Notes from Web 2.0

We're here at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. I'll take some notes here:

Business Models for RSS: recreating the INBOX? Authors, as always, being left behind? Will the market sort out the compensation for each of the constituencies -- author, publisher, RSS service? Do the authors even care? NYTimes clearly cares very much, but PR Blogs -- these people don't care who benefits, their blogs are out there to garner publicity. HEP: a RSS to email gateway, that enables bidirectional communication between the author and the audience (must investigate). Extending RSS: through RSS you receive text, products, music, photos -- right now these are all flattened, then you receive the feed and have to reintroduce specificity to the data. Trusted Networks a la Ebay -- possible to decentralize it? [The network more valuable intact (entertainment value, discovery)]. People Lie. People are Lazy. First mentions of Flickr. :) Tagging by the seller sucks; tagging by the community works. Tagging when done for a non-commercial reasons no one is trying to sell anything tends to be more accurate. Humans need to do the tagging. On Flickr there is an incentive to tag, to find info later. People tagging it themselves because it will have value to them later.

I've heard the word "Kumbaya" twice now to describe something touchy-feely, let's all hold hands.

Dialing on the App Tone Ebay opened up their APIs to generate more GMS -- General Merchandise Sales -- 40% of their sales come through their APIs, not insignificant. Affliate programs are essentially a micropayment system. Guy from eBay recommends a book called "Platform Leadership" (a book about how to build a business around "complementers") To Flickr: what about Wallop? We do not want to establish or push a standard. Open APIs as a way of acquiring innovation -- see what the outside developers build and, if you're Microsoft, then copy them.

At this point the sessions began and I stopped taking notes.