Web 2.0 This Week (July 10 – 16)

The main Web 2.0 news this week focused on Technorati (is it dyin or is it rockin?) and the release of Atom 1.0. Lots of other random and interesting stuff as well, including important chia-pet news.

Weekly Summary:

1. Technorati is Dead! Long Live Technorati!

Technorati has dominated web 2.0 news this week. Posts come at it from three different but related angles:

Technorati’s traffic has lately been dominating the competition, and they are getting a lot of press as well . See no. 5 from last week’s wrapup. Richard MacManus again noted Technorati’s ascension in a post this week called “Technorati for President“, and cited a recent Wired Magazine article on them that barely mentioned that they have any competition. Richard writes “You’ve got to hand it to Technorati, they sure know how to get media and blog attention. A recent Wired article makes the extraordinary claim that Technorati is “a public utility on a global scale”. With no mention whatsoever of other blog search engines, Wired compares Technorati to Google…”

Jason Calcanis launches his “Off with their Head” campaign against Technorati (and other blog search engines) . See Jason’s cry for Google and Yahoo to launch blog search engines here and follow up here. See Blog Herald’s counter-point here.

Discussion over the overall demise of Technorati, its index and its interface. Doc Searls gives a massive overview here.

More Points of View:
Dave Sifry, Syntagma, Frank Gruber, BusinessWeek, Blog Herald, ChrisWere.com, WeBreakStuff, Jeremy Wright, Jeremy Wright #2, Newest Industry, Hans on Experience, Scoble, David Berlind, David Berlind #2

2. RSS v. Atom – Tim Bray posts a comparative chart

From Alex Bosworth, “The differences are posed in such a way as to show how Atom is superior, and as Don Park has pointed out some points might be half-truths or misleading, but generally I think it details the differences between Atom and RSS. The problem is that Atom has serious failings which all stem from the same cause – Atom is made for consumers, not producers.”

See also: Rogers Cadenhead, Tris Hussey and John Udell.

3. Steve Gillmor – Once you go RSS, you never go back.

“How many people, once they switched to AOL on Live8 Day, went back? The same number who switched back from RSS. My friend still hasn’t fired up Bloglines, or Rojo, or iTunes for that matter. But he will. That I’m sure of. It’s a matter of time.”

He mentioned this in a Gillmor gang podcast too. I totally agree. I’ve shown many people how to use RSS. They are all religous about it now.

4. Nivi – “RSS is the TCP/IP Packet of Web 2.0”

David Beisel comments here.

5. Dan Cornish – “RSS is Like TV”

“RSS is starting to feel like television. I sit in front of the tv with a remote and click through 100 channels and then say “nothing is on.”

In a comment to a Fred Wilson post.

Via Michael Parekh.

6. Net Rage – Blogging Sucks

Catalyst released a report at the link above that basically says people don’t get blogging and RSS yet, and we have a long way to go to get there. It’s just us geeks and wannabe geeks for now.

“Even assuming mainstream interest, current blog design standards – at least in terms of navigation, nomenclature and taxonomy – are a barrier to consumer acceptance. In fact, the design of most blogs can incite net rage”

See also BW, BloggersBlog and BlogHerald.

7. 5 Million Bloggers in China

“Of the 100 million mainland internet users, 5 million are bloggers and about 2 million have blog accounts with Bokee.”

Our understanding is that 2 players in China have about 80% of the market.

via BlogHerald.

8. Yahoo’s HotJobs adds scraped jobs to paid listings.

There’s been a ton written about this over the last week. Basically, Yahoo’s HotJobs is now scraping job sites for job listings and adding them to it’s paid listings. It had to – it’s being squeezed by the paid guys (see Monster.com) and the new scrapers like Indeed.

What we’d really like to see is companies set up their jobs page with an RSS feed. Seems obvious and would avoid all this scraping nonsense.

See Business2.0, SiliconBeat, Greg Sterling, Charlene Li, Zeremy Zawodny.

9. ReadyMade.com – How to Make a Chia Pet Couch


“How much oxygen did your furniture produce today?”
:-)

Via BoingBoing.

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