Publishing 2.0 at Web 2.0 (Rojo Demo)

Chris Alden (formerly of Red Herring) is showcasing Rojo and talking about how it came to be. (The session title was John Battelle's idea.)

Publishing 1.0 was more about on-line magazines. We thought of them like magazines with structure and hierarchy, etc. Central planning of editorial content, display ads, brand was very important.

Publishing 2.0 is... suits vs. pajamas?(!) Publishing 2.0 penalizes those Big Media who publish first but get the story wrong. But how do you know who to trust?

It's about: forums, posts, memes, contextual ads, reputation, organic, merit-based, rapid-fire, self-correcting. "Every page is a front page." No single point of failure. But there is chaos too!

Aggregation is here. Yahoo News vs. CNN. Google News.

Feeds are The New Way. They're optimized for dynamic content. Feed are doing for reading what blogs are doing for writing.

Cool, nobody in the room will admit to not knowing what RSS feeds are.

Advertising in feeds IS happening.

Rojo is here to make that stuff more useful and accessible, via rojo.com and through partners. So it's time for a demo of the beta. (Yes, betas abound.) It's an invite-only trial, in the tradition of GMail--sort of.

Web-based RSS aggregator. Lots of color and some fancy DHTML tricks. Tabbed interface. Mark read/unread. E-mail story to someone. Looks fairly clean. Chris is speculating on the future market growth of RSS readers. The product has these sort of virtual folders that seem to be based on a search. Interesting. They're personal groupings of feeds (not posts?). Actually, no. They tagged by the user. They're tags, not folders.

They provide starter folders for users. All the views/folder can be exported as RSS for viewing in other aggregators (excellent).

There's a Social Networking Community component too. You can invite people, create a connection, and then see each others sub lists. You can see which stories they flag (mark as important). It's like a linkblog. (Yup, Chris confirmed that.)

Fine-grained permissions will let you control exactly what other users can and cannot see. Users control their own structure and taxonomy.

There's a "recommended channels" feature, of course. Cool, they have a feature like Bloglines citations.

Marc Canter is asking how "people discovery" works in the system. Since it's an invite only system (right now), that's built in.

What's the business model? They're saying it'll be a free service with contextual ads. But there's the notion of a human aggregation model they're tinkering with. When another blogger helps you find good blogs, etc. Maybe you could build the next Gizmodo on top of Rojo? Infoworld has something at infoworld.rojo.com to see what Infoworld folks are reading/recommending. It's an interesting blend of reading and writing.

It's a federation system.

Steve Gilmor is asking about syncronization and switching costs (as he does in every session). It's not there today, but they want to do it.

Want an invite? Mail web2@rojo.com to get one.

See Also: My Web 2.0 post archive for coverage of all the other sessions I attended.

Posted by jzawodn at October 05, 2004 03:32 PM