I’ve Said Too Much

A nice chap called Chris Thun from Yahoo! Search left a comment on my post about MyWeb yesterday and pointed out that MyWeb DOES include tagging (pretty heavily and well, actually), and I must have been using the MyWeb 1.0 beta.

And he’s right. Somehow I managed to start on MyWeb2.0 and then switch to MyWeb1.0. I should have spotted it, of course, but then again it does seem to my there’s some messy beta overlap going on here. My Yahoo! Toolbar, for instance, is pointing to the MyWeb1.0 beta, and the work I did to reorganise folders is showing up on 1.0 but not on 2.0.

So apologies for the bad early review, but no apologies for the confusion. It is pretty confusing, isn’t it? So how do I get all my work from MyWeb1.o into MyWeb2.0?

Ben Hammersley’s written an insightful post today about how we all tend to conflate “America” with “the world” when it comes to Internet matters.

This works both ways, in that when genuinely interesting things happen outside the US, the US often doesn’t notice. And I think something genuinely interesting is happening in Britain right now. I think BSkyB, the digital satellite broadcaster which effectively owns pay TV in Britain and Ireland, has just got the Internet.

Point 1: a couple of weeks ago, Sky issued a press release announcing the launch of Sky Interactive. This is a platform for Web publishers to put content onto the Sky TV platform as WTVML, a hacked version of WML which Sky has put together and then put out under an open licence. The press release can be found here, but here’s the salient points:

Sky Interactive is to create a new interactive television portal that will enable website operators to reach a potential audience of around 20 million users through the television set. The portal will launch later this year with the aim of attracting a diverse range of web content providers including established e-business operators, not-for-profit organisations and even individuals.

With the launch of the new portal, Sky aims to broaden the range of services available on its platform and to stimulate further innovation in the interactive TV arena. The development of the new portal reflects the growing trend for website owners to deliver content to multiple devices and for consumers to access electronic services on a variety of different platforms. With around 10 million viewers accessing Sky’s existing interactive services each month, Sky believes that the new portal will represent a significant new opportunity for website owners interested in service delivery to non-PC devices.

Available without subscription to all digital satellite viewers in the UK and Ireland, the easy-to-use portal will provide access to a range of internet services that have been adapted specially for television. Services will be accessed using conventional URLs or via the the portal’s listings pages and online search engine.

In addition, personalisation features will enable viewers to save their favourite links and access a history of services visited previously. Each person in a household will be able to create an individual profile where he or she can enter personal information to facilitate online transactions, using features such as auto-complete and auto-logon.

For website operators, the new portal will make it easier than ever before to launch an interactive TV service. Registration, testing and validation services will be available online at Skyinteractive.com and website operators will be able to adapt their services using the WTVML technology that was developed by Sky and subsequently made available as a public standard.

This is potentially enormous, and indicates that Sky may be doing something that the mobile operators, for instance, have never countenanced: the creation of a vibrant community of content on its platform with new opportunities for content owners to create revenue streams. It’s not the end of the digital TV walled garden - you still need a contract with Sky to get up there - but it’s certainly put a great big gate in the wall.

Point 2: Sky are talking about launching an “Internet movie and sports download service.”

The service, available only to Sky’s premium subscribers, will bypass the company’s satellite network, sending programmes to a computer via a broadband Internet connection.

Users will not be able to watch the programmes on their televisions unless they have connected the TV and computer. It will take about two hours to download a two-hour movie over a typical high-speed Internet connection.

The new service is part of Chief Executive James Murdoch’s drive to meet ambitious growth targets. The company currently has nearly 8 million subscribers and is aiming for 10 million by 2010.

So, in one week, BSkyB, which has some claim to being the most successful digital TV operator on the planet, announced plans to put the Internet on TV, and TV on the Internet. And what did we all want to talk about? Podcasts and Grokster. It’s a topsy-turvy world.

UPDATE: So I appear to be using the wrong beta. Ignore the following review, and see this post here.

I’ve been playing with the beta of Yahoo! My Web today. My motives for doing so are quite interesting in themselves - I’ve been using Furl for my “personal” web bookmark management, and del.icio.us for work links (the ones that appear down the right hand side of this blog). I’ve found myself using Furl less and less, even though I like it and it’s easy to use. That’s probably more a function of my spending less time looking at “fun” stuff online and more time looking at “work” stuff (or maybe there’s just been a blurring between the two), but I thought I’d check out the Yahoo! version to see if it might encourage me to farm and categorise Web content a bit more.

On the first pass, I’d say it’s interesting - but nowhere near where it should be functionally. The “big idea” here is that I share some or all of my content with people I know, and that’s not such an original idea, though it is a big one. My Web certainly doesn’t make it easier for me to manage bookmarks than Furl does - in lots of ways, it’s actually more difficult (there’s no contextual menu, no Firefox plug-ins, etc. etc, but these will come). I had to install the egregious Yahoo! toolbar to get any kind of inline bookmarking juice.

The interface itself is very “pre-Ajax” in that I have to go through step-by-step forms to do things like share folders and rename them. More drag and drop will make the interface much easier to use. Making an individual folder public, for instance, and then subscribing to its feed, is almost ridiculously difficult.

Finally, there’s no tagging. This seems extraordinary, and would be a key differentiator to Furl if it existed. I have no sense of a wider community of My Web users, which I get through the tags on Flickr and del.icio.us. Given that Yahoo! now owns Furl, this seems like a bizarre omission. Surely the way for me to create a “content stream” of bookmarks, blog/360 posts and photos is through tags, isn’t it?

So an interesting start, but a looooong way to go. I’ll use it for a few days and see how it goes.

Interesting research from Hitwise:

Newspapers And Magazines Face More Dynamic, Complex Landscape As They Transition Online: According to Hitwise, the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service, 26.2 percent of all visits to Web sites in its “News & Media - Print” category originated from another news site (both print and non-print affiliated) in the four weeks ending May 21, 2005. In addition, 18.8 percent of visits to print-affiliated news sites came directly from search engines and directories, 9.0 percent from entertainment sites, and 7.2 percent from Web e-mail services.

While print-news sites receive significant traffic from other news sites, they also lose more visitors (25.8 percent) to them versus any other site category. Other top categories that visitors of print-news sites leave to include: Entertainment (10.6 percent); Business and Finance (9.8 percent); and Lifestyle (7.4 percent).

Very interesting. I’d be interested to know what percentage of that 26.2 per cent of all visits originated at Google News (perhaps the ultimate non-print affiliated news site!). But in terms of demonstrating that the competitive nature of news sites has changed around us - in as much as we’re competing for attention jointly as well as against each other - this is fascinating.

I’m a big fan of the changes that have been implemented over at del.icio.us, with suggested keywords based on previous activity. It’s done in a really nice Ajaxy way, and like all the best incremental functionality I can take it or I can leave it.

But what I’m really interested in knowing, for practical as well as intellectual purposes, is what kind of impact this is having both on the spread of keywords being used, and the shape of the tail. Clay Shirky, who I met for the first time in New York last week, drew me a nice diagram showing how, on del.icio.us, as few as 12 users can give you up to 90 per cent of the keywords that will ever be used for a particular bookmark. There’s a clear shelf in the tail at 12 users, and then a steep drop-off.

So will that 12 become 10 or 9 or 8 with the new technology? Does anybody know?

I’m just crawling out from under a mountain of RSS feeds which gathered together while I’ve been travelling the last couple of weeks. I tried (really I did) to go through the feeds methodically and find the nuggets of stuff I’ve missed, but it’s really just impossible. At the end of the day, I’m just marking stuff as read which, in RSS terms, is as good as shoving it in the rubbish bin.

Which got me thinking about disposable media. It seems to me there is a hierarchy of disposability in media. Newspapers are more disposable than magazines - they don’t hang around the house as long. And magazines are more disposable than paperbacks.

But media can also become more disposable as a result of technology. A TV programme recorded on VHS had a certain amount of disposability, but its physical reality (and the fact that to record over it meant a rewind) meant there was an inbuilt non-disposability to it. But a programme recorded on a PVR suddenly becomes massively disposable. It’s the work of a microsecond to send that multi-million pound BBC costume drama hurtling into personal digital oblivion.

So might there come a time when “undo” becomes a vital social need? And how can my personal criteria for non-disposal - my attention.xml, perhaps - inform technology when I’m trying to delete something I’ve not read yet? Or, to put it in more simple terms, just what the hell have I just missed by marking two weeks worth of feeds as “read”? How do I find that out?