Finally, The Internet As Intended.

Wow. Netscape’s userbase is really letting them have it. There are six pages of negatives comments by Netscape users reacting to the new site. Will they simmer down over time? Here’s a taste of what most are saying:

I don’t want other people voting on what I should read first. I want to see major national news stories and then if I want to know about entertainment or sports or whatever I can click a link. I liked having a choice. This new format is awful. What if the New York Times decided to have readers vote on where things should be placed in the paper. What a disaster. If this is how it will be from now on, I’m changing my homepages.

So much for the wisdom of crowds :-).

Over at Read/WriteWeb Richard MacManus has some skinny on old-school Netscape user’s reactions to the just-out-of-beta redesign of Netscape.com. Apparently, based on comments left on Richard’s blog, some of the mainstream Netscape user crowd are not too thrilled with the changes.

you know damn well this kids running the show don’t give a crap about what the public wants.

Jason Calacanis, who came to AOL via their acquisition of Weblogs, is spearheading Netscape’s shift from a web 1.0 portal into a 2.0 collective-intelligence aggregator.

 

We should all be watching to see how eagerly Netscape’s mainstream userbase takes to the web2.0 principles at work in the new netscape.com. It’s a great litmus-test of the principles that are driving the big re-interest in the web.

This morning I moderated a session at the Online Community Forum: “Blogs, Wikis, and Workspaces for Public Policy” - a half day event at the National Press Club.

The pic is Jim Cashel warming up the crowd with fascinating insight on the power of blogs, while Tony Kopetchny adjusts his tie.

tags: ocf2006, onlinecommunityreport

CNET has another article on Web 2.0 apps finding homes in corporate america - Corporate America wakes up to Web 2.0. its more mainstream coverage of Web 2.0 in the enterprise and the article points out what we all know - that collaboration tools that enable simple human interaction have promise in the workplace. The article sites a few higher profile corporate experiments including blogs & wikis at Ernst & Young and an internal knowledge sharing app built on bookmark tagging at IBM.

Yahoo Local now supports hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews. Here come the biggees, does this mean buy-bye edgeio?

About a month ago at the Online Community Camp in San Francisco I moderated the Emerging Technologies in Online Community session (grab the ppt here). In the talk I said you might as well kiss the borders of your online community goodbye. What I meant was this - tomorrow, the web is the community, and your members are running free out there, convening and collaborating away - and they are not doing it on your site. So let them, encourage them, but give them the tools to make your community portable. Don’t restrict them to your websites pidly 800x600 borders. Let your community members continue to participate in the community by pluging content and functions into their own websites, by commenting and conversing on other websites. Browser extensions, desktop widgets, site widgets, bookmarklets, syndication, and SMS let your community exist well beyond the boundaries of your ‘web pages’.

Dont believe this is the future of things, here’s a list of new companies that are turning the web into a community by enabling conversation, information sharing, and networking beyond the confines of a destination web site:

WidgetBox, which is still in stealth beta mode (but you can peek under the covers over at Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch) will offer users a host of "site widgets" that they can plug into blogs, auctions, social networks, and personal homepages.

CoComment lets users attach conversations to any site, collect their comments, organize them, and share them.

Itzle, a browser extension that "allows you to walk around websites as if they were physical locations". Users can have real-time chats, co-surf with friends, and share favorites.

Even Google is getting into the game with Google Notebook. Which doesn’t have a social aspect to it just yet, but is a good example of functionality that lets users interact across the web.

Of course there are the photo sites that let you plug your photos into blogs and personal sites, flickr, and photoBucket. And Yahoo is in the mix with Yahoo! Widgets, and OS X provides a platform you can extend your community to, and so will Vista.

The interesting thing is that all of these tools are just that - tools. They have a social focus, but are not ‘communities’ in and of themselves. This leaves alot of space for traditional online communities - ones that are rooted in a ‘destination site’ - to take these concepts and free their members from the confines of their site. Sites that already have significant membership and participation should really be able to leverage these types of tools to build an even stronger base.

My mom doesn’t get "social bookmarking". Most of my clients need an hour long personal tour of del.icio.us before any lightbulbs go off. Blue Dot lifts the geek veil, adds rounded corners and a buddy list, and just might make social bookmarking useful for the rest of us.

How’d they do it? The mechanics of BlueDot are almost identical to del.ico.us, what del.icio.us calls bookmarks, Bluedot calls dots. Registered users use an IE toolbar or a Firefox bookmarklet to "dot" pages of interest as they surf the web.  You can see your friends dots, and your friends automatically see yours. You can discover both friends and dots through tags. All sounds so familiar, right?

The magic isn’t in the friend list and ‘containers’, as Benzinger at SolutionWatch suggests. The magic is in explaining the service sans geekery.

Bluedot keeps the interface simple, but not cryptic, and has done a fantastic job of explaining the service without web2.0 buzzwords or geekery.  I would encourage anyone building a web2.0 application to sit through the 3 minutes flash demo of BlueDots service as an example of how to explain a web2.0 app to your audience who doesn’t give a hoot about web2.0.

Will it work? I don’t know. But a quick scan of the popular tags on Bluedot vs the popular tags on Del.icio.us seems to suggest that it certainly is appealing to the mainstream, not the geekstream.

I cant believe that yesterday eBay launched eBay Wiki, and I didn’t know about it before my I gave my talk this morning at the Gilbane Content Management in Government conference in Washington DC about Blogs, Wikis, and RSS. The service lets any registered eBay user post an article about any relevant eBay topic. The wiki is already looks like a very useful resource for eBay’ers, and I have know doubt the enthusiastic eBay community will keep it that way. The site is powered by Joe Kraus’s JotSpot.

eBay has always been a stellar example of baking the power of your network right in to your product. Now that eBay has rolled out tag-based item browsing, a community support wiki, blogs (I’m not seeing the value here for eBay as clearly however), and is testing Skype integration - they are moving just as fast as the other big boys embracing the web2.0 wave.

 

• Blogs, Wikis and Workspaces Survey - Online Community Report
  Jim Cashel at Forum One is looking for input on use of blogs, wikis, and workspaces - you can take his free survey
  (tags: onlinecommunity blogs wikis workspaces)

Seth Jayson at the Motley Fool says don’t believe the Google hype:

• Google insiders continue to drop shares at an alarming rate;
• Click-fraud is dangerous for Google, and ruining the internet;

  Any of you try searching lately? Notice the astounding lack of quality across the board, even at revamped competitors like Yahoo! (Nasdaq: YHOO) and IAC/InterActiveCorp’s (Nasdaq: IACI) Ask.com? I feel your pain. I, too, have spent hours stuck in the revolving door of link farms, splogs, and scraper sites.

• The constant release of ‘doodads’ is just a diversion

  Take a hard look at this problem, and a hard look at those insider sales, and then ask yourself why on Earth Google is spending time on doodads that no one needs, like an online spreadsheet. I think the answer is “because it needs news that looks like the future.”

• and Microsoft and Yahoo have closed the gap with their new maps and local search (Jason says surprassed).

He ends up with the conclusion that Google is a pretty good advertising network, but not the only one that can do things right, and it will need alot more than “gee whiz” factor to retain its huge capitalization.