You might have read today already about the launch of blognation, a new blog network created by Sam Sethi to cover the Web 2.0 ecosystems in different countries around the world with country specific blogs. To cut a long story short, I am going to be leaving GizBuzz and Oratos to become a UK editor of blognation, along with Ivan Pope, Ewan Spence and David Terrar. Over the next few days and weeks, a number of country blogs will be launched, each written by an editor who is an expert in his or her respective country, in English.

You may remember Sam from an interview I conducted with him late last year after he fell out with Michael Arrington. He’s very eminent within the UK and European web startup scene, and blognation gives me an exciting new platform to take blogging and podcasting further.

This obviously leaves the big question of what happens with GizBuzz and Oratos. I cannot continue to blog on GizBuzz, since it is obviously in a fairly similar niche to blognation. Whilst I am fairly keen that it should not die, we haven’t found an editor to run the site, and so it looks as though it will be dormant for the moment. It will certainly stay online, however. The future for Oratos is looking more rosy; FOSSwire, the blog we launched late last year, is doing phenomenally well. YouMakeMedia is also growing nicely.

So, if you want to keep up to date with my writings in the future, I encourage you to subscribe to blognation. Since I won’t be writing about US startups at blognation, I might post the occasional thought on what is happening in Silicon Valley at my personal blog.

Finally, it just remains to thank all those who have contributed to GizBuzz, commented and read, as well as all those who have helped us along the way, whether by giving us an interview or tipping us off to news. Two people in particular stand out; Peter, who has written a huge quantity of fantastic content for GizBuzz for well over a year, as well as helping out with the podcasts, and Chris who designed the site for nothing, without being asked, and has written and podcasted on numerous occasions. When I started the site in January 2006 I had no idea that GizBuzz would become what it has, and I will always be grateful to those who helped make that happen through their incredible generosity of time and spirit. Thank you.

Update: As you may have read, blognation failed as a result of Sam Sethi’s dishonesty in public and to his employees about the funding status of blognation, and his consequent inability to pay anyone involved. Gory details abound on the internet, but suffice to say that this is a sad failure, both because it was utterly preventable, and because the concept had so much scope for success. The silver lining is the number of fantastic people I met through my involvement with blognation, both internally and in the wider UK startup community. At present there are no plans to restart GizBuzz, although this may change in the future. In the meantime, you can read my blognation content here.

The new launch of Zooomr has been a shambles, with about two weeks of downtime, and the final product isn’t even that interesting. As I write this it is down yet again, and the latest version is far too buggy to have been released and adds little in the way of innovation, with most of the new features either minor or ripped off other sites (most obviously Twitter for Zipline and Flickr for ‘awesomeness’). Chris Van Patten, editor of YouMakeMedia and previously a fan of Zooomr, described it as “it’s a half-hearted new look with a few disconnected features”. I think that’s fair. Robert Scoble, normally an enthusiastic evangelist for the service, has written a post which criticises their lack of a business plan and implores them to take serious steps to take Zooomr to the next level. He has some ideas, and so have I.

I had originally written these ideas in an earlier version of this post on my personal blog (which has fewer readers) a couple of days ago, because I felt that it was unfair to be too critical publicly, given the fact that Zooomr was built by a then 17-year-old Kris Tate, singlehandedly. Zooomr is an incredible achievement for him, and I have a huge amount of respect for him. However, the disastrous nature of the launch of Mark III looks as though it could be, at least in part, down to his lack of experience. My main evidence for this is an excellent account of the release by Zoli Erdos. He writes of Kris’ lack of focus on the core of what needed to be done to bring Zooomr back online, instead becoming obsessed by making use of a Sun server which wasn’t necessary to actually launch. He writes:

Good intentions aside, what he really needs now is razor-sharp focus on doing whatever it takes to bring Zooomr online now. When you run a Software-as-a-Service business, even if it’s all free, people, in this case 50-100,000 users become dependent on you - that’s a responsibility. Understanding that responsibility is what differentiates business leaders from dreamers - however well-intentioned, talented they are.

Note that all this is second hand information; if it has got mixed up at some point along the line, someone tell me and I’ll correct it.

Where from here, then? It has become clear that the Kris Tate - Thomas Hawk (brilliant amateur photographer, investment manager and part-time Zooomr CEO) partnership on Zooomr is no longer enough if it is to prosper. They have handled the community aspect mostly brilliantly as I wrote a couple of weeks ago (albeit with an occasional lack of sufficient information according to Zoli’s post). Things that haven’t been handled well have been engineering (the massive downtime is evidence enough for this) and business strategy. Whilst some might dispute the last point, citing the launch of the Zooomr marketplace which allows users to sell their photography as stock, I doubt that will bring significant revenue. The stock system at the moment works fine for the people it is supposed to work for (the buyers of the stock and the agencies), and I expect there will be serious problems with the signal to noise ratio in the marketplace, making it mostly useless for people wanting to buy stock.

Both those problems point to needing VC or at least angel funding. Funding would provide the ability to hire a couple of experienced engineers as well as enough hardware to ensure a reliable, effective service. They would also provide the pressure to find a proper business model. I suspect that Kris and Thomas are hard at work trying to find investment already.

They should also build out a ‘community board’. Zooomr’s strong point is its cult-like following from many key people, some of whom would have invaluable insight. Get famous people from the community with a track record of predicting the curve like Scoble (who would be happy to do this, I would have thought), as well as some non-competing clever founders, who might be less known but have better ideas, some amateur photographers and finally some random Zooomr users who live locally to help in coming up with ideas and strategy, with monthly-or-so meetings. Zooomr gets great advice and coverage, and in return Zooomr leverages their community to generate lots of good will for everyone who helps them out, as they have done with those who lent them hardware this week. They shouldn’t pay the advisors.

My other thought was that maybe Yahoo should buy Zooomr, and make it an experimental, cutting edge test ground. Chuck random ideas at it and see what happens. Kris Tate would be a real asset for Yahoo/Flickr, and the new experimental site would already have a passionate, vocal user base. I guess this is pretty unlikely to happen, though.

Zooomr could go far, but isn’t going anywhere at the moment. There’s lots going for it, but hard, shrewd decisions need to be taken now in order to realise its potential.

For this episode, I interviewed Chris Saad of Particls, an attention management application of which I am a great fan. They’re coming out of a private beta today, and are also announcing a revenue sharing version of Particls for online publishers. You can download it here.

The official description of Particls here, but essentially it is a desktop application which works out what you are interested in, ranks incoming information in order of importance and then displays it in various different ways proportional to that importance. This approach goes a long way to solving the problems of information overload which anyone with more than a few feeds in their RSS reader will be aware of.

Some of the things Chris and I discussed included the phenomenon of attention metadata, who might want to use Particls and why, monetisation (Particls is pretty unique in Web 2.0 for having a rock-solid plan to make money that will almost certainly work well), the APML Workgroup and Sam Sethi’s concept of iPALS. It’s not too long, and don’t be put off if you haven’t heard of APML or iPALS - they’re quite simple really, and Chris explains them well.

Get the Podcast

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Music in the episode

I decided to try something new this week, and stick some music on the end of the podcast. I like Jamie Cullum, and couldn’t help thinking that the lyrics to this song could equally well apply to Web 2.0. Below are the song details, and a link to download it (legally - it is specifically licensed for bloggers and podcasters to distribute it by Cullum’s label as a means of promotion).

Download “I Want To Be A Popstar” (mp3)
from “Pointless Nostalgic”
by Jamie Cullum
Candid Productions

• Buy at iTunes Music Store
• Buy at eMusic

Vecosys has confirmed TechCrunch’s rumour that Google will partner with O2 to launch a UK phone network. The partnership with O2 is not unlike Virgin Mobile’s with T-Mobile. Known as Virtual Mobile Network Operators, Virgin Mobile piggy backs on T-Mobile’s network infrastructure which means they don’t have to make that massive outlay. I found myself posting quite a long comment over on Vecosys, so I thought I may as well rehash and develop it to post it here.

According to Sam Sethi, Google will use branded Nokia phones as their handsets, and will obviously preload them with Google software. Google already has a lot of mobile apps; you can download Google Maps and a Gmail app to your phone, and many services such as iGoogle and Google Reader are available online in mobile versions, as well as obviously search.

So why are Google doing this? Sam sees the move as an attempt to enable Google to collect our attention data on the move as well as at our computers, as they are already doing.

Whilst he’s probably right indirectly, I’m not sure that’s the main reason behind the decision. At the moment the penetration of mobile internet isn’t that great in the UK, partly due do expensive data bills and partly down to culture - most people just don’t see the need to regularly access the internet on their phone (the most widespread use is probably getting football scores), and are unlikely to be aware that they can access email on a normal phone, without requiring a Blackberry. Presumably the Google Mobile network will be about changing that by making data as cheap as possible, subsidised by adverts on Google services. If the apps are already on the phone, and aren’t expensive to use, people are likely to use them.

It strikes me as a slightly silly thing to do; data costs are coming down (T-mobile and 3 are both offering fairly cheap ‘unlimited’ data plans now). Also, by launching this, they’re tying themselves into a market which is a long way from their traditional core of information organisation and advertising. Virgin Mobile, for example, runs a customer service operation to support its network. Whilst it may be possible to avoid some of that by whitelabelling some of O2’s operations, there will still inevitably need to be some ‘drag’, like sales operations.

It seems like a desperate attempt to increase adoption of their mobile services, which might well help in the short term but will probably hurt them in the long run as they realise that they don’t want, or need, to be part of the mobile business. Had Google itself been invented in the earlier stages of the internet, they might have been tempted to launch an ISP to increase adoption of the internet and indirectly their search engine. I think it is clear that that would not have been a sensible move.

There’s been some interesting things happening in personal publishing happening recently - Twitter has become incredibly popular, and that has probably been the catalyst to a new phenomenon known as lifestreams. As far as I can tell, these were invented by British web developer Jeremy Keith, who described them thus:

Just about every time somebody publishes something on the Web, it gets time stamped. Wouldn’t it be nice to pull in all these disparate bits of time stamped information and build up a timeline of online activity?

We are producing so much information in so many different places that it makes sense to try and pull that all together into one place. Jeremy Keith did that himself, and you can see the results here. That used a PHP script, and is fairly basic. However, a number of different services have cropped up which emulate the basic functionality, and they have all have evolved Jeremy’s concept in a slightly different way.

Jaiku is an interesting, slightly Twitter-like, product which is much more comprehensive and allows you to pull in your own feeds. iStalkr doesn’t have the mobile emphasis of Jaiku, and is more true to the original concept with a few nice extra features - in fact Jeremy Keith is a user of the service.

The one I really like, though, is Tumblr. Tumblr was originally conceived as an easy way to create Tumblelogs,  which are described by Wikipedia as preferring “short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging.” The whole point with Tumblelogs is that they are supposed to be a joy to update, with no work required, posting interesting things as and when. Tumblr realised that a great way to take that further would be to allow you to import your own feeds and republish that, lifestream style.

The result is a great service, for a number of reasons. It is a study in usability;  signup is incredibly quick, and the backend dashboard is brilliant, ensuring that anyone will feel confident using it. Crucially, the whole concept is instantly understandable, in a way that perhaps iStalkr and to a lesser extent Jaiku won’t be to those not well versed in the concepts involved. At the same time, there are a number of brilliant features on Tumblr, including custom themes and domains, as well as a friends system, adding the possibility of getting a network effect going.

I’ve been really enjoying my Tumblr blog. I’m not sure that anyone’s reading it, but in a strange way it is extremely satisfying to see everything you produce online collected in one place. I guess we’ll see this gaining popularity in the tech world, and probably even breaking out of that - you don’t need to know what RSS is to use Tumblr, which makes barriers to entry low. Give it two years, and Tumblr could be big.

Today restrictions were limited on the number of invitations which could be sent by a Joost user, effectively making it open to everyone (so long as they can find someone who already has it).

Formerly The Venice Project, Joost is an on-demand IPTV (television over the internet) startup from the founders of Skype, and it has has never been far from the blogosphere’s attention. Indeed everyone in media seems to have decided that it is the ‘next big thing’. It looks like the whole effort is going well - they’ve done deals with many key content providers which will ensure that they will have TV franchises such as CSI available, and last week I got yet another press release telling me that they have secured advertising from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nike. I’ve been part of the closed beta since it was called The Venice Project, and I wanted to take the opportunity to do a look at the product, the ideas behind it and its chances for success. This is an obscenely long post, for which I apologise, but I think it does cover most of the important aspects of the product.

(more…)

Updated

At 3pm BST Splashcast launched a new feature for podcasters, called My Podcast Network. Previously Splashcast allowed users to create a ‘channel’ of various different pieces of media, allowing formats including audio, video, images and PowerPoint presentations. This media had to be either hosted by Splashcast or online at a small number of locations including Flickr and YouTube.

The rubbish part, as I understand it, is that you couldn’t make the channel update automatically in any way, unless you were using either Flickr or YouTube. That made me initially ignore the tool (despite the fact that ex-TechCrunch writer Marshall Kirkpatrick helps run it).

Now, however, Splashcast has made the link from essentially being a content provider to being an aggregator and re-processor, by allowing the input of new shows into the channel via RSS. This immediately makes it vastly more useful for many people, including us. We can use Splashcast to create a widget for the GizBuzz podcast. This updates whenever we add a show and allows easy playing right on our site. Previously this would have been achievable, but only after what I imagine would have been a lot of coding by either Peter, Jacob or Chris (or some or all of them!).

Update: Since the post has been live, I’ve tried to put the widget in the sidebar to use as a player for the GizBuzz podcast (I couldn’t publish it before because of an embargo). It turns out that Splashcast won’t do what we want it to do. It won’t actually produce a widget of all the items in an RSS feed as far as I can tell; I want an option to display all our podcast episodes, but it will either display one episode at a time or the whole feed as one option. However, Marshall Kirkpatrick has told me that this is a feature currently in development, and that he may be able to think of a work around. It would be great if it came together, because it would be genuinely valuable to us.

They also have a few usability issues with the console used to create the widget, which aren’t present when initially creating it (all I did yesterday), but are present when you’re trying to tweak it. To some extent this is down to confusing vocabulary (players, shows and channels are all very different, but in the context of Splashcast I wasn’t initially sure what was what), which is perhaps inevitable given how unique the service is.

Embedded below is a video from Kirkpatrick which probably explains the feature more clearly than I have. It also demonstrates the nice Splashcast video player, which doesn’t show any branding or controls unless you hover over it (unlike YouTube etc).

We’re tweeting with joy - you can now get the latest updates from GizBuzz, along with the other two Oratos blogs (YouMakeMedia and FOSSwire) on Twitter, the new nano-blogging tool taking the tech world by storm (see our review).

Even if you’ve decided Twitter isn’t something you want to get involved with in the orthodox sense, our Twitter feed is still valuable for you - you can get GizBuzz content, as soon as it is written, delivered to your Google Talk account or by SMS text.

The Oratos Twitter page is here. 

A big shout out to Peter for putting this together. As I understand it, he’s created a plugin for our blog software (WordPress) which pings a script. This script then checks the blog’s RSS feed for new items, and adds any items it finds to Twitter, via its API. This means that there doesn’t need to be a cron script, which would add load to the server by checking the feed every 2 minutes even if there wasn’t a new post. It also means that you get our posts instantly, rather than when such a script decides to check for them.

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Google has just announced that they have acquired Tonic Systems, a company which has already been developing in this area, with the aim of releasing in the summer. According to a post on the Google Blog (incidentally by Sam Schillace, who we interviewed previously for the podcast):

We’ll soon be welcoming a new addition to the Google Docs & Spreadsheets family: presentations.

This is no surprise; they are building a comprehensive online office suite, and presentations were always going to be an integral part of that. As Sam put it in the post, presentations are well suited to collaboration.

It just made sense to add presentations to the mix; after all, when you create slides, you’re almost always going to share them.

I disagree with Arrington. He does not believe Schmidt’s comment at the Web 2.0 Expo that he does not believe that Google Office competes with Microsoft’s product is genuine. I do think the comment is genuine; Google really does see their product as a collaboration tool, rather than a traditional MS Office equivalent. They’ve taken the very sensible view that rather than create a rubbish traditional office suite by using a technology not really appropriate, they will create a product that does one thing, collaboration, extremely well, without trying to compete against Microsoft, whose desktop application will always be able to provide more features.

Through running Gizbuzz, I probably sign up to at least one new Web 2.0 service every day. Some I never use again, but a few are genuinely useful, and I think would genuinely be useful to someone else. However, unlike me, that other person isn’t at all interested in the technology (the service itself), but whether it is of any benefit to them (ie. whether it is fun, useful, interesting etc). What’s going on in their mind is a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ if you like, and the irritation of signing up to a new service which they might well not like is a significant barrier to entry.

It is why, when collaborating with friends, I suggest Google Docs and Spreadsheets rather than Zoho - however easy signing up is, it is still a barrier and an irritation when friends already have Gmail (and therefore Google) accounts.

That’s where OpenID comes in; simply put, OpenID removes the need to sign up to a service. I sign up to an OpenID server once, and am given a web addresso. When I want to use an OpenID enabled service, such as Zooomr, I simply give that service my OpenID address, and am redirected to the OpenID server, where I then confirm that I authorise the service to use my ID. I am then redirected back to the service, and am able to use it instantly.

There are obviously many advantages to OpenID, such as privacy, security and interoperability, but the headline grabber for me is ease of us, and it is why I think OpenID could be a major force in preventing the Web 2.0 boom from becoming a bubble. If people are able to signup to a new service in probably less than 20 seconds, without any privacy concerns, confirmation emails or other annoyances, they are far more likely to adopt a less conservative attitude to trying out new services, and as such, are probably likely to find themselves using more. The more people that use a web service, the more money it makes and the less likely it is to go under. Thus the bubble is less likely to pop.