[I don't normally post entries about other people's blog entries, however this relates to a topic that I've meant to cover for some time.]

Caught an interesting blog entry about Web 2.0 hype via Reddit the other day, and thought it worth a mention. It's a rather cynical take on the current "Web 2.0" phenomenon, noting that many of the recent Web 2.0 sites and services have no rational current or future business model.

To recycle a rather dated joke--

1. Make a really cool AJAX-equipped, streaming-video website with das Blinkenlights
2. Get lots of visitors and users
3. ???
4. Profit!

This is happening to a scale not seen since the disastrous .COM bubble of 1999-2001, and many of the rising stars of the internet world seem to exist purely in the hope that Yahoo or Google or Microsoft will snatch them up for tens of millions in their quest for Internet dominance. Sometimes it really does happen.

Most of us would love to be on the cheque receiving end of such an acquisition.

Being a software developer, entrepreneur, and technology consultant, I've been in contact with a lot of people who dream of branching out on their own, making their own killer software application or hugely popular web application. They imagine how they'll be sitting on the pile of lucre when the Adsense revenue and subscription fees start pouring in, or when the huge buy-out cheque comes in the mail, all while enjoying a reputation as a technical genius (or, in common media parlance, as an "internet whiz").

I offer my support and encouragement for their plans, but temper it with a bit of skepticism. My doubt arises because 9 times out of 10, or more like 97 times out of 100, their plan involves--

• Making a killer web application for geeks to hang out. Maybe make subscription levels and members only areas for revenue
• -or- Making cool component libraries for software developers, maybe some cool AJAX-like components
• -or- Making tools for the software development community (bug tracking, process management, etc)
• -or- Making cool web development tools, like an aggregator to mash up all of the Google Maps and Flickr photos with Amazon ISBNs
• -or- Something else to cater to the technically adept geek community.

This is what they know, so naturally they want to spin their observations and experience directly into business success. Whether they're pro-bloggers, or elite software developers, they feel that they know the needs of the market -- they know the itches that need scratching -- not to mention their natural desire to earn some credibility among their peer group of geeks and developers.

There are a number of problems with this plan.

• Every other software developer/web app creator is thinking and doing exactly the same thing: A small market is being grossly oversupplied by for-profit ventures, not to mention a huge cadre selfless gratis/libre advocates.
• The target is, on average, a smarter crowd. Smarter not only in general intelligence, but more importantly in the specifics of the products and technologies that you're offering.
• This target market has been observed as being very thrifty (just ask how the tip-reliant in Las Vegas felt about Comdex).
• A sad reality is that some of the target market resents seeing peers financially succeed. If you make a commercial product or solution, expect your forums to be overloaded with the resentful pointing out every marginally related open source competitor or freeware. Expect users to claim their constitutional right to use your information and services free of advertisements and restraints.
• The target market is technically capable of circumventing ads, copy protection, and just about everything else you might throw up to earn or protect revenue.
• The market is being conditioned to believe that software and services should be free (as in beer), or at least the costs should be submarined into something else.

This isn't to say that revenue isn't possible -- there are quite a few solution providers and websites doing very well targeting the developer/geek audience -- but instead is just an observation that it's one of the most difficult markets to tap. While many other domains sit underserved with a client base open and willing to paying fair rates for solutions, most dreaming software developers still peg their dreams on building the next Slashdot or tech aggregator or AJAX component suite or SQL formatter.

Software developers wage war over their saturated marketplace, building marvels of technical excellence in hopes of getting a piece of the table scraps, all while ignoring the much larger market (one in which people are actually paying $0.99 a day for a service to SMS jokes to their cell phone. In the tech world you can expect a fight to the death if a site demanded a $5/year subscription fee). I marvel seeing many of the simplistic, technically-deficient solutions yielding huge returns in other domains -- earlier today I had to deal with a widely used "business group membership" product, and I was astounded to see the enormous fees that went along with a subpar, circa-1995 era solution.

A week or so I mentioned a desire to build a Firefox extension to perform site-specific time tracking and blocking. I also commented that "obviously extensions aren't a potential revenue market". Not ever project has to be a revenue project (there are greater rewards than monetary rewards in many quests), however not everyone agreed with my assessment.

[as an aside, a user comment noted that there is a recently released extension called TimeTracker, which displays your daily total browsing time. While that product is extremely basic right now, it does discourage me from continuing on my extension quest -- I don't want to interfere or seem to "rip off" the obvious growth path of TimeTracker]

My reasons for believing that the extension market isn't a viable revenue market are largely documented above. The only current revenue model for extensions, I believe, is by serving a master other than the user (e.g. Adware/spyware, or as a branch of a much greater service such as Google and their Google toolbar).

For yafla registered clients (which basically means professional consulting clients who need the online tools) I've implemented an "AJAX" style logon (evident on the home page. It was basically developed for the upcoming http://www.360notes.com, which is currently in super-ultra-amazing stealth mode). It's responsive and extremely lightweight, and works throughout the site without redirects.

Maybe I'll bundle it up and sell it as an AJAX-enabled ASP.NET logon security user control! 

I've received a couple of fantastic comments about troubles that people have faced adding items from here to their del.icio.us bookmarks, namely because Radio Userland uses a constant title for all entries (and del.icio.us automatically uses the title, so three different entries get the same title if you fail to manually override its choice). The common title problem was one of the reasons I created the notables static listing, though of course that listing is just a subsection of entries.

To help with this issue, I've added quicklinks below each entry to add it to your del.icio.us bookmarks, furl bookmarks, to Digg it or to Reddit it (which will link to an existing entry if one is already on there), and to check for Technorati links (there are seldom Technorati links because most of the readers here aren't bloggers, or they aren't the sort of bloggers that comment on every site they visit. I'd get a big boost in the Technorati rankings if I started pandering to the incestuous blogging community). I've mirrored these items to the static section as well.

I like Reddit.

On average the signal to noise ratio is great, and a scan through the hot list is usually a very worthwhile venture. The wide range of topics makes it more entertaining and informative than many tech-only sites, but it still has enough tech-related info to feel pertinent to the software development profession.

I've also received a substantial number of hits from Reddit over the past couple of months, with no less than 5 entries hitting the front page for periods of time, with each of them yielded 6000+ inbound visitors. Though these are of no profit to me, it is satisfying that many of these visitors left great comments and sent interesting emails, and found the entries informative or educational. After each onslaught the number of RSS subscribers jumps by a hefty amount.

Early on I admittingly submitted a couple of my longer, more thought-out posts to Reddit, thinking it would help exposure a bit, but became a bit discouraged by the whole exercise after seeing them instantly start descending into the negative range. Pure speculation, but my guess is that some rather unsportsmanlike submitters are automatically "voting down" everything in proximity of their addition, hoping to make their own submission stand out in relation (it's the only rational explanation for the almost instant vote downs). I would also guess that many users skip over low-ranked new items, so it basically becomes a race to get the first couple of up votes before it's voted into oblivion, and then a continued series of up votes to offset the continual downvotes.

This came to mind as I was just "testing out" the quicklinks that I just added on posts. I discovered a case of a single entry that had been submitted to Reddit three different times from different areas of the blog (which is a "benefit" of users who subscribe to and read the different areas). I've put these in order, determined by the obvious sequential ID that Reddit adds. I'm not sure of the specific times of each of them.

http://reddit.com/info?id=14ev - This was added from the home page version. It earned a forgettable score of 1.

http://reddit.com/info?id=14lu - This was apparently added referencing the static version located here. It earned a healthy -4 score. Perhaps because it was a duplicate of the prior one.

http://reddit.com/info?id=14sm - This was added from the Software Development version. It earned a very respectable score of 204, and I knew about this one because of a substantial impact on the visits over a two day period.

The exact same content, in different forms, yielded a 1, a -4, and a front-page for two days 204. Whether it was because of titles, time of day, or simply luck of the draw (that the last one got momentum before the haters started downvoting), it is a fascinating demonstration that these sorts of web democracies aren't always a meritocrasy.

Just thought that was a little fascinating.

Mozilla has announced the winners of the previously mentioned extend Firefox contest, with the three grand-prize victors carrying home a beefy PC, along with a considerable amount of developer credibility. Category winners earned some decent prizes as well.

Congratulations to the winners on a job well done.

Having said that, I've tried out the winning extensions, and I have to confess that I'm underwhelmed. Not to take away from their accomplishments, but for a challenge of such magnitude, for a core product with millions of software developer fans, I expected some awe-inspiring, revolutionary products to emerge.

Firefox has an enormously robust and feature rich extension model, where almost anything is possible, yet the roster of available extensions is dominated by trivial tools with simplistic, archaic interfaces, too many of which seem like hack jobs (the exception being the extensions by big corporations -- Corporations that spit and polish their offering to reap the benefits of tracking your habits and encouraging you to use of their search).

Of course I'm complaining about something that is generally free, so as the old saying goes, you get what you pay for...In fact you get far more than you pay for, but it demonstrates that there are limits to the sacrifice and resources someone will commit to a product that they find difficult to monetize.

Not only is it close to impossible to achieve revenue from an extension unless you're pushing a different product (such as search), but the skills and technologies that you learn building extensions is hard to leverage for professional gain (e.g. knowing XUL and the Mozilla extension API is of marginal value outside of building extensions, where the C skills gained doing kernel hacking has tremendous professional value).

Nonetheless, at least the winners weren't gadget clocks. Gadget clocks and basic arithmetic web service examples always strike me as a sign of a technology or platform that is being oversold.

One of the continuing trends of the Web 2.0 revolution is tag-mania -- sticking tags on everything and anything, hoping that it somehow improves the flow, digestion, and utility of information. From adding tag clouds to your blog, to slashdot, to photos, to bookmarks, tags have continued to spread across the web landscape.

As with every tech "revolution", in corporations across the globe eager employees are embracing the trend, advocating adding tags to documents and directories and files, and embracing the concept of metadata.

As a bit of an explanation for those who haven't been following TechCrunch in morbid curiousity -- wondering what dubious business came out of super-secret stealth alpha invite-only mode today -- and thus aren't up on their Web 2.0 lingo, tags are, in essence, a set of words that one or more users apply to something to categorize it -- what we historically called keywords, albeit sometimes (thought not always) with a "democratic" process determining the rendered tag set.

For instance the tags of this post might be "Web 2.0, tags". Ten visitors might add "tripe", making it the dominant tag in the tag cloud.

Getting a variety of people adding tags to the same content, or building a common directory of information loosely categorized by tags, is what's commonly called a folksonomy. Consider, for comparison, a formal taxonomy of a system like Yahoo's classic categorization, where a submitter would choose exactly where in the hierarchy a link went, and the Yahoo overlords would validate it, and insert it if appropriate. Instead the loose addition of tags adapts to have multiple categorizations over time.

[Web 2.0 aware readers will probably shudder seeing an explanation of something so "basic", yet discussions in the field have led to me to believe that much of this great revolution has gone unnoticed by the bulk of society, including even the majority of technology workers. I regularly converse with people who've never seen del.icious, don't know who 37signals are, and haven't been to Reddit or Digg or Flickr or Furl. Much like bloggers have grossly overestimated the impact of blogs on the general population, there seems to be a presumption that the Web 2.0 lingo and dogma is more universal than it actually is]

While many of the Web 2.0 aficionados declare there to be a fundamental religious difference between the venerable keyword and tags, the difference is superficial at best (democratically selected keywords are still just keywords). The same keywords that have always existed as a data block in the JPEG file format, and exists in virtual every document format (Word, for instance), form the foundation of tags. Metadata has been around since we first started storing data, and tags are a continuation of that trend.

Many of the foundations of modern tagging, the evolution of the keyword, were first demonstrated widely by the superlative web photo organizing and sharing application Flickr.

Given the primitive state of image recognition, this was a perfect fit: Without tagging your photo with keywords such as "bridge, burlington skyway, qew", there was no way searches could find that photo if asked, for instance, for pictures of the Burlington Skyway bridge -- We aren't yet at a stage where software can reliable figure out what the subjects of a picture are, and mechanical metadata is still incomplete (although it's getting there), so keywords/tags/folksonomies fills a critical gap if the photography data process.

Outside of photos the use of tags is often much more dubious.

To go back in history a bit, when search engines first appeared they largely relied upon meta keywords. This was a compromise due to limits in the "comprehension" of content -- search engines got confused easily, and even when they could parse the content properly they couldn't truly figure out what the content was about. 

Keywords came along, offering a simple, condensed, human-created subset of the data, categorizing the important attributes of the content. Search engines embraced and utilized keywords as an important element of fulfilling search requests.

The honeymoon didn't last for long. It turned out that keywords were a prime stomping ground for search engine spammers, not to mention that it was a horribly limited method of searching through data: Not only were the choices of keywords entirely subjective -- often grossly incomplete and inconsistent -- but by design it was limited to a very, very small subset of the content. If you really wanted content about metal railings, you might have missed my extensive discussion on that topic in my Burlington Skyway Bridge article because I didn't feel that metal railings made the cut for the keywords.

Meta tags are largely dead now.

In its place search engines have become much better at determining what a given page is about (or at least simulating a reasonable promixity thereof). By analyzing content, having a directory of similar and derivative words, and by deriving information by context (such as links and related pages, and how they word links) and layout (noting that heading text, title, and early text holds more importance in classifying the page, though it still is used in concert with the rest of the content), search engines have come a long way it understanding content, and in correlating searches with appropriate results.

The loss of the keyword has proven to be very beneficial for search. Now it's the actual data that classifies the content, rather than artificial metadata.

With improvements in language processors and context associative correlations (e.g. where the content parser understands that the paragraph on boxers is talking about the boxer breed of dog, determined by its correlation with other documents coupled with other details of the language, using language trees to classify probable meaning), things will only get better.

Content search has a very bright present, and a brighter future.

Yet tags continue to spread in woefully inappropriate domains, even where it's serving as nothing more than the modern day equivalent of the venerable META keyword. Instead of building reliable, feature-rich search tools into product, appropriately determining relationships and context to understant content, product vendors are just tossing in a hack-job tag infrastructure and calling their job complete.

Worse still, users are accepting it and calling it a feature.

While I remain committed to SQL Server, after a lengthy evaluation and feature analysis process, we will start advocating MySQL 5 to some clients under a set number of conditions, both on the Windows and the Linux platforms. While MySQL was previously lacking some critical foundational features, v5 ups the ante considerably, filling a particular niche in the solution spectrum. This is a part of a wider trend at yafla of embracing some of the "alternative" platforms, outside of our normal Microsoft-enabled comfort zone, where it benefits our customers and the solution.

Due to licensing conditions we still won't be targeting our applications at MySQL.

We still advocate PostgreSQL, another excellent open source RDBMS, for some scenarios.