Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

ZDNet wins “Best business website 2007″

October 4, 2007

AOP Awards Sometimes, when you are months into a big project with a long time still to go to launch, you wonder if it’s all worth it. Will anyone notice? Was that big idea we had really the right one? What if somebody launches before you and steals your thunder?

Were you were mad to even set out on a path in the first place?

I’m sure we all have those doubts and there were plenty of times in the development of the new ZDNet site that I questioned my sanity.

I say new but in fact it’s been nearly a year since we launched (it’s one year old on 30th October) and last night at the AOP Awards, the publishing industry voted ZDNet.co.uk “Best Business Website 2007″

The judges said: -

“This site has displayed a fantastic use of web 2.0 and is in tune with the user. Really revolutionary, with a thinking behind the site that is streets ahead of its peers”

Amazing really that a site conceived nearly two years ago should be praised for being ahead of it’s time even now. When we started out on the project, some of what we were doing was completely unproven and we had no idea if it would work.

Last night proves that we weren’t mad (well not much) and that we had a vision that has become the benchmark for other publishers. It’s nice to know that somebody noticed as well.

Posted in AOP, Social Media, Web 2.0, ZDNet | 1 Comment »

Byte Night Local Launches

June 8, 2007

Byte Night LocalToday we launched the Byte Night and Byte Night Local campaigns with a press announcement about the events. We’ve been building the “Local” site for a few weeks now and it’s been an interesting project to say the least! We’ve had fantastic support from a whole range of very dedicated people who have provided their time and expertise for free.

Trying to manage the specification, design, HTML, coding, video production and hosting with people who are trying to do their day jobs in parallel has been extremely challenging. The problem is not with enthusiasm, knowledge or commitment, that was abundant, the challenge was coordinating the various components to fit in with everyone’s busy schedules. Unlike a project where all the resources are under your control, on this one, none of them were!

The finished site looks great, we’ve mashed up the best of Flickr, You Tube, Google Maps and powered the whole thing with the CNET Networks community platform to allow registration and blogging, this is Charity 2.0!

I’ve slept out for Byte Night for the last four years and it’s an amazing event that has raised over £1.5M for NCH, the children’s charity that helps homeless young people. As well as the London event, this year we’re launching “Byte Night Local” with the aim of recruiting 250 people to sleep out locally, in their gardens or company premises so that the experience isn’t restricted to the people who can make it into London. I’d encourage you to sign up and support a really good cause and experience a little of what the people we are trying to help have to endure every night of the year.

A big thanks must go to Rod for the original idea, Michael, Jess, Belinda and the team at Banner who created the original designs and much of the copy. At CNET, to David for the HTML coding, Piete for the tech work, Tim and Simon for the hosting set-up and Chris for the video production.

Finally, Suzie at CNET for supporting the project, Sam and Louisa at NCH and Kath at Lewis PR for testing, copy and moral support through the whole process. It’s been a great experience and a true team effort. Everyone gave generously of their time which ultimately means that even more of the money we raise goes directly to the people who need it most.

Thank you to everyone, sorry if I missed anybody. See you on the 5th October, let’s hope it doesn’t rain!

Posted in Blogging, Byte Night, Charity, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

Panel discussion on the dark side of social media

May 2, 2007

After attending the last three Chinwag events, which I would highly recommend, I’ve been asked to speak on a panel at the June event which is mysteriously title “The dark side of social media”. We’ll be talking about elements of social media that hit the headlines (and sometimes not) for the wrong reasons: -

  • Identity theft
  • Libel
  • Stalking
  • Scurrilous behaviour

and I’m sure much more. One interesting element of this from a community perspective is how do you decide where the censorship line is to be drawn? Unacceptable language in the Cbeebies community would be perfectly OK in the Quentin Tarantino discussion forum. Also, how we make the back end systems more intelligent in automatically reducing the chances of publishers displaying incorrect/libelous/offensive material on their sites?

So come along to the event, they are always great fun and lively conversations that involve the audience as well, hopefully see you there.

Posted in Events, Social Media, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

How many ways to perform “inside search”?

April 20, 2007

Search imageI’m fascinated by the many different approaches to search that are emerging to challenge the “inside search” we all know and love (hate) on web sites. You know, where you type in a keyword and get a large and random set of search results returned from a basic keyword index.

I’ve written about Ultra Knowledge before and how their automatic tagging sets them apart from the crowd but now the crowd are starting to take differing (and potentially complementary) approaches.

Collarity sits on top of the existing site search and monitors where the users click through to for each keyword. This then creates a “wisdom of the crowds” intelligence so that when the next user types that keyword, the system will suggest the most popular destination URL’s. This is interesting as Collarity don’t actually index the content which makes it fast to deploy. The downside of this is that it’s only as good as the underlying site search so if that doesn’t return relavent content then the value of the wisdom is reduced to the lowest common denominator.

Eurekster takes a different approach, allowing the users to rate the search results thus increasing the weighting of the most valuable results. It also allows users to create their own search results based on their knowledge of the subject making it a mashup of search and wiki functionality.

And this week I met with a UK company called Synature who have yet another take on “inside search”. Much more focussed on specific sectors (initially holidays) their product is about connecting like minded users using something they call “Attitudinal Matching”. They employ a psychologist who sets a series of 4-6 questions about how you feel about a particular subject. For example in holidays you would be asked to rank your requirements on a scale between “Beautiful” and “Exciting”. The results of these questions are then fed into a sophisticated system that can match you to like minded people and their holiday recommendations. Again, the system doesn’t index the content, just the user who created it and allows you to locate relevant content via the social network that this creates.

There are many others of course, if you know of anything interesting going on in the search space, please leave me a comment as it’s such a fast moving area it’s impossible to keep up.

Which is right? Well all of them have their pros and cons in different applications and the possibilities for combining them with each other and the social networking platforms is intriguing. Watch this space…

Posted in Search, Social Media, Tagging, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

Open source vs commercial software

February 1, 2007

I spoke with some guys at the AlwaysOn show yesterday who have an interesting business model aimed at tech support professionals. Spiceworks have a radically different take on free software. They allow anybody to download their application which monitors devices on the network. It incorporates a ticketing system and also the ability to share experiences in a forum environment with other Spiceworks users.

In return for the software, Spiceworks then serve ads within the application. Shock horror you are thinking! But what’s really ingenious about the ad serving part is that it’s related to your specific network equipment. Not only that, if a disk is running out of free space, the system will suggest potential local suppliers for a larger one.

Squarely pitched at the SME marketplace where the IT team is 2-5 people supporting up to 250 users and who typically don’t have a huge support network, they have only focussed on the US market so far. It’s a fascinating mash-up of web 2.0 application, community functionality and adsense type ad serving and it’s coming to an IT department near you soon…

Posted in Ad serving, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

AlwaysOn conference day two

January 30, 2007

Day two of the AlwaysOn conference saw an exhausting program of showcases, panel discussions, keynotes and workshops. The showcases were very interesting with up to six CEO’s per session having six minutes to explain their business. The moderators were very strict on time, marching onto stage to stop the presenters after their allotted time. How we could do with that at other events!

With sessions running concurrently it wasn’t possible to see everything but I did manage to take in: -

  • Panel – are there chinks in Googles armour? – Answer = no!
  • Workshop – becoming a power blogger – I’ll let you decide
  • Showcases – Advertising service providers, Consumer generated media, Technology enablers and Community – 20+ presentations!
  • Panel – Keeping the IM generations mindshare – how to build products for the 13-17 year olds

The general themes running through the day were: -

  • There are a lot of people trying to crack video both from a search and social media/editing perspective.
  • Social media and giving up control to the audience is the new model not just for publishers but for advertisers too
  • Lots of great technology on display from web based video search and editing through to complete virtual worlds

I’ll be blogging separately on the interesting technologies so watch this space…

Posted in AlwaysOn, Events, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

AlwaysOn conference day one

January 29, 2007

Started in NY tonight with Tony Perkins and Bill Cleary doing a double act where they presented video blogs from Davos and San Francisco respectively. These were a bit like “You’ve been framed” only not as consistently amusing but did set the tone for presentations that are now sure to be laced with video for the rest of the event.

While videos clearly add an element of interest and production not previously encountered in Powerpoint slides, I can’t help but think it’s cheating a bit to rely too much on them.

They were followed by Peter Hirshberg from Technorati giving a similarly light hearted, video laced presentation about web 2.0 and their new product built in association with Ogilvy.

Not exactly sure what that product is as it wasn’t really that clear and no demo was forthcoming.

The main theme, as to be expected was all about how social media is taking over and the need for publishers and advertisers to take an active role in the “conversation”. The intro’s were obviously designed to be lightweight rather than in depth. Let’s hope tomorrow brings a little more substance on what and how publishers and advertisers can engage rather than lots of people simply urging them on.

Posted in AlwaysOn, Events, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Leave a Comment »

“Old school” business – your opportunity to have fun at the ball?

November 6, 2006

One of the things we learned while developing the new ZDNet.co.uk site is that the old “Web 1.0″ model for building web sites doesn’t apply any more.

We used to have a pretty slick production line that consisted of Design building pages, Production turning them into HTML and Tech engineering the code into the content management system (CMS).

As we developed the new site, particularly the Community section, we found that that model doesn’t work any more.

In a “Web 2.0″ world (whatever that is) we’re returning to the age of the developer. The Community area on ZDNet V is all about functionality rather than style. Sure, it looks good but the emphasis has shifted towards more traditional development. Where once the on-line world coveted pure design, what we need now are people with experience in useabilty and Human Computer Interface (HCI) skills.

What’s interesting is that these are not new requirements, application development was around long before the web was even thought of. Web businesses are desperately hiring developers as fast as they can and the dangers are clear, application development requires a completely different process to web site development.

Changing that is difficult, as a result of the ZDNet V experience, we are completely re-engineering our development processes to put more emphasis on functionality without losing any of the design ethos that has made us successful so far. It’s not going to be a simple process but we’ve made a start.

The challenge for on-line businesses is strangely converse to those that faced traditional businesses when the world went on-line in “Web 1.0″. Those businesses struggled to get to grips with Design and HTML skills compared to the new media upstarts. We were the Cindarella’s to their ugly sisters and we had a great time at the ball.

Now us upstarts would do well to look to the experience that the traditional companies have had all along. That is the ability to build robust, functional, easy to use systems and adapt that experience to make them accessible via the web browser.

This is the next big challenge for both traditional and new media businesses but for once, the old school businesses might just have an advantage.

Time for the ugly sisters to get a makeover and pull on their party dresses?

Posted in Web 2.0, ZDNet | Leave a Comment »