I'm in the RSS and Syndication Business Strategies workshop at Web 2.0. We're discussing how to slice and dice the publishing world: big business, small publishers, random people, etc. RSS has many uses, so it's hard to figure things out and explain it to users and publisher. Some use it to syndicate content to other sites, some use it in personal readers, and so on.
Is there a clear difference between "commerical" publishers and everyone else?
Ooh, some Yahoo bashing (I expected that--Steve Gilmor is here). Discussion of on-line aggregators reporting usage/sub stats back via User-Agent. Bloglines and Yahoo do this. Feedburner may solve the problem. Bob Wyman (pubsub.com) is reminded of when AOL first turned on proxies--some folks freaked out because there was an intermediary between the user and the publisher. From impressions to click-thru tracking.
I think Bob wants an affiliate model. My feel of the room is that it's all about the money. Given that this session is about business strategies, that's unsurprising. How do we share the money?
Does RSS destroy centralized marketplaces when commerce and marketing enters the picture? Or does it simply lower the barrier to entry? (I think it just lowers the bar.) Lots of discussion on the future of eBay. Will they stay the same or become a trust and recommendation engine?
Damn, this room is full of smart people! I'm getting sucked into listening more than writing (gasp!).
LiveDeal vs. eBay vs. craigslist. How can one subscribe to a feed of all sofas for sale within 5 miles of home?
Tagging matters. But people lie and are lazy. Google made it automatic--to some degree. Why does tagging work on, say, Flickr? (Because of the personal incentive.) Same with eBay and del.icio.us.
There are many publishing models and it's really too soon to tell who's going to win. AdSense gets things started. Jeff Jarvis calls it "the lowest end of the value chain." (I think.)
We need to get publishers and potential publishers to grok RSS and users to grok readers (not the technology).
As expected, the discussion has wandered quite a bit. But it's been quite interesting.
See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.
Posted by jzawodn at October 05, 2004 10:20 AM
tagging can be thought of as ad hoc categorization.
for a system like del.icio.us, instead of having a pre-defined list of categories and a tool to manage that, you simply have an extra field where each word becomes a tag. (then there are tools to help you group by tags, rename tags, etc.)
It would be pretty easy to create an eBay RSS feed that searches for all sofas for sale within 5 miles of your house. Our search API lets you specify a max distance, so will compare your ZIP code with the sellers and factor that it.
