Surfarama

Since Joshua Schachter announced that he was taking up del.icio.us full time and had received some early stage funding everyone has starting wondering what is the business model…

I’ll wager that Adsense will play a part in the near future, all those tags and user contributed content should provide some nice context for targetted advertising. Plus del.icio.us is all about finding new links, new sites, new resources, so what better place to display context sensitive ads…it lines up nicely with John Battelle’s concept of traffic of good intent, and I doubt any del.icio.us user would begrudge well done text ads.

The other angle will be to monetise the considerable RSS traffic that del.icio.us has. This is more problematic because del.cio.us has literally 1000′s and 1000′s of feeds…a feed for any tag, user, inbox, or combination thereof. Problematic yes, but the feeds are an equally rich source of context for text ads, and I’d expect del.icio.us to partner with Feedburner or perhaps one of the other outfits like Pheedo to put text ads of some sort into the feeds.

Of course Mr Shachter may not have to worry too much about a business model…I am sure he will receive an offer to buy the service outright at some stage, actual revenue or not. Actually I’d be extremely surprised if he hasn’t already received many offers…anyone got a suggestion?

Coolio…Andy Baio‘s Upcoming.org is getting the recognition it richly deserves…the recently announced improvements have stimulated renewed interest, which I reckon will lead to a surge of innovation around the API.

Inspired by Ross Mayfield‘s list of Dream Mergers…my prediction is that Evite buys Upcoming in late 2005/early 2006 after it has gone fully viral and Upcoming event lists are a routine addition to the blog of any serious scenester.

Just gave 1clicksub a make over with a shiny new logo and a nicer looking button. Much better.

Scoble points to a post from Jeff Sandquist:

I want to create a link blog that only contains individual podcasts that I find interesting. Subscribing to the RSS feed for this podcast link blog wouldn’t return every Daily Source Code or Morning Coffee notes, just the individual shows I’ve found interesting. (Along with appropriate meta data to the creater,etc)

I have also been thinking about this recently and so added an optional “media file URL” field to the posting interface at Linkroll. Users can fill in this field with a link to the media file in question and the link will appear in the Linkroll RSS 2.0 feeds as an enclosure.

This means that anyone can create their own RSS 2.0 podcasting “channel” which contains only the particular podcasts they’re interested in. In this way you don’t have to subscribe to every podcast in a particular feed but can just choose which ones will be downloaded and fed into your audio player.

Users can also use Linkroll to create group podcast channels just by using a particular tag.

The feature is in ‘beta’ now, but seems to function pretty well so far.

Love to know what you think.

Butler is a Firefox plugin which adds a bunch of functionality to Google web pages, including lots of links to other search engines and removing Googles text ads from most pages.

This is really interesting because it challenges Google in the same way their recently announced autolink feature challenges other publishers on the web. Many publishers have come out against the Autolink feature because they think Google has no right to mess with their page content, even if it is optional and in the interests of adding functionality for users.

Now Google is being challenged in the same way, and it will be interesting to see if they walk the talk. In other words will they be cool with a tool which potentially costs them revenue?

Mark Pilgrim is not making any money out of this, and given the timing I suspect this is his way of challenging Google to see if they are prepared to drink their own kool-aid, or will they push back when a tool like Butler impacts their revenue?

Boing Boing have cleaned up the Bloggies at SXSWi winning Best Group Blog and Blog of the Year, nice one!

We were living in Houston this time last year so I got to go to SXSWi and had a great time. I actually got to present some of the awards at the Bloggies (in a strange turn of events), including one to Cory Doctorow, representing Boing Boing, for best Group Blog 2004. That was cool.

Funny story about my first interaction with Cory Doctorow at SXSWi 2004…I see him in the book stall at the conference buying a copies of Eastern Standard Tribe, so I tease him about having to buy copies of his own book…of course all it meant was that he had run out of copies to give to people, and Cory doesn’t know me from a bar of soap, so I just come across as a complete ass…oh well, wasn’t the first time.

The other thing I missed this year was the Blogger booze up at Club DeVille. Last year was really fun…I met Eric, Biz, and Ted, and had a great night with many drinks. I still have the t-shirt to prove it.

Definition of “Rocking Natick”

Just signed up and loaded my Bloglines OPML list into feedtagger, and so far it doesn’t really grab me. No doubt they have lots of things in mind and more improvements will be made, but my initial thoughts:

• Buggy…I got lots of errors trying to navigate tags. I am using IE at the office and will try Firefox and Safari tonight.
• Don’t like the basic layout…would prefer the standard scrolling single column
• Colors will quickly drive me crazy. There’s a reason you don’t see news sites designed with white on black color schemes…just too hard to read.

Who is behind Feedtagger?

I was wondering when someone would launch something like this…a marriage of Bloglines and Del.icio.us presided over by the good Rev. AJAX:

Feedtagger

As I write I am waiting for the site to digest my OPML file from Bloglines to get me started…will post more once I have had a chance to play.

I sketched out some ideas for something very similar a little while back, but I can’t help but think that the business of building standalone RSS aggregators is going to be a hard one to make any money with…sort of like browsers really…it would have to be pretty special for anyone to pay for, and the ad supported idea is frought with complications.

Anywho…back to testing this thing.

I am thinking of selling Linkroll, so I can regain some focus on other projects. If you are interested drop me a line at the following address:

We havn’t heard much about the launch of Kijiji.com (or atleast I havn’t), which is an eBay company and looks like it is trying to do a colorful version of Craigslist.

It all feels like they’re not entirely sure what they’re doing with it and so are taking the stealth approach to see what pans out.

So I am sitting LAX posting from my new pocketPC, an XDA I I mini. I havn’t got an SD wifi card yet so it is a bit slow over gprs…still I’m just stoked I can sit here and hand write a post. the hand writing recognition on this thing is fabulous.

Robert Scoble has been raving about these recently so Jennifer and I went to check them out last weekend…Jen needed to replace her aging P800. Long story short, we both got one.. .very nice.

I’ve been travellivg since so havn’ t sorted out the sync with the Mac at home yet, but I know there’s a 3rd party app for this…hopefully it does a good job.

I’ll try and post a decent review soon, suffice to say so far I am very pleased…functions great and has a great form.

We heart Flynn,
originally uploaded by Charles.

I havn’t posted any Flynn pics for a few weeks now, so here he is sitting up all by himself…he’s such a dude.

I am in Houston for the week, missing Flynn and Mummy terribly.