provide management and moderation controls, as well as integrate with your ECM and other traditional enterprise platforms.

In other words, by the time you’ve installed, configured, customized, and integrated all of the ingredients you’ve brought together, if you’ve lost sight of the specific reasons why Enterprise 2.0 is supposed to work better, your effort will have been in vain. I see this often when Enterprise 2.0 projects don’t provide, say, read access to RSS feed readers to workers or fail to make it easy to create a blog post or wiki page from the Intranet and a dozen other minor decisions made on top of the Enterprise 2.0 tools selected, yet contrary to their spirit and that will be significantly detrimental to the outcome. Best advice: Clearly understand the benefits of these news tools and ideas and then do your very best to ensure they aren’t negated.

Lesson #4: Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media. Just like the previous generation of workers received computer literacy classes en masse and learned how to use business productivity applications such as word processing, spreadsheets, and email, the same will be required for the current generation of workers and Enterprise 2.0. This is even simple guidance such as should something go into a blog post, a wiki page, or mashup app. Also why and when should workers respond to comments and participate in social networking, bookmarking, and internal/external online communities? Outside of technology companies and within mainstream businesses, we’ve clearly seen that Enterprise 2.0 tools have an additional hurdle to jump in learning how to tap their benefits, especially if the organization has relatively low turnover and few younger workers. The hurdle is making sure that workers have a clear understanding of the specific techniques of how to apply Enterprise 2.0 tools to their daily work. Social media information formats such as project status wiki pages to departmental news blogs are still foreign to most workers today and proactive worker education will be required to make sure the investments in Enterprise 2.0 are being appropriately reaped.

Lesson #5: The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time. One major benefit of the open, globally visible information in Enterprise 2.0 platforms is that organizational retention of knowledge actually begins to accrue on a wide scale. But it’s a continuous, linear build-up and almost never a sudden and pronounced business benefit. Adoption and habits also take time to form and it’s quite typical to see 6 months go by before significant activity begins to take place in the Enterprise 2.0 platforms in an organization. Do not expect big immediate wins but carefully measure your rollouts and make sure their network effect is being established. Particularly if your tools aren’t following SLATES, and many platforms, such as SharePoint often don’t follow SLATES by default, then growth and uptake can require a great deal of work. But like compound interest, it doesn’t take forever to begin achieving respectable results on a regular basis and all the best rollouts we’ve seen have given their Enterprise 2.0 strategies the time and support to work organically.

Lesson #6: Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business. In fact, this seems to never have happened. While older, much heavier related systems such as Documentum might see a significant decrease in usage, there are often reasons why they have the process and ceremony around their usage. Heavyweight IT systems might be more appropriate for managing SOX compliance say than a corporate wiki, while a brainstorming effort over several days generally makes much more sense on a wiki than on a FileNET instance. In fact, instead of competition, enabling connections to existing IT systems can provide significant benefits and allowing reports, views, and documents to be hosted by or connected to Enterprise 2.0 tools and can help make sure that there isn’t another silo of content in the organization. Having a blog post on the budget for FY 07 with the actual current numbers being displayed in an HTML table live from an RSS feed from the budget system is an example of this. In this way, Enterprise 2.0 seems to work better when it lives in close contact with existing IT systems than in isolation. The biggest impact of this lesson is that these new tools are so different and generally support such different types of knowledge than usually captured, that impact to existing systems seems to be minimal. Interestingly, you might see a decrease in the use of e-mail or ECM when the conversations that formerly happened on those platforms make a more natural home in Enterprise 2.0 platforms.

Lesson #7: Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready. Beyond simple productivity gains, other sorts of more subtle returns often accrue around Enterprise 2.0. McAfee has recently noted that these types of tools tend to create many more links between workers and different groups in an organization and that these types of links tend to provide better benefits than the stronger, more frequent links between organizational entities and individual workers. For this reason and others, Enterprise 2.0 platforms seem to foster a new type of collaboration that exhibits more innovation, creativity, and cross pollination. And because these tools are generally so freeform, they will regularly be used in ways they were never originally intended. Blogs and wikis in particularly can be put to just about any use in terms of accumulating knowledge and collaborating over a network and increasing I’ve seen Enterprise 2.0 initiatives finding them being used in entirely unexpected ways. Of particularly interest, I’ve begun to see the rise of widgets provide a rich fodder for blogs posts and wiki pages that are ad hoc business dashboards of information of all kinds, enabled by the cut and paste of functionality on the open Web. Enterprise 2.0 enables a rich canvas for workers to think about and construct their information landscape and anything is possible.

Conclusion

It’s still quite useful to read Nine ideas for IT managers considering Enterprise 2.0. Almost exactly a year later, all the advice still rings true despite what we’ve learned in the interim. Nevertheless, we’re just now beginning down the road of Enterprise 2.0 and an enormous amount has yet to be learned. The increasing pervasiveness of the tools and knowledge of Enterprise 2.0 will continue to have a growing impact on our businesses for better and worse. Success stories will continue to emerge as well as the first major issues such as information spills, IP theft, and other potential problems when so much critical business information is made so much more leveragable. How to access the benefits while minimizing the risks will continue to be a major topc in the Enterprise 2.0 community.

In the meantime, I’d like to try an experiment and extend the SLATES mnemonic a bit. My biggest issue in using it in its present form to communicate Enterprise 2.0 is that it doesn’t itself capture the social, emergent, and freeform aspects that we know are so essential and so I’ve added these. I know SLATES is supposed to be capability based but it also needs to convey the intended outcomes clearly, and social capability in particular is missing. Thus, I’ve used an anagram generator to create another (hopefully) pithy mnemonic, FLATNESSES, which itself captures yet another important aspect of Enterprise 2.0, its egalitarian nature. FLATNESSES is depicted in the diagram below containing these three key aspects added to SLATES as well as a fourth which I discuss below. I hope you find this a useful conception to discuss the vital elements of Enterprise 2.0 in your efforts and would love your feedback.

Finally, I’ve also added one more capability to the new mnemonic, network-oriented, to reflect that all these aspect of Enterprise 2.0 must apply not only to applications that are fundamentally delivered over a network but that their content be fully Web-oriented, addressable, and reusable. The atomization and portability of information, such as what RSS has enabled, has been vital to the successful growth of communities like the blogosphere and one vital point about Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 that many organizations don’t yet fully understand: Our enterprises are NOT the Web. And to get the full benefits of the Web 2.0 era, we must begin adapting our organizations and their information and IT resources (with suitable enterprise context) to this network-oriented model that has worked so for us globally on the Internet these last 15 years.

What else have we learned about Enterprise 2.0 in the last year? Please add it to Talkback below.

Creating real business value with Web 2.0

I run into a fair number of people who are skeptical about the actual business value of Web 2.0.  Sure, they usually agree it’s a terrific new movement There’s a whole aspect of Web 2.0 that can drive genuine business value and significant competitive advantage.in online software that encourages social collaboration, two-way use of the Web, services that are open and repurposable, Web-based applications, and more.  But can you build and grow a real business with these ideas?

Sometimes the trend towards startups in miniature, mashups the size of a feature, open source data sources, and the relentless democratization of content makes it look like everything is becoming free or very inexpensive.  Or so distributed and decontrolled that there’s no place to create value.  That makes the value proposition in this brave new world seem pretty shaky indeed. 

Yet the truth could not be more different.

To these concerns I point out that this is only one end of a spectrum.  There’s a whole aspect of Web 2.0 that can drive genuine business value and significant competitive advantage.  To illustrate this argument, I’ve recently started collecting real-world Web 2.0 business success stories that demonstrate this point. 

Now, most people following this space are aware that eBay, Amazon, and Google are held up as exemplars and the successes of the Web 1.0 era because they were Web 2.0 before it was fashionable.  The argument is they did this by leveraging user contributions, offering open Web services for others to integrate with, building hard to recreate data sources, etc.

But there are many other interesting new success stories.  And by studying them some common threads can be teased out and we can get a general sense of what’s happening and what works.  Let’s take a look at the ones I’m tracking and what they’re doing, in rough order of commercial success. I am also including two that aren’t a commercial success but demonstrate some techniques with serious potential:

Companies using Web 2.0-style techniques for business advantage

• NHN’s Naver Search Engine.  Never heard of Naver?  You’re not alone unless you live in Korea.  But the big secret is that Naver is annihilating Google there.  Korea also happens to have the highest rate Internet use of any country in the world.  More importantly, not only is NHN using Web 2.0 techniques like gathering collective intelligence and social collaboration to achieve market domination, but they sold over $228 million in online ads on their service last year, making their stock go through the roof in recent months.  These are impressive results and note that much of this is revenue they’ve directly outcompeted Google for, one of the most successful Internet businesses in history who has also had a significant presence in Korea since 2001.
• Amazon’s Web Services Division:  Currently taking in more than $211 million a year, Amazon’s Web services turns most of its online storefront into a full blown open platform that supports a large and thriving community of companies that re-use Amazon’s best-of-breed On Demand commerce services.  This gives Amazon’s partners ready access to vast IT resources in the form of a product that would otherwise be only getting a single use.  By making this strategic move, Amazon takes advantage of the economies of software and resells its services over and over again, recouping their cost many times over and taking advantage of unintended uses dreamed up by the aftermarket.
• IBM, Salesforce, and Microsoft Provide Self-Servicing to SMBs: The potential of the Web to offer true customer self-service, particularly to small audiences en masse, still has largely untapped commercial potential.  This has led to the coining of the term, The Long Tail, a key concept in the Web 2.0 toolkit.  Because automated systems can efficiently provide high-quality unattended customer service online, it enables businesses to profitably serve customer groups they could never think of serving before.  The New York Times recently covered how both Salesforce and IBM are generating significant new revenue and business results from these smaller markets.  This is not just because the Web allows it, but also because of recent progress like pervasive Web connectivity, faster bandwidth, more people online, and growing trust of online software.  As for Microsoft, one of the last bastion’s of market penetration for them is small and medium businesses.  This is the one market that their new online Office Live products is squarely aimed at self-servicing with Web-based business software.
• Craigslist and Google Base:  Both of these services, like eBay, can only exist in symbiotic conjunction with their users.  While gaining control of a hard to recreate data source is an important Web 2.0 strategy, you need to have a revenue model associated with it to be a business success.  This is something that Wikipedia, the classic example of a Web 2.0 data source built by its users, can’t boast.  However, this is something both Craigslist and Google Base aspire to be, successful commercial services created from their user’s data.  While Craigslist and Google both have done things occasionally to create walled gardens of their data, the point is that the more they do this, the more likely they will hurt themselves.  I don’t have revenue numbers for craigslist
• Katrinalist.net and Antbase.org.  Both of these are completely non-commercial sites that demonstrate the raw power of harnessing collective intelligence and scalable marshalling of underutilized data resources, respectively.  The Katrina List story is amazing in itself and the Antbase.org story comes from a new article in Discover magazine, while partially online describes how a scientific community turned massive taxonomy resources otherwise mouldering away in basements as lost specimens into a thriving online database of information that can be shared by all.  Understanding the success and importance of both of these points to intriguing and largely unexploited possibilities that I predict will become more common and widespread in the near future.

The whole point of Enterprise Web 2.0 is to put best practices for creating Web experiences into the hands of business people, Web designers, and users so that we make the most of the systems, users, and information that we have.  For example, the vast, aging inventories of otherwise userful information is one of the bigger wastes in IT today.  Web 2.0 encourages us to put it all online, make it user organizable, findable, and to build a community around it. 

So too is leveraging the activities of users as they interact with our online systems.  Both first class participation mechansims like tagging, ranking, commenting are important but so are second order mechanisms that track what users are looking at, saving particularly popular data sets and making them easily shareable and reusable.

That’s not to say that adding del.icio.us bookmark buttons to your content will save a failing business model from the eventual extinction, but it’s the first step down a promising new path. These are just some of the possibilities and we can now begin to see how early adopters are using it to considerable effect.  What will you do?

Do you know of other Enterprise Web 2.0 success stories?  Please share!

Web 2.0 Business Models

The differences for “Web 2.0″ type companies stem not from their preferred business models – models that are very similar to their dot.com counterparts – but in the forces influencing the implementation of those models.

John Battelle made the case for Web 2.0 inaugurating the second coming of the web, the building of a better web (or more aptly, better Internet and web businesses), versus it representing an impending bubble. In his NYT op-ed piece (free registration required), he identified a very different set of variables, which are shaping the progression and development of Web 2.0 companies compared to the dot.com days – more broadband connections, low start-up costs, better search, and lack of IPO pressure.

These factors have powered a number of successful Web 2.0 companies, where as Battelle notes, Web 2.0 is in some ways simply a new way of approaching business. Today’s influences lead to an important distinction. While many of these startups still hope to be snatched up by the likes of Google or Yahoo!, those with the right approach don’t need to be – they have viable revenue streams. Interestingly enough, that makes them even more desirable as potential acquisitions.

There are mainly two Web 2.0 business models today, one based on technology and the other on network effects. Both are closely related and in some ways, rely on the other for true success.

Technology Focused
The technology business model is one primarily based around innovation, offering a compelling value proposition not available elsewhere. These services are extremely useful and can be fully utilized without any investment on the part of a user. Bells and whistles, however, are only available as premium or pro upgrades.

Take Flickr’s Pro Account or SkypeIn as examples. These revenue streams are based on a pricing point that is reasonable to a critical mass of power users, who in effect pay’ for others. It is important to observe that in certain cases of the technology business model, such as Skype, network effects help drive both the adoption and value of the service.

These models also enable the possibilities for partnerships, where those such as FeedBurner can leverage their technology to help manage content delivery for papers like the Houston Chronicle.

Network Effects Focused
The network effects business model is one primarily based on user base and user interaction. Like its counterpart, technology is key for this model but it is not the focus. Instead, technology is important as an infrastructure tool, facilitating the business models of these companies.

Of course, in any network effects business model, the idea behind Metcalfe’s law comes into play – the total value of the service is roughly proportional to the square of the number of customers’ utilizing the service. So for MySpace, if Suzy Q could not connect to Betty B or John S but might be able to do so on another network, she might leave.

Community or network content approaches apply both with MySpace, where the content’ is the thousands of user profiles and in the case of Gawker, where their community content is a network of blogs that attracts high volume traffic and readership. In the latter example though, Gawker can do something in addition to the contextual advertising that MySpace does, they can syndicate their content to third-parties such as Yahoo!.

For those that can sell or syndicate content (of which, MySpace and social networking sites cannot), tightly integrated are open APIs that enable mash-ups. Having others build useful applications on top of their content increases its value. If Google, Amazon, or Craigslist, would charge even a nominal fee for access to their data, they would make a killing. Such a change may not be possible at this point but could be an option for others who pursue a network effects business model down the road.

Conclusion
Of course, the web is still evolving because from my perspective, Web 2.0 is a movement and not a demarcation point. But if you think about many of the new companies out there, chances are they would fit into one of these two models.

What Is Web 2.0

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

In the year and a half since, the term “Web 2.0″ has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

This article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	–>	Google AdSense
Ofoto	–>	Flickr
Akamai	–>	BitTorrent
mp3.com	–>	Napster
Britannica Online	–>	Wikipedia
personal websites	–>	blogging
evite	–>	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	–>	search engine optimization
page views	–>	cost per click
screen scraping	–>	web services
publishing	–>	participation
content management systems	–>	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	–>	tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness	–>	syndication

The list went on and on. But what was it that made us identify one application or approach as “Web 1.0″ and another as “Web 2.0″? (The question is particularly urgent because the Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!) We began trying to tease out the principles that are demonstrated in one way or another by the success stories of web 1.0 and by the most interesting of the new applications.

1. The Web As Platform

Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.

Figure 1 shows a “meme map” of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O’Reilly Media. It’s very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.

For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk. The first of those principles was “The web as platform.” Yet that was also a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames after a heated battle with Microsoft. What’s more, two of our initial Web 1.0 exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People don’t often think of it as “web services”, but in fact, ad serving was the first widely deployed web service, and the first widely deployed “mashup” (to use another term that has gained currency of late). Every banner ad is served as a seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering an integrated page to a reader on yet another computer. Akamai also treats the network as the platform, and at a deeper level of the stack, building a transparent caching and content delivery network that eases bandwidth congestion.

Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later entrants have taken their solution to the same problem even further, understanding something deeper about the nature of the new platform. Both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how it’s possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing additional Web 2.0 design patterns.

Let’s drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out some of the essential elements of difference.

Netscape vs. Google

If Netscape was the standard bearer for Web 1.0, Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era. So let’s start with a comparison of these two companies and their positioning.

Netscape framed “the web as platform” in terms of the old software paradigm: their flagship product was the web browser, a desktop application, and their strategy was to use their dominance in the browser market to establish a market for high-priced server products. Control over standards for displaying content and applications in the browser would, in theory, give Netscape the kind of market power enjoyed by Microsoft in the PC market. Much like the “horseless carriage” framed the automobile as an extension of the familiar, Netscape promoted a “webtop” to replace the desktop, and planned to populate that webtop with information updates and applets pushed to the webtop by information providers who would purchase Netscape servers.

In the end, both web browsers and web servers turned out to be commodities, and value moved “up the stack” to services delivered over the web platform.

Google, by contrast, began its life as a native web application, never sold or packaged, but delivered as a service, with customers paying, directly or indirectly, for the use of that service. None of the trappings of the old software industry are present. No scheduled software releases, just continuous improvement. No licensing or sale, just usage. No porting to different platforms so that customers can run the software on their own equipment, just a massively scalable collection of commodity PCs running open source operating systems plus homegrown applications and utilities that no one outside the company ever gets to see.

At bottom, Google requires a competency that Netscape never needed: database management. Google isn’t just a collection of software tools, it’s a specialized database. Without the data, the tools are useless; without the software, the data is unmanageable. Software licensing and control over APIs–the lever of power in the previous era–is irrelevant because the software never need be distributed but only performed, and also because without the ability to collect and manage the data, the software is of little use. In fact, the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.

Google’s service is not a server–though it is delivered by a massive collection of internet servers–nor a browser–though it is experienced by the user within the browser. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.

While both Netscape and Google could be described as software companies, it’s clear that Netscape belonged to the same software world as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other companies that got their start in the 1980′s software revolution, while Google’s fellows are other internet applications like eBay, Amazon, Napster, and yes, DoubleClick and Akamai.

DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense

Like Google, DoubleClick is a true child of the internet era. It harnesses software as a service, has a core competency in data management, and, as noted above, was a pioneer in web services long before web services even had a name. However, DoubleClick was ultimately limited by its business model. It bought into the ’90s notion that the web was about publishing, not participation; that advertisers, not consumers, ought to call the shots; that size mattered, and that the internet was increasingly being dominated by the top websites as measured by MediaMetrix and other web ad scoring companies.

As a result, DoubleClick proudly cites on its website “over 2000 successful implementations” of its software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdSense, by contrast, already serve hundreds of thousands of advertisers apiece.

Overture and Google’s success came from an understanding of what Chris Anderson refers to as “the long tail,” the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web’s content. DoubleClick’s offerings require a formal sales contract, limiting their market to the few thousand largest websites. Overture and Google figured out how to enable ad placement on virtually any web page. What’s more, they eschewed publisher/ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups in favor of minimally intrusive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.

The Web 2.0 lesson: leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head.

A Platform Beats an Application Every Time In each of its past confrontations with rivals, Microsoft has successfully played the platform card, trumping even the most dominant applications. Windows allowed Microsoft to displace Lotus 1-2-3 with Excel, WordPerfect with Word, and Netscape Navigator with Internet Explorer. This time, though, the clash isn’t between a platform and an application, but between two platforms, each with a radically different business model: On the one side, a single software provider, whose massive installed base and tightly integrated operating system and APIs give control over the programming paradigm; on the other, a system without an owner, tied together by a set of protocols, open standards and agreements for cooperation. Windows represents the pinnacle of proprietary control via software APIs. Netscape tried to wrest control from Microsoft using the same techniques that Microsoft itself had used against other rivals, and failed. But Apache, which held to the open standards of the web, has prospered. The battle is no longer unequal, a platform versus a single application, but platform versus platform, with the question being which platform, and more profoundly, which architecture, and which business model, is better suited to the opportunity ahead. Windows was a brilliant solution to the problems of the early PC era. It leveled the playing field for application developers, solving a host of problems that had previously bedeviled the industry. But a single monolithic approach, controlled by a single vendor, is no longer a solution, it’s a problem. Communications-oriented systems, as the internet-as-platform most certainly is, require interoperability. Unless a vendor can control both ends of every interaction, the possibilities of user lock-in via software APIs are limited. Any Web 2.0 vendor that seeks to lock in its application gains by controlling the platform will, by definition, no longer be playing to the strengths of the platform. This is not to say that there are not opportunities for lock-in and competitive advantage, but we believe they are not to be found via control over software APIs and protocols. There is a new game afoot. The companies that succeed in the Web 2.0 era will be those that understand the rules of that game, rather than trying to go back to the rules of the PC software era.

Not surprisingly, other web 2.0 success stories demonstrate this same behavior. eBay enables occasional transactions of only a few dollars between single individuals, acting as an automated intermediary. Napster (though shut down for legal reasons) built its network not by building a centralized song database, but by architecting a system in such a way that every downloader also became a server, and thus grew the network.

Akamai vs. BitTorrent

Like DoubleClick, Akamai is optimized to do business with the head, not the tail, with the center, not the edges. While it serves the benefit of the individuals at the edge of the web by smoothing their access to the high-demand sites at the center, it collects its revenue from those central sites.

BitTorrent, like other pioneers in the P2P movement, takes a radical approach to internet decentralization. Every client is also a server; files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloaders to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file.

BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle: the service automatically gets better the more people use it. While Akamai must add servers to improve service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the party. There’s an implicit “architecture of participation”, a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.

2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence

The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence:

• Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users.
• Yahoo!, the first great internet success story, was born as a catalog, or directory of links, an aggregation of the best work of thousands, then millions of web users. While Yahoo! has since moved into the business of creating many types of content, its role as a portal to the collective work of the net’s users remains the core of its value.
• Google’s breakthrough in search, which quickly made it the undisputed search market leader, was PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results.
• eBay’s product is the collective activity of all its users; like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity, and the company’s role is as an enabler of a context in which that user activity can happen. What’s more, eBay’s competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which makes any new entrant offering similar services significantly less attractive.
• Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page–and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company’s own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with “most popular”, a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the “flow” around products. With an order of magnitude more user participation, it’s no surprise that Amazon’s sales also outpace competitors.

Now, innovative companies that pick up on this insight and perhaps extend it even further, are making their mark on the web:

• Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust, applying Eric Raymond’s dictum (originally coined in the context of open source software) that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” to content creation. Wikipedia is already in the top 100 websites, and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a profound change in the dynamics of content creation!
• Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, two companies that have received a great deal of attention of late, have pioneered a concept that some people call “folksonomy” (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. Tagging allows for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses, rather than rigid categories. In the canonical example, a Flickr photo of a puppy might be tagged both “puppy” and “cute”–allowing for retrieval along natural axes generated user activity.
• Collaborative spam filtering products like Cloudmark aggregate the individual decisions of email users about what is and is not spam, outperforming systems that rely on analysis of the messages themselves.
• It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don’t advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by “viral marketing”–that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn’t Web 2.0.
• Even much of the infrastructure of the web–including the Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python code involved in most web servers–relies on the peer-production methods of open source, in themselves an instance of collective, net-enabled intelligence. There are more than 100,000 open source software projects listed on SourceForge.net. Anyone can add a project, anyone can download and use the code, and new projects migrate from the edges to the center as a result of users putting them to work, an organic software adoption process relying almost entirely on viral marketing.

Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about?

At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. But as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog “seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain.”

One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS. RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web since early hackers realized that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. Skrenta calls this “the incremental web.” Others call it the “live web”.

Now, of course, “dynamic websites” (i.e., database-backed sites with dynamically generated content) replaced static web pages well over ten years ago. What’s dynamic about the live web are not just the pages, but the links. A link to a weblog is expected to point to a perennially changing page, with “permalinks” for any individual entry, and notification for each change. An RSS feed is thus a much stronger link than, say a bookmark or a link to a single page.

The Architecture of Participation Some systems are designed to encourage participation. In his paper, The Cornucopia of the Commons, Dan Bricklin noted that there are three ways to build a large database. The first, demonstrated by Yahoo!, is to pay people to do it. The second, inspired by lessons from the open source community, is to get volunteers to perform the same task. The Open Directory Project, an open source Yahoo competitor, is the result. But Napster demonstrated a third way. Because Napster set its defaults to automatically serve any music that was downloaded, every user automatically helped to build the value of the shared database. This same approach has been followed by all other P2P file sharing services. One of the key lessons of the Web 2.0 era is this: Users add value. But only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application via explicit means. Therefore, Web 2.0 companies set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data and building value as a side-effect of ordinary use of the application. As noted above, they build systems that get better the more people use them. Mitch Kapor once noted that “architecture is politics.” Participation is intrinsic to Napster, part of its fundamental architecture. This architectural insight may also be more central to the success of open source software than the more frequently cited appeal to volunteerism. The architecture of the internet, and the World Wide Web, as well as of open source software projects like Linux, Apache, and Perl, is such that users pursuing their own “selfish” interests build collective value as an automatic byproduct. Each of these projects has a small core, well-defined extension mechanisms, and an approach that lets any well-behaved component be added by anyone, growing the outer layers of what Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, refers to as “the onion.” In other words, these technologies demonstrate network effects, simply through the way that they have been designed. These projects can be seen to have a natural architecture of participation. But as Amazon demonstrates, by consistent effort (as well as economic incentives such as the Associates program), it is possible to overlay such an architecture on a system that would not normally seem to possess it.

RSS also means that the web browser is not the only means of viewing a web page. While some RSS aggregators, such as Bloglines, are web-based, others are desktop clients, and still others allow users of portable devices to subscribe to constantly updated content.

RSS is now being used to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data, and photo availability. This use is actually a return to one of its roots: RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer’s “Really Simple Syndication” technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape’s “Rich Site Summary”, which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows. Netscape lost interest, and the technology was carried forward by blogging pioneer Userland, Winer’s company. In the current crop of applications, we see, though, the heritage of both parents.

But RSS is only part of what makes a weblog different from an ordinary web page. Tom Coates remarks on the significance of the permalink:

It may seem like a trivial piece of functionality now, but it was effectively the device that turned weblogs from an ease-of-publishing phenomenon into a conversational mess of overlapping communities. For the first time it became relatively easy to gesture directly at a highly specific post on someone else’s site and talk about it. Discussion emerged. Chat emerged. And – as a result – friendships emerged or became more entrenched. The permalink was the first – and most successful – attempt to build bridges between weblogs.

In many ways, the combination of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The “blogosphere” can be thought of as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, the conversational watering holes of the early internet. Not only can people subscribe to each others’ sites, and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments.

Interestingly, two-way links were the goal of early hypertext systems like Xanadu. Hypertext purists have celebrated trackbacks as a step towards two way links. But note that trackbacks are not properly two-way–rather, they are really (potentially) symmetrical one-way links that create the effect of two way links. The difference may seem subtle, but in practice it is enormous. Social networking systems like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn, which require acknowledgment by the recipient in order to establish a connection, lack the same scalability as the web. As noted by Caterina Fake, co-founder of the Flickr photo sharing service, attention is only coincidentally reciprocal. (Flickr thus allows users to set watch lists–any user can subscribe to any other user’s photostream via RSS. The object of attention is notified, but does not have to approve the connection.)

If an essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

First, because search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, bloggers paying attention to other bloggers magnifies their visibility and power. The “echo chamber” that critics decry is also an amplifier.

If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls “the wisdom of crowds” comes into play, and much as PageRank produces better results than analysis of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere selects for value.

While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls “we, the media,” a world in which “the former audience”, not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.

3. Data is the Next Intel Inside

Every significant internet application to date has been backed by a specialized database: Google’s web crawl, Yahoo!’s directory (and web crawl), Amazon’s database of products, eBay’s database of products and sellers, MapQuest’s map databases, Napster’s distributed song database. As Hal Varian remarked in a personal conversation last year, “SQL is the new HTML.” Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies, so much so that we have sometimes referred to these applications as “infoware” rather than merely software.

This fact leads to a key question: Who owns the data?

In the internet era, one can already see a number of cases where control over the database has led to market control and outsized financial returns. The monopoly on domain name registry initially granted by government fiat to Network Solutions (later purchased by Verisign) was one of the first great moneymakers of the internet. While we’ve argued that business advantage via controlling software APIs is much more difficult in the age of the internet, control of key data sources is not, especially if those data sources are expensive to create or amenable to increasing returns via network effects.

Look at the copyright notices at the base of every map served by MapQuest, maps.yahoo.com, maps.msn.com, or maps.google.com, and you’ll see the line “Maps copyright NavTeq, TeleAtlas,” or with the new satellite imagery services, “Images copyright Digital Globe.” These companies made substantial investments in their databases (NavTeq alone reportedly invested $750 million to build their database of street addresses and directions. Digital Globe spent $500 million to launch their own satellite to improve on government-supplied imagery.) NavTeq has gone so far as to imitate Intel’s familiar Intel Inside logo: Cars with navigation systems bear the imprint, “NavTeq Onboard.” Data is indeed the Intel Inside of these applications, a sole source component in systems whose software infrastructure is largely open source or otherwise commodified.

The now hotly contested web mapping arena demonstrates how a failure to understand the importance of owning an application’s core data will eventually undercut its competitive position. MapQuest pioneered the web mapping category in 1995, yet when Yahoo!, and then Microsoft, and most recently Google, decided to enter the market, they were easily able to offer a competing application simply by licensing the same data.

Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon “embraced and extended” their data suppliers.

Imagine if MapQuest had done the same thing, harnessing their users to annotate maps and directions, adding layers of value. It would have been much more difficult for competitors to enter the market just by licensing the base data.

The recent introduction of Google Maps provides a living laboratory for the competition between application vendors and their data suppliers. Google’s lightweight programming model has led to the creation of numerous value-added services in the form of mashups that link Google Maps with other internet-accessible data sources. Paul Rademacher’s housingmaps.com, which combines Google Maps with Craigslist apartment rental and home purchase data to create an interactive housing search tool, is the pre-eminent example of such a mashup.

At present, these mashups are mostly innovative experiments, done by hackers. But entrepreneurial activity follows close behind. And already, one can see that for at least one class of developer, Google has taken the role of data source away from Navteq and inserted themselves as a favored intermediary. We expect to see battles between data suppliers and application vendors in the next few years, as both realize just how important certain classes of data will become as building blocks for Web 2.0 applications.

The race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces. In many cases, where there is significant cost to create the data, there may be an opportunity for an Intel Inside style play, with a single source for the data. In others, the winner will be the company that first reaches critical mass via user aggregation, and turns that aggregated data into a system service.

For example, in the area of identity, PayPal, Amazon’s 1-click, and the millions of users of communications systems, may all be legitimate contenders to build a network-wide identity database. (In this regard, Google’s recent attempt to use cell phone numbers as an identifier for Gmail accounts may be a step towards embracing and extending the phone system.) Meanwhile, startups like Sxip are exploring the potential of federated identity, in quest of a kind of “distributed 1-click” that will provide a seamless Web 2.0 identity subsystem. In the area of calendaring, EVDB is an attempt to build the world’s largest shared calendar via a wiki-style architecture of participation. While the jury’s still out on the success of any particular startup or approach, it’s clear that standards and solutions in these areas, effectively turning certain classes of data into reliable subsystems of the “internet operating system”, will enable the next generation of applications.

A further point must be noted with regard to data, and that is user concerns about privacy and their rights to their own data. In many of the early web applications, copyright is only loosely enforced. For example, Amazon lays claim to any reviews submitted to the site, but in the absence of enforcement, people may repost the same review elsewhere. However, as companies begin to realize that control over data may be their chief source of competitive advantage, we may see heightened attempts at control.

Much as the rise of proprietary software led to the Free Software movement, we expect the rise of proprietary databases to result in a Free Data movement within the next decade. One can see early signs of this countervailing trend in open data projects such as Wikipedia, the Creative Commons, and in software projects like Greasemonkey, which allow users to take control of how data is displayed on their computer.

4. End of the Software Release Cycle

As noted above in the discussion of Google vs. Netscape, one of the defining characteristics of internet era software is that it is delivered as a service, not as a product. This fact leads to a number of fundamental changes in the business model of such a company:

1. Operations must become a core competency. Google’s or Yahoo!’s expertise in product development must be matched by an expertise in daily operations. So fundamental is the shift from software as artifact to software as service that the software will cease to perform unless it is maintained on a daily basis. Google must continuously crawl the web and update its indices, continuously filter out link spam and other attempts to influence its results, continuously and dynamically respond to hundreds of millions of asynchronous user queries, simultaneously matching them with context-appropriate advertisements.It’s no accident that Google’s system administration, networking, and load balancing techniques are perhaps even more closely guarded secrets than their search algorithms. Google’s success at automating these processes is a key part of their cost advantage over competitors.

   It’s also no accident that scripting languages such as Perl, Python, PHP, and now Ruby, play such a large role at web 2.0 companies. Perl was famously described by Hassan Schroeder, Sun’s first webmaster, as “the duct tape of the internet.” Dynamic languages (often called scripting languages and looked down on by the software engineers of the era of software artifacts) are the tool of choice for system and network administrators, as well as application developers building dynamic systems that require constant change.

2. Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices (even if the software in question is unlikely to be released under an open source license.) The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. It’s no accident that services such as Gmail, Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, and the like may be expected to bear a “Beta” logo for years at a time.Real time monitoring of user behavior to see just which new features are used, and how they are used, thus becomes another required core competency. A web developer at a major online service remarked: “We put up two or three new features on some part of the site every day, and if users don’t adopt them, we take them down. If they like them, we roll them out to the entire site.”

   Cal Henderson, the lead developer of Flickr, recently revealed that they deploy new builds up to every half hour. This is clearly a radically different development model! While not all web applications are developed in as extreme a style as Flickr, almost all web applications have a development cycle that is radically unlike anything from the PC or client-server era. It is for this reason that a recent ZDnet editorial concluded that Microsoft won’t be able to beat Google: “Microsoft’s business model depends on everyone upgrading their computing environment every two to three years. Google’s depends on everyone exploring what’s new in their computing environment every day.”

While Microsoft has demonstrated enormous ability to learn from and ultimately best its competition, there’s no question that this time, the competition will require Microsoft (and by extension, every other existing software company) to become a deeply different kind of company. Native Web 2.0 companies enjoy a natural advantage, as they don’t have old patterns (and corresponding business models and revenue sources) to shed.

A Web 2.0 Investment Thesis Venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky writes: “The key is to find the actionable investments where you disagree with the consensus”. It’s interesting to see how each Web 2.0 facet involves disagreeing with the consensus: everyone was emphasizing keeping data private, Flickr/Napster/et al. make it public. It’s not just disagreeing to be disagreeable (pet food! online!), it’s disagreeing where you can build something out of the differences. Flickr builds communities, Napster built breadth of collection. Another way to look at it is that the successful companies all give up something expensive but considered critical to get something valuable for free that was once expensive. For example, Wikipedia gives up central editorial control in return for speed and breadth. Napster gave up on the idea of “the catalog” (all the songs the vendor was selling) and got breadth. Amazon gave up on the idea of having a physical storefront but got to serve the entire world. Google gave up on the big customers (initially) and got the 80% whose needs weren’t being met. There’s something very aikido (using your opponent’s force against them) in saying “you know, you’re right–absolutely anyone in the whole world CAN update this article. And guess what, that’s bad news for you.” –Nat Torkington

5. Lightweight Programming Models

Once the idea of web services became au courant, large companies jumped into the fray with a complex web services stack designed to create highly reliable programming environments for distributed applications.

But much as the web succeeded precisely because it overthrew much of hypertext theory, substituting a simple pragmatism for ideal design, RSS has become perhaps the single most widely deployed web service because of its simplicity, while the complex corporate web services stacks have yet to achieve wide deployment.

Similarly, Amazon.com’s web services are provided in two forms: one adhering to the formalisms of the SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) web services stack, the other simply providing XML data over HTTP, in a lightweight approach sometimes referred to as REST (Representational State Transfer). While high value B2B connections (like those between Amazon and retail partners like ToysRUs) use the SOAP stack, Amazon reports that 95% of the usage is of the lightweight REST service.

This same quest for simplicity can be seen in other “organic” web services. Google’s recent release of Google Maps is a case in point. Google Maps’ simple AJAX (Javascript and XML) interface was quickly decrypted by hackers, who then proceeded to remix the data into new services.

Mapping-related web services had been available for some time from GIS vendors such as ESRI as well as from MapQuest and Microsoft MapPoint. But Google Maps set the world on fire because of its simplicity. While experimenting with any of the formal vendor-supported web services required a formal contract between the parties, the way Google Maps was implemented left the data for the taking, and hackers soon found ways to creatively re-use that data.

There are several significant lessons here:

1. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely coupled systems. The complexity of the corporate-sponsored web services stack is designed to enable tight coupling. While this is necessary in many cases, many of the most interesting applications can indeed remain loosely coupled, and even fragile. The Web 2.0 mindset is very different from the traditional IT mindset!
2. Think syndication, not coordination. Simple web services, like RSS and REST-based web services, are about syndicating data outwards, not controlling what happens when it gets to the other end of the connection. This idea is fundamental to the internet itself, a reflection of what is known as the end-to-end principle.
3. Design for “hackability” and remixability. Systems like the original web, RSS, and AJAX all have this in common: the barriers to re-use are extremely low. Much of the useful software is actually open source, but even when it isn’t, there is little in the way of intellectual property protection. The web browser’s “View Source” option made it possible for any user to copy any other user’s web page; RSS was designed to empower the user to view the content he or she wants, when it’s wanted, not at the behest of the information provider; the most successful web services are those that have been easiest to take in new directions unimagined by their creators. The phrase “some rights reserved,” which was popularized by the Creative Commons to contrast with the more typical “all rights reserved,” is a useful guidepost.

Innovation in Assembly

Lightweight business models are a natural concomitant of lightweight programming and lightweight connections. The Web 2.0 mindset is good at re-use. A new service like housingmaps.com was built simply by snapping together two existing services. Housingmaps.com doesn’t have a business model (yet)–but for many small-scale services, Google AdSense (or perhaps Amazon associates fees, or both) provides the snap-in equivalent of a revenue model.

These examples provide an insight into another key web 2.0 principle, which we call “innovation in assembly.” When commodity components are abundant, you can create value simply by assembling them in novel or effective ways. Much as the PC revolution provided many opportunities for innovation in assembly of commodity hardware, with companies like Dell making a science out of such assembly, thereby defeating companies whose business model required innovation in product development, we believe that Web 2.0 will provide opportunities for companies to beat the competition by getting better at harnessing and integrating services provided by others.

6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device

One other feature of Web 2.0 that deserves mention is the fact that it’s no longer limited to the PC platform. In his parting advice to Microsoft, long time Microsoft developer Dave Stutz pointed out that “Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.”

Of course, any web application can be seen as software above the level of a single device. After all, even the simplest web application involves at least two computers: the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And as we’ve discussed, the development of the web as platform extends this idea to synthetic applications composed of services provided by multiple computers.

But as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the “2.0-ness” is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform.

To date, iTunes is the best exemplar of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many previous attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example.

iTunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure. Data management is most clearly the heart of their offering. They are services, not packaged applications (although in the case of iTunes, it can be used as a packaged application, managing only the user’s local data.) What’s more, both TiVo and iTunes show some budding use of collective intelligence, although in each case, their experiments are at war with the IP lobby’s. There’s only a limited architecture of participation in iTunes, though the recent addition of podcasting changes that equation substantially.

This is one of the areas of Web 2.0 where we expect to see some of the greatest change, as more and more devices are connected to the new platform. What applications become possible when our phones and our cars are not consuming data but reporting it? Real time traffic monitoring, flash mobs, and citizen journalism are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.

7. Rich User Experiences

As early as Pei Wei’s Viola browser in 1992, the web was being used to deliver “applets” and other kinds of active content within the web browser. Java’s introduction in 1995 was framed around the delivery of such applets. JavaScript and then DHTML were introduced as lightweight ways to provide client side programmability and richer user experiences. Several years ago, Macromedia coined the term “Rich Internet Applications” (which has also been picked up by open source Flash competitor Laszlo Systems) to highlight the capabilities of Flash to deliver not just multimedia content but also GUI-style application experiences.

However, the potential of the web to deliver full scale applications didn’t hit the mainstream till Google introduced Gmail, quickly followed by Google Maps, web based applications with rich user interfaces and PC-equivalent interactivity. The collection of technologies used by Google was christened AJAX, in a seminal essay by Jesse James Garrett of web design firm Adaptive Path. He wrote:

“Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.”

Web 2.0 Design Patterns In his book, A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander prescribes a format for the concise description of the solution to architectural problems. He writes: “Each pattern describes a problem that occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.” The Long Tail Small sites make up the bulk of the internet’s content; narrow niches make up the bulk of internet’s the possible applications. Therefore: Leverage customer-self service and algorithmic data management to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head. Data is the Next Intel Inside Applications are increasingly data-driven. Therefore: For competitive advantage, seek to own a unique, hard-to-recreate source of data. Users Add Value The key to competitive advantage in internet applications is the extent to which users add their own data to that which you provide. Therefore: Don’t restrict your “architecture of participation” to software development. Involve your users both implicitly and explicitly in adding value to your application. Network Effects by Default Only a small percentage of users will go to the trouble of adding value to your application. Therefore: Set inclusive defaults for aggregating user data as a side-effect of their use of the application. Some Rights Reserved. Intellectual property protection limits re-use and prevents experimentation. Therefore: When benefits come from collective adoption, not private restriction, make sure that barriers to adoption are low. Follow existing standards, and use licenses with as few restrictions as possible. Design for “hackability” and “remixability.” The Perpetual Beta When devices and programs are connected to the internet, applications are no longer software artifacts, they are ongoing services. Therefore: Don’t package up new features into monolithic releases, but instead add them on a regular basis as part of the normal user experience. Engage your users as real-time testers, and instrument the service so that you know how people use the new features. Cooperate, Don’t Control Web 2.0 applications are built of a network of cooperating data services. Therefore: Offer web services interfaces and content syndication, and re-use the data services of others. Support lightweight programming models that allow for loosely-coupled systems. Software Above the Level of a Single Device The PC is no longer the only access device for internet applications, and applications that are limited to a single device are less valuable than those that are connected. Therefore: Design your application from the get-go to integrate services across handheld devices, PCs, and internet servers.

AJAX is also a key component of Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr, now part of Yahoo!, 37signals’ applications basecamp and backpack, as well as other Google applications such as Gmail and Orkut. We’re entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.

Interestingly, many of the capabilities now being explored have been around for many years. In the late ’90s, both Microsoft and Netscape had a vision of the kind of capabilities that are now finally being realized, but their battle over the standards to be used made cross-browser applications difficult. It was only when Microsoft definitively won the browser wars, and there was a single de-facto browser standard to write to, that this kind of application became possible. And while Firefox has reintroduced competition to the browser market, at least so far we haven’t seen the destructive competition over web standards that held back progress in the ’90s.

We expect to see many new web applications over the next few years, both truly novel applications, and rich web reimplementations of PC applications. Every platform change to date has also created opportunities for a leadership change in the dominant applications of the previous platform.

Gmail has already provided some interesting innovations in email, combining the strengths of the web (accessible from anywhere, deep database competencies, searchability) with user interfaces that approach PC interfaces in usability. Meanwhile, other mail clients on the PC platform are nibbling away at the problem from the other end, adding IM and presence capabilities. How far are we from an integrated communications client combining the best of email, IM, and the cell phone, using VoIP to add voice capabilities to the rich capabilities of web applications? The race is on.

It’s easy to see how Web 2.0 will also remake the address book. A Web 2.0-style address book would treat the local address book on the PC or phone merely as a cache of the contacts you’ve explicitly asked the system to remember. Meanwhile, a web-based synchronization agent, Gmail-style, would remember every message sent or received, every email address and every phone number used, and build social networking heuristics to decide which ones to offer up as alternatives when an answer wasn’t found in the local cache. Lacking an answer there, the system would query the broader social network.

A Web 2.0 word processor would support wiki-style collaborative editing, not just standalone documents. But it would also support the rich formatting we’ve come to expect in PC-based word processors. Writely is a good example of such an application, although it hasn’t yet gained wide traction.

Nor will the Web 2.0 revolution be limited to PC applications. Salesforce.com demonstrates how the web can be used to deliver software as a service, in enterprise scale applications such as CRM.

The competitive opportunity for new entrants is to fully embrace the potential of Web 2.0. Companies that succeed will create applications that learn from their users, using an architecture of participation to build a commanding advantage not just in the software interface, but in the richness of the shared data.

Core Competencies of Web 2.0 Companies

In exploring the seven principles above, we’ve highlighted some of the principal features of Web 2.0. Each of the examples we’ve explored demonstrates one or more of those key principles, but may miss others. Let’s close, therefore, by summarizing what we believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

The next time a company claims that it’s “Web 2.0,” test their features against the list above. The more points they score, the more they are worthy of the name. Remember, though, that excellence in one area may be more telling than some small steps in all seven.

6 Secret Signs of an Easy Home Business

Here are the six things to look for in an easy home business:1. A Well-Established Company With A Great Track RecordIt’s no secret that most so-called easy home businesses fail. There are a thousand reasons why, and it would take a business degree to really understand it all, but one thing that easy home businesses share is a great track record.

If a company is able to survive and thrive for 4 years, it means they have everything in place to run the business – and that means you can join up and hit the ground running.

2. Popular Products

This ties closely with Item 1 – an easy home business must have products that people want! It sounds simple, but many “fast cash” businesses you see being marketed on the Internet have products that you would NEVER buy in a thousand years. Yet they expect you to sell them!

By choosing an easy home business that has products that are easy to sell, it makes everything easier. You don’t need to twist arms, or deal with a high percentage of product returns. Everthing goes smoothly when people are calling YOU to order!

3. No Large Up-Front Costs

This might sound surprising, but CASH is in short supply when you start any easy home business. That’s right – every easy home business has this problem. It’s important to know that the cost of getting into a business is not your only cost – there are marketing costs to consider, for instance. How will you attract new customers and new sales? You’ll need to have business cards, a telephone (try not to use your home phone, just in case your business skyrockets or, Lord fordbid, goes bankrupt), and other expenses. You may need to attend teleconferences, or travel to events, and these costs should be considered BEFORE you jump in to any easy home business with both feet.

4 No Inventory to Maintain

We’ve all seen the easy home business opportunity that lets you get in on their hot opportunity – if you’ll fill your garage with products. Those days are gone!

In today’s environment, easy home businesses do all the product handling for you – they will produce it, package it, ship it, and even bill the customer on your behalf. Your only requirement is to tell them where to send your earnings!

Be sure that the easy home business you choose has no inventory requirements.

5. An Easy Way to Attract New Customers

A great easy home business is one that has customers coming to YOU. This is achieved by having a system in place that lets customers find you.

6. A Great Marketing System

The best easy home businesses come with a fine-tuned marketing system that you can use. This is a system that you can plug into with minimal effort, and see results in a very short timeframe. Things like replicated websites, co-op advertising, and low cost marketing kits are things that indicate a great marketing engine is in place. You’ll need these tools if you are going to attract potential customers quickly.

Summary

If you spend some time looking at easy home businesses, you’ll find some that have the six features in this arcticle. Choosing a business with these features is the best way to maximize your chances of success, and gives you a greater likelihood of seeing positive cashflow in a relatively short timeframe. There’s no guarantees, but this checklist will really improve your odds of success!

10 reasons for starting a home business online

1. You want to escape the rat race. You’d rather spend the hours you waste every day with your family, or on a hobby. Running your own business online you can stop the commute, and you can feel good because you are helping to cut pollution too.

2 You can work part time building your new home business online until you see it taking off. You aren’t giving up your bill paying regular job to jump in without any income.

3 It’s possible to start a home business online with very little outlay. Webhosting is cheaper than a bricks and mortar shopfront. You already have the pc to access the net, it can start working for it’s keep.

4 You can choose your own hours. If you have an appointment to keep in the morning, start your online work in the afternoon. No one can tell you “you can’t have that week off in August, Bill got in first”

5 If you work harder you can benefit directly, you put more hours in and your online business makes more profit, your wages go up. Your salary isn’t fixed by someone elses view of what you’re worth.

6 A lot of online business tasks can be automated, using readily available tools. Emails can be automatically sent by autoresponders, even regularly asked questions can be sorted and answered by software.

7 A website works 24 hours a day without complaining. Even if you’re on holiday your online business website can be working online for you bringing in money. 

8 Your online business can be as far reaching as you want, it can offer something for your local community. It can equally sell to people around the world, without penalty. It doesn’t cost any extra to send an email to Australia, or for your website to be used to

9 Starting a home business online means you have a continuously growing market as more and more people come online everyday.

10 It’s dress down day everyday. You can work in your pyjamas if you want, nobody’s going to stop you in your own home. No more suits and ties unless you want to wear them, but that’s your choice.

Why Small Businesses should have a Business Blog

The use of Business Blogging by small businesses is a topic that has been covered by many but is certainly important enough to be revisited here. I am convinced, given the wide range of potential benefits and the different ways in which a small business can use a Business Blog, that the discussion should not be if a blog is worthwhile but rather where its focus should lie.

A blog can play a central role in the marketing activity of a Small Business but, like all forms of marketing, it needs to be planned, targeted and measured. Consequently, a key phase in creating a successful Small Business blog happens ahead of its launch when you plan out how you want to use your Blog, who your target audience is and what you want to achieve with it. All three of these elements are key to its success.

If we now take a look at some of the potential types of focus that a small business Blog can take, then you will see what a powerful tool it can be.

Demonstrate and communicate your expertise
Most small businesses offer specialist knowledge and skills – it’s what differentiates them – but what they often lack is a way to demonstrate them to potential customers. A Business Blog offers the ability to do this and much more beside. By what you write in your posts and also how you write them, you can show your expertise without overtly selling to your readers – this gives you the chance to build up a positive reputation and a degree of trust with potential clients and partners alike.

Build individual networks and foster collaboration
Small businesses may be specialists but they also need a strong support structure and partners around them. Business blogging is not only an ideal way to start to engage with customers, as we have seen, but also to foster partnerships, collaborations and joint ventures with others in your industry. As you attract other players in your marketplace to your blog, opportunities for collaboration and networking will develop naturally through the conversations taking place.

Communicate with a local, national or global audience
While Business Blogs are most often used to communicate with a targeted, but geographically widespread, audience, they can also allow you to focus in on a local customer base, primarily by changing the emphasis of the posts and the structure. This flexibility of approach means that small businesses of all types and with all types of customer base can use blogs to promote their business and develop relationships with their customers.

Developing reputation and trust
We all need to get closer to our customers and a Business Blog is an excellent way to achieve that. It allows us to engage customers and readers of our blog in a way that no other online method can achieve. This in turn gives us the time and the opportunity to develop our reputation in their eyes and foster a high level of trust between ourselves and our customers.

Great Search Engine rankings
With so many people using the internet to research products and services before they buy, small businesses need to achieve a prominent position and high ranking in Search Engine Results for their chosen key phrases. Business Blogs can help immeasurably in this. The structure of a blog combined with the focused nature of the posts, regular updates and the interlinking which is part and parcel of blogs, will all push you towards to the top of the rankings. This makes a Business Blog ideal for small businesses looking for greater visibility and enquiries.

Dominate a Niche Market
Small businesses usually have a set of services or products which are designed to answer the needs of a specific, and often, niche market. Getting exposure in that market is key to being able to dominate it and ensure that your business is the one that the market itself recommends. Using a Business Blog, you can raise your profile and lead the discussions on any aspect affecting that market. Talk about it and get talked about!

Project your personality
As a small business, you will tend to work very closely with your customers. Your expertise is highly important but so are you as a person and how you get on with your customer – a strong relationship will help to ensure that the project develops well. Blogs can let your personality shine through before you enter the relationship and may give you the edge in being selected.

Easy Web Publishing – no webmaster required!
While we rightly focus on external benefits, we should not forget that there are also solid internal reasons for using a blog in a small business and ease of use is right at the top of that list. Blogs can be used in addition to a business website or as part of it – they can also be used instead of a website. In all of these cases, once established, you can publish new content or change pages on your site without relying on a web designer or webmaster. Reader friendly, user friendly and cost effective.

Research your Market
Your Business Blog provides you with a two way communication tool, and the information that you can get from your readers may be highly important. By participating in the discussions that your posts will generate, you should be able to get a clearer idea of what the up to the minute interests of your clients are. Surveys and focus groups can achieve this to a certain level but open conversations on your Blog will achieve much more, both in terms of depth and breadth.

Finally a word of advice: don’t get hung up about the word “blog” – a blog is a tool and it’s what you do with it that counts. Many people use Microsoft Word but the documents that they produce are as varied as the author. The same is true with Blogs for small businesses. So, evaluate what you need as a business and then focus strongly on using the Blog for that purpose and it will be successful for you.

11 ways to sink your corporate blog, Titanic style

Companies are discovering the benefits of communicating with customers through corporate blogs, and are setting them up in ever greater numbers. There are many places now where you can find help in setting up and developing successful blogs – indeed I hope that Better Business Blogging is one of them! However, I have found a dearth of places with practical information on sinking a blog, although the blogosphere seems to be littered with real life examples of dead or dying blogs.So I decided that it would be good to post some pointers to help those determined to professionally sink their blog. These have been tried and tested by some of the most expert blog “scuttlers” around so, with pens and keyboard at the ready and without further ado, I give you:

1. Don’t focus on any one subject area: keep your readers on their toes by switching between posts on “Thermal Dynamics” and who is likely to win “The X Factor” or “American Idol”. Maintaining a clear focus on your blog will simply attract readers interested in the subject and encourage high search engine rankings for your relevant keywords. A real “no-no” when trying to kill off your blog.

2. Make sure your Domain name can be misread: ‘Experts Exchange’ may be the name of your blog but you could find that using a domain name of www.expertsexchange.cc results in you attracting readers looking for a very different type of service.

3. Over-optimise your posts: a keyword-optimised post should contain keyword phrases which are keyword attractive to Search Engines but non-keyword-optimised human readers are less likely to wade through keyword-rich blogs with too many keywords which make no sense. (cf. keyword phrases). Related post: “Keywords for keyword addicts”

4. Always sign your posts with “Lots of Love”: blogs are intended to be personal, so you can never be too friendly with your readers. Adding “xxx” for kisses adds that additional personal touch that sets you apart from other blogs.

5. Don’t update your Blog: you know that your first post was probably “the best you’ve ever written” or indeed “the best anyone’s ever written”, so don’t pander to your readers’ whims by providing regular information. In any case, you’ll find that good regular information will only encourage them to come back and recommend your blog others, so stay clear of this potential minefield at all costs.

6. Avoid pictures - in fact avoid anything remotely colourful. Everyone loves pages of plain text and the more austere it is the better, so don’t mess it up with imagery. Ideally steer clear of new paragraphs as well, one long one is more than sufficient – and you’ll also find that punctuation only distracts readers so do away with that too.

7. Cater to a Multilingual audience … but do so using an online translation tool. You will find that your blog instantly becomes unintelligible in the target language as well as the original. A clear “Win – Win” situation when it comes to confusing readers and chasing them away.

8. Don’t respond to comments: to be honest, you never meant to allow people to actually leave comments anyway, it was just that you couldn’t find how to disable them. And don’t install a spam comment filter either – all those “special interest sites” are probably just what the doctor ordered.

9. Calculate your Blog’s ROI – not a bad idea, per se, but once you have gathered everyone’s opinion on how to do it, decided on what criteria really matter and how to measure them and then finally got stuck into the calculations, you will find that you have no time left to post anything of value.

10. Use lots and lots of external advertising – there’s nothing like a good game of “Hunt the Post” on a blog, your corporate readers will love it! So make sure you have multiple AdSense, BlogAds and eMiniMalls on your blog although, if space permits, you might like to squeeze in a post or two. The false dawn of hope that your readers experience when they finally find a post is a joy to behold.

11. Avoid expressing an opinion – there is nothing worse than opinions to get people’s backs up and encourage them to participate on your blog which you will then need to ignore at all costs to dampen the debate. You may find that sharing information carries these same risks as it opens the door for dialogue and discussion, so avoid at all costs.

With these 11 key rules in place, you will be well on your way to creating a blog which is certainly unattractive and hopefully will not be around long enough to gain any visibility for your company in the market. So cast off and bon voyage!

7 Blog Promotion Strategies That Work

Below are only the things that produced visitors to my site in the last 48 hours. Nothing theoretical whatsoever.

1) Search Engines

Yesterday was my biggest day yet with this new site platform and the performance is unlike anything I have ever experienced before.

I had more search engine traffic from more phrases in one 48 hour period than ever.

From very nice short tail keywords like “video syndication” to fat long tail phrases like “how to get more friends on myspace.”

And everything in between.

How do I do so well in the engines?

I use the very best publishing system on Planet Earth. Nuff said.

2) Article Syndication

LOL – right? Wrong. Article syndication is still a very powerful traffic driver if you do it properly.

Rather than try to be on every article directory on the web, I go for the most important article directories on the web.

I also write the best content I can on highly relevant, topical, hot issues in my niche.

I do not wirte and syndicate articles for links. I write for traffic. Huge difference most people completely ignore.

I syndicated this article over the weekend and am getting traffic from the following article sites:

• GoArticles.com
• Ezinearticles.com

I will get traffic from many others, but I am only showing you today what happened to drive real targeted traffic in the last 24 hours. (People don’t do this anywhere else that I know of by the way!)

I syndicate my articles exclusively with SubmitYourArticle.com.

3) News Readers

Because I have several feeds to choose from, and a wide range of related topics I publish on, I have feed subscribers on all kinds of readers.

In the last 24 hours I have gotten traffic from people using feed readers from:

• Yahoo
• Google
• Bloglines
• Delicious, and
• different versions of desktop readers like MyWebTop.com.

4) Links

I’ve gotten significant traffic in the last 48 hours from sites such as:

• BradFallon.com
• CreativeBits.org
• WillieCrawford.com
• MichelFortin.com

and many many others.

These are link partnerships or just people pointing to specific posts here and commenting on their blogs.

The better your content, the more people comment and trackback your site. So good content equals good link traffic.

5) TrafficSwarm

I get a good amount of traffic each day from TrafficSwarm, which is no new kid on the block.

I have tested the traffic from this service and opt-in rates are good, meaning the traffic isn’t junk traffic, if you were wondering.

They have a free and paid version. Don’t bother with it on the free level. It is extremely inexpensive traffic compared to Adwords and Co-registration, and there are other benefits of membership aside from direct traffic and subscribers.

6) Video Syndication

I have been doing screen capture blog marketing videos lately and syndicating them on all the free video sharing sites available.

Since I started (I have only done 4 so far) I can attribute top 10 rankings in Google for terms like “blog marketing videos” and many others to this marketing tactic alone.

Since video sharing sites are all popular (none of the sites I syndicate videos to are under PR5, most PR6 or higher) the links are worth a lot and the traffic is great each time I submit a video.

Video syndication will be one of the buzz phrases of 2007. Glad I am in the top 10 for that phrase too!

7) Tagging and Pinging

Or simply posting properly and showing up automatically (and practically instantly) in places like Technorati which track blogs, is a big daily traffic driver.

Right after I post this I will see traffic from Technorati and other sites that I ping.

Kind of encourages me to post regularly knowing every post brings me more traffic and another chance to score in the engines for more keywords.

If you don’t know how this is all done, the best information available on the subject is from Sean Wu.

Again, the above tactics all resulted in real, live, free targeted traffic to the Friday Traffic Report in the last 48 hours.

Thought you’d like to see what is working based on my actual log files rather than more theoretical pieces from people who don’t necessarily use the tactics they push to drive traffic to their own sites.

72 places to submit your blog

Here is a list of 72 places to submit your blog.

1. http://blog.hotornot.com/
2. http://blogadvance.com/
3. http://blogannounce.info/
4. http://blogexplosion.com/
5. http://blogoriffic.com/
6. http://blogs.tomstopsites.com
7. http://boingboing.net/
8. http://browseblogs.com/
9. http://bulkfeeds.net/
10. http://dir.blogflux.com/
11. http://directory.autismlina.com/
12. http://directory.blogthat.net/
13. http://findingblog.com/
14. http://geekphilosopher.com/
15. http://memigo.com/
16. http://portal.eatonweb.com/
17. http://wutzle.com/
18. http://www.5starblogs.com/
19. http://www.biggerblogger.com/
20. http://www.blogarama.com/
21. http://www.blogazoo.com/
22. http://www.blogcatalog.com/
23. http://www.blogdigger.com/
24. http://www.blogdir.co.uk/
25. http://www.blogdir.com/
26. http://www.blog-directory.org/index.php
    
27. http://www.blogdust.com/blog-directory/
28. http://www.bloggeries.com/
29. http://www.bloggernity.com/
30. http://www.bloghop.com/
31. http://www.bloghub.com/
32. http://www.blogion.com/
33. http://www.bloglines.com/
34. http://www.blogmatrix.com/
35. http://www.blogpoint.com/
36. http://www.blogpulse.com/
37. http://www.blogrankings.com/
38. http://www.blogratingz.com/index.jsp
39. http://www.blogroll.net/
    
40. http://www.blogscholar.com/
41. http://www.blogs-collection.com/
42. http://www.blogsearchengine.com/
43. http://www.blogsforsmallbusiness.com
    
44. http://www.blogsrating.com/
45. http://www.blogstreet.com/
46. http://www.blogtoplist.com/
47. http://www.blogtopsites.com/
48. http://www.blogwise.com/
49. http://www.bloogz.com/
50. http://www.blurtit.com/
51. http://www.crayon.net/
    
52. http://www.delightfulblogs.com/
53. http://www.esperanto.se/kiosk/engindex.html
54. http://www.feedmap.net/BlogMap/
    
55. http://www.findory.com/blogs/
56. http://www.getblogs.com/
57. http://www.globeofblogs.com/
58. http://www.headlinespot.com/
59. http://www.icerocket.com/
60. http://www.kookkoo.com/
61. http://www.newstrove.com/
62. http://www.quickblogdirectory.com/
63. http://www.rateitall.com/
64. http://www.rssmad.com/
65. http://www.sarthak.net/blogz/
    
66. http://www.search4blog.com/
67. http://www.technorati.com/
68. http://www.thevital.net/
    
69. http://www.thevital.net/
    
70. http://www.truthlaidbear.com/
71. http://www.wilsdomain.com/blogs/
72. http://www.yourwebloghere.com/