“Don’t forget to take a dictaphone,” said one of my colleagues. “She speaks really quickly.” Scoffing at the youngster’s lack of power-note-taking skills, I have simply brought my notebook and pen. Like an idiot. He was right. She speaks very quickly and very intensely. Here are some scraps of what I was able to salvage between my coughs. (Apologies, Julie. I hope you didn’t catch anything!)

What is the impact of Web 2.0 on established businesses, I ask.

“So, what we’re finding is an unusual dynamic between large business and startups. You know how they say that M&A is the new R&D, right? Well, that can bring benefits on both sides. Startups need to develop good habits and practices, no matter what stage they’re at. They need to be on track to be bought. At the same time, large businesses need to be radically open to the dynamic change being offered by new companies with new ideas. And large businesses don’t often attract innovators. They’re too slow moving and don’t want to change, you know? Change more often comes from outside companies rather than within them. So there’s a lot to be gained on both sides by new companies working hand-in-hand with established ones.

“One company that we’ve worked with is Monitise. Monitise offers banking - real time information, security & payment services - over mobile phones. Monitise has been incubated by Morse Plc, the big communications company. That’s not a popular word nowadays - incubate - but it’s the best description of what’s been happening. Because of that relationship, they have been able to strike deals with the big high street banks, which an unaffiliated start-up would have a lot of difficulty with. But they’ve also been independent enough to be able to do things their own way and be fast-moving and agile. That sort of model, where a new company is given some stability and insight into best business practices by a larger company, but also remains independent in many ways, that’s the way I see things happening.”

There’s a pause here for me to cough and wheeze a bit and desperately gulp down some water.

“A lot of what I understand by Web 2.0 is that companies need a lot less cash to get started. They’re able to use existing investment by other people. Broadband penetration is a great example of that. Because people have always-on, fast internet access, it’s possible to offer services cheaply that would historically have required enormous investment.

“And technology is empowering marketing. It used to be thought a central business tenet that marketing-based companies are not a good thing. But now, technology has evolved to the extent that that can actually be a very good thing. Another company I’ve been involved with is Eloqua, which you might describe as a next-generation salesforce.com. But it also builds in marketing tools that give you very fine control over cost-per-acquisition.

“They used to say that 50% of the money spent on advertising is wasted, but you don’t know which half, right? Well, we’re moving to a point where we have the capability for marketing to become 100% efficient through careful analysis of Google AdWords and other mechanisms.

“Marketing-led companies can be entirely successful; it becomes a question of execution. Look at Apple Computer, right? I’ve been involved with e-tribes. It’s a social network, but for people my age [To be polite, I can only say that Julie is one month older than me]. A lot of what they’re doing is finding the means to get to the right people to join their service.”

I demur, slightly, and start talking about social marketing - blogs and so forth - becoming more important as marketing tools, and having less precise ROI calculations…

“Right, so I think what we’re seeing is a couple of things. First of all, we’re moving to a point where communications are more and more real time. At Ariadne, we publish an online journal that is only updated a few times, but I think we’re moving to a point where people will expect us to have a blog. They expect the information to be updated in real time.

“Also, the nature of marketing is changing. Word-of-mouth has always been enormously powerful, but technology is giving it even more power still. People are broadcasting for themselves, whether that be on a blog or video or whatever it is.

“It’s a question of your aims in that space. People are talking about you whether you like it or not. And you want to be engaged in that, to be part of that feedback loop. Because if you’re not, then you don’t really know what’s going on. Social media lets you show your best side if you can. On a wider scale, we’re moving from a model where communications are about control of the message, to a point where the best you can hope for is to have some influence. Markets are conversations, like they say, and the best thing you can do is attempt to join that conversation.”

So, I say, between more coughs, this Web 2.0 thing, is it business or consumer?

“It’s interesting, right? Because historically the companies we’ve been involved with have been B to B to C, and we’ve been at the top of that. Your channel finds your customers for you. Nowadays, things seem to be a lot flatter, because of the increased power of the internet and you can go directly B to C.

“I wouldn’t say that these services are necessarily about either business or consumer, but they are about individuals. People find these services, and if they are useful, then they become part of their business practice.

“It becomes very challenging for CIOs, because their role is changing. In the past, they’ve decided what software and hardware you’ve got access to in your business. But nowadays, it tends to be more about integration.

“People find and use tools and it’s up to CIOs to help them with that. Take instant messaging. As the CIO, you find your sales department is using IM to talk to customers. You can’t just shut it down, like they might have done in the old days. The sales people have got relationships with customers through the use of IM, and it’s your job to make sure it works properly and to support that. They’re needing to be a lot more flexible.

“There’s a service I use called SpinVox, another company we’re involved with. It turns speech into text - so you can get your voice messages through your mobile as an SMS. That really helps me as an individual, because it’s a lot faster and more convenient. But is it business or consumer? Well, it’s both. We’re also involved with Otodio, which does the opposite in a way. It turns text into voice, so you can say ‘read’ business documents while you’re driving your car through the stereo. It’s a business tool, sure, but it’s more about being useful to people as individuals.

“While some of the companies we deal with are about mobile phones, that’s an area that I’m actually still quite cautious about. For one thing, it’s very difficult to see where things are going as we move from 2.5G to 3G. It’s hard to see what people will want or what will stick. The other big issue is integration. To create an application for mobile phones, you currently need to create 160 different versions. That’s quite a scary and expensive prospect for a startup.”

Time for me to go. I scribble furiously and pray that I’m not sick before I leave the building.

They haven’t been Techcrunched or boingboing’ed as yet so the number of sites in the system is low, which limits the utility of the service. However, a search for ‘Search Engines’ has been pre-populated. It would be useful if there were a way to seed the system with results from another service. I also think real money would be an interesting addition. As it is, only the ongoing addition and betting on sites by sufficient users will reveal whether the model actually works. But I have to say.. it looks good on paper. Would I invest real money in Tall Street? No. But then I’m not an investor on the lookout for innovative new ideas.

Yes, it’s just another student project, and it looks a bit rough. But haven’t we seen something fitting that description before…?

Gary was also good enough to answer a few questions for me:

Could you explain briefly how tall street works.

Traders make investments on sites belonging under keywords. They get rewarded (their investments increase) if when people who search those keywords find their sites useful (based on if the link gets clicked and any ratings the link gets) and punished if not.

Can prediction markets work for search when there are so many ‘correct answers’?

This is a problem any search engine struggles with.

The ideal situation is:
The user has some idea about what they want, they express this in “search terms”, the search engine returns the best answer for what the user wanted.

A search engine works by:
Returning all the pages that contain that term (or had that term in the anchor text to that page). Then it ranks those pages based on some algorithm which takes into account the number of pages linking to it, (and linking to those pages) among other things.

Tall Street works by:
Returning all the pages that someone thought belonged under that search term, and the rankings are influenced by

1) how many people thought that site belonged under the term (if lots of people invest in a site it gets lots of investment then it gets a high ranking),

2) how much they thought the site should be ranked in comparison to other sites under that term (some unpopular terms might only have one investor in, and they could completely control the rankings for that search term, this is fine since if someone disagrees then they are able to invest more heavily and change the rankings),

3) how much influence (money) the investors investing in the sites under the term have over the directory i.e. their net worth (if that investor is good investing in popular sites then over time they will get more influence since they will accumulate more money)

Why is this better?

Rankings are up-to-date - the link structure of the web that search engines analyse to determine rankings isn’t dynamic - links remain long after a site moves. What could happen with Tall Street is if some site added a new cool feature that no other site under the keyword had, then investment in that site could increase and it’d end up at the top of the results straight away. You wouldn’t see something like this in the link structure until long after. ( i.e. The feature would have to be very cool that people decided to link to the site and then the search engine would have to recrawl the web, and then update the results)

Users can find sites by type and easily find similar sites - Sites are under keywords because people thought that the site belonged under the key words. With search engines you get lots of results many aren’t relevant. They just appear because they contain the term you are searching for on the page. We have a feature where you can drill down to find pages under keyword1 and keyword2, which lets you easily find similar sites e.g. http://www.tallstreet.com/view/PHP/tutorial/
Fair Ranking system - Everyone gets an input into the rankings. If you think a site doesn’t belong, you can mark it as spam. If you find a site that is better then what is showing as the best then you can sign up and invest in it. If you’re right and other people agree, then you’ll make more money and have more influence over the directory.

At a later stage, we could allow traders to group together and publish their portfolio. This means you could search for ‘what do New Zealanders think is the best news site’. Or ‘what do web developers think is the best reference site’. This isn’t something a search engine can do as easily.

Is this a web 2.0 product, and how so?

My aim in the project is to create a cool fun website that I think it’ll help make finding good sites easier. I guess if you follow the definitions on

http://twopointouch.com/2006/08/17/10-definitions-of-web-20-and-their-shortcomings/

It has to some degree:
The wisdom of crowds
Shared Web Applications
User Participation

But mainly because I think these elements will help produce the best result.

I try to allow the site to work even if you don’t have javascript (we do not rely on AJAX) and provide an AJAX way if I think it can help usability.

I would argue that you should narrow down a little on what you search for, to gain a little traction in a few limited ‘best of’s. What’s your answer?

My view is to provide some value to people as early as possible. You are right. Limiting would show exactly how the product works. But one way we give users value is to allow them to add their own site under keywords. This is fine since if they if they are spamming they will be punished, and if they want to earn lots of money to invest in their site they will need to play the game well and make good investments in other sites. We could publish some of the popular search terms on the front page, or if people want to recommend some categories to promote we could do that.

Who are you and where are you from (professionally and geographically)?

I’m a software engineering student from the bottom of the world (New Zealand). I have been working for an ecommerce store which is where I picked up the skills to do this.

How are you funded currently?

Currently the project is experimental rather then an actual company, it’s self funded.

What are your plans for this going forward?

The real problem is gaining users, the site isn’t useful unless people use it, and people won’t use it unless its useful. This is made harder by the fact we have $0 marketing budget.

The key things we are concentrating on at the moment are:
- We are trying to add in content to make the site more useful.
- Getting users.

For some reason, my request for a face-to-face interview with Larry Page and Sergey Brin was unsuccessful. Apparently, I needed to ask in 1996 to get an appointment any time soon. Nonetheless, the Google people were keen to answer my questions about the business. On the less positive side, I had to do the whole thing by email and the answers need to be attributed to a ‘Google spokesperson’. As I’ve said before, I think email interviews are less than satisfactory. Being a big company, they have to be pretty circumspect and so some of the answers are a bit bland, to say the least. Nonetheless, thought I’d share a portion of what they provided. Thank you, Oliver at Google UK, for co-ordinating this.

How do you define Web 2.0, if indeed you consider it worthy of a definition?

Here at Google we have no single definition of web 2.0. For us, the development of our services rests on keeping creative and innovative, maintaining our focus on improving user experience, and our goal to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Two commonly used indicators of Web 2.0 are “the web as platform” and “the wisdom of crowds”. How is Google currently implementing these? A third element that tends to be cited is “the web as a social experience”. Are you active in this space?

Our overall view is “Don’t bet against the Internet”. What’s exciting today is that technologies like AJAX are making it possible for browser-based applications to have the rich functionality that used to only be possible with desktop-based applications.

A big objection to web applications is trust. How might this be overcome?

Google is committed to protecting our users’ privacy. We recognise that our continued success is based on earning - and keeping - our users’ trust. Unlike a credit card company or mobile phone operator, our users can switch to a competing search provider with the click of a mouse. All our work at Google is guided by clear privacy principles.

At Google:

- We build privacy protections into our products from the ground up;

- None of our products use any personal data unless fully disclosed in a privacy policy;

- We always ask people actively to opt-in to services that use sensitive data;

- We write our privacy policies in simple clear language so that users can easily understand them - they are not the usual legal jargon; and

- We allow people to use most of our services anonymously, and we even tell them how they can disable our cookies that they have been sent.

In addition, Google will take legal action to protect its users’ privacy. In 2005 the US Government asked us to provide two months worth of users’ search queries and billions of web addresses (URLs) as part of its effort to defend the Child Online Protection Act, a 1998 federal law that seeks to ban Internet sites from displaying content deemed ”harmful to minors”. The US Supreme Court ruled that the law couldn’t be enforced unless the Government could prove that less intrusive measures (such as Internet filtering) had proven inadequate.

Google challenged these demands. As Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel, has explained:

While privacy was not the most significant legal issue in this case (because the Government wasn’t asking for personally identifiable information), privacy was perhaps the most significant to our users. As we noted in our briefing to the court, we believe that if the Government was permitted to require Google to hand over search queries that could have undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private. (Google Blog, 17th March 2006).

A US judge largely ruled in our favor - forcing the Government to exclude all search queries from its demand and to limit the number of URLs to just 50,000. We believe that this was a real victory for privacy, and for our users.

How does AJAX help Google deliver a better service/experience?

With AJAX, web sites can be more dynamic and interactive, and the user interface can be more responsive. For example, AJAX technologies are behind the draggable maps on Google Maps. Likewise, AJAX technologies are behind Google Suggest, letting us display query suggestions from Google’s legions of servers in real time as the user types. These types of interactive features are enabled by AJAX, and they have let Google develop novel and innovative interfaces that improve our ability to deliver information to our users.

So-called “mashups” using the Google Maps API (in particular) are causing a lot of excitement. Why do you think this is the case? Any favourites there? Is this the future? (i.e. will the trend towards open APIs become dominant? why?)

Mapping has traditionally been a very expensive and complex technology. With the Google Maps API, web developers can incorporate maps into their web pages for free and with very little programming experience. Because the API is so accessible, web developers whose web sites had geographic data quickly adopted Google Maps to make their web sites more interactive, attractive, and useful for their users. We are really excited to see such wide adoption from such a wide range of web sites. There is such a variety of sites that use the Google Maps API, everyone on the team has their own favourite. We even do our own mash-ups sometimes, such as our integration of the stages of the Tour de France 2006 into Google Earth, which you can read about here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/tour-de-france-goes-3d-with-google.html

Google’s business model is generally to provide free services and monetize those services with targeted advertising. Open APIs like the Google Maps API are very compatible with this business model, and we hope to open up more of our computing infrastructure to developers in the future.

One driver (IMHO) of Web 2.0 is a demand for authentic, word-of-mouth relationships and referrals. Is web searching going out of fashion any time soon?

While it is difficult to speculate about future trends, we feel that providing relevant answers to search queries is something that users want and value, and we continue to devote the majority of our time to developing and improving upon our search services.

It’s important to remember that today only around 10 to 15% of the world’s information is available online. The more information that comes online, the more important search will become.

On the internet, stories increase in value over time, rather than disappearing, the way they do in printed newspapers and magazines:

In a weird way, [the internet] completely inverts the calculus of news, which is that the new stuff is what matters and the old stuff doesn’t matter — because the good old stuff gets more relevant over time as more people flag it and link to it.

I guess this is the Long Tail of news, except it’s an interesting shape. Online, news lasts forever. You could say that the most influential articles online are the short head, and the rest of what gets written is part of the tail. Time - when the piece was written - is only a small part of the equation.

The home page is dead:

The day that you could, as a media organisation, expect people to come to your home page, to navigate to news within your site, make you a part of their daily routine — that day is going.

Increasingly people are going to be getting their news from a broad menu of many sites. You can’t expect them to come necessarily to your home page. They will be coming, instead, to individual stories that they find out about in any number of ways — possibly from a blog, possibly from another site, or from Google.

People aren’t visiting websites any more. They’re dipping into stories, flipping back, skimming through. Internet ’surfing’ is alive and well, as much as the advertisers and advertising managers on mainstream sites might wish it were otherwise.

Your blog won’t make as much money as a successful print publication:

No single blog that we start is going to generate significant revenues in terms of advertising.

QFT.

Why people read blogs as an alternative to mainstream media:

Mainstream interests are often served well by mainstream media, but niche interests are usually not served at all by mainstream media. And that’s a case where the blogosphere is basically filling that gap, and that’s why I prefer it for those subjects.

A lot of the time mainstream media also makes a pretty hamfisted job of covering niche interests. Online, you can find experts on anything. Most journalists are generalists, on the other hand.

Is blogging journalism, and should anyone care:

Fundamentally, it doesn’t matter what journalists think — this is happening anyway.

Blogs have an extraordinarily wide spectrum of styles and technique and it’s not like our world, and yet it’s competing with our world for readership.

The whole citizen vs. professional journalism thing is a red herring, as I see it. If people write interesting, useful stuff then they have got my vote. I don’t care if they are NCTJ accredited. For useful information, I don’t even care if it’s well-written. (Watch a short documentary about citizen journalism here).

How journalistic style might change as a result:

I think the AP style, which has become New York Times style, has dominated the culture of journalism in the US as one of objectivity or being dispassionate, is going to evolve simply because they’re [in] competition from very passionate voices.

An interesting idea. But not always true. A lot of bloggers model their style on what they’re used to in newspapers. Be nice to see a bit more excitement in the papers, though…

Frankly, even though I’m supposed to be an investor, the ideas that excite me most are not necessarily the ones that make the most money, but the ones that blow away evil old monopolies. For example, I love collaborative news sites not so much because they make a lot of money– though they might– but because they’ve shown what a bad job the “old media” were doing.

Most people don’t understand what a social force startups can be. There are a lot of changes that can only happen through companies. One startup I dream of funding is the one that kills the record companies. You know your business model is broken when you’re suing your customers. The new business model must be out there somewhere, and my guess is that the way to beat the bad guys is not through political action (or at least, not only that), but by inventing
whatever replaces them.

(Parochial headline alert: PG Tips is a brand of English tea.)

Lunch today with John Davies, who’s in charge of next-web research for BT. It was quite a long, or rather intense, discussion, so I’ll only tackle the basics here. I’ve been trying to nail this semantic web issue for some time, but every time I start reading an academic paper, my attention seems to wander off. So this was a good opportunity for me. I wasn’t going to deviate. As soon as he sat down, I was in with my carefully prepared, top journalist’s question: “so what’s this semantic web thingy, then?”

It turns out that that is one of the more difficult questions. (Damn!) It depends on what you mean. You might mean turning the billions of existing web sites semantic or only about possible future sites or services. The second of these options is the most likely outcome at the present. Semantic web is partly about annotating web pages to make them amenable to machines. John prefers the expression ’semantic technologies’ to avoid this confusion.

At the moment, information on the web is pretty much designed for human consumption. You and I know when we go to a shopping site that the figure in bold is the price, that a certain number is the product code and that this piece of information is about the shipping information. To a machine, it may make no sense whatsoever. If machines are to be able to bring together all these different pages to make the web more useful, then they need to be able to read them.

We’ll see the first applications of semantic technologies in the enterprise space. Its need is more acute. They have lots of databases, all built by different people according to different rules. Integrating the information from those is already a very costly and time-consuming activity. One database may talk about CustomerName, another may refer to CustomerID, for example. Joining these things together, so perhaps, a support department knows about what equipment the logistics department has installed for a customer, improves business efficiency. Semantic technologies put what Davies called a “wrapper” around these different data sources to create overarching access, connecting different datasources in a way that doesn’t require nearly so much human effort.

People developing semantic technologies work by developing an ontology for understanding the sort of data it’s looking at and the technology will be able to do some reasoning based on this. An ontology means a form of classification system for whatever it is that’s being examined. For foods, that might include their ingredients, nutritional properties, suppliers and type. It’s not just a list, though, but will also understand the relationships between different items. An ontology developed for food might come across E101 and additives and CrispyPop bar. It will know that E101 falls under additives which are part of the ingredients of the bar. If that description then gets combined with a database of shops at a wholesaler where you might send the bar, then the semantic agent will calculate that health food shops aren’t going to stock CrispyPop bars. It’s not intelligence in any way, but the application of rules that the creators have decided upon.

Because the semantic technologies are lightweight and open source, they are potentially available to any company. For this reason, enterprises that get some of their data from external sources will still be able to use semantic approaches to integrate and drill the ensuing combination. These are my words, not John’s, but one way to think of the technologies is as providing a toolkit for more easily creating web mashups. Companies already exist, such as Cerebra and Ontoprise, to sell ways to integrate enterprise information using OWL, the web ontology language.

I kind of understood, so far, but I needed a good example. I suspect you may be the same.

BT works closely with the National Health Service in the UK. The Service has already gone a long way into digitising and collating its information through the Electronic Patient Record system and also information on medical knowledge through the SNOMED classification system. Unfortunately, though, the data can still be very dispersed. The X-Ray department might have a patient’s data on a different system to the Pharmacy, for example, and those might be completely unconnected to the systems used in a different hospital or by a clinic.

What semantic web technologies bring to this is unity and also what John called Description Logics. It can prise open the different databases, allow an overview, but also calculate with it. Imagine a patient’s medical record says that they are allergic to almonds. Then a doctor misses this and somehow prescribes a nut-based food. When the nurse enters this into the patient’s record, the semantic application will use its ontology to work out that almonds are nuts and that therefore this is a very bad idea. Semantic technologies that can perform calculations like this, and potentially save lives, are already in use in the UK Health Service.

I’ll leave this there for today. My head hurts already. If there’s interest, I’ll be happy to do a follow-up on another day.

Anyway, he isn’t. Yes, he’s laid-back and he did use the expression ‘real good’. We only had a short conversation, but I can imagine him being a big hugger. I like that sometimes, though. Anyway, I was disarmed. He seems to be a charming man. Actually, I’ve been really lucky so far, and only a couple of my Web 2.0 interviews have been with people who turned my flesh. Bottom line? You try to knock the scobleizer and you go through me first. Also, cheers to Robert for doing a live interview after the recent debate on the subject.

So what got you into blogging?

Back in 2000, I used to work as a conference organiser for a tech company and I was asking all the speakers what the sessions should be about. Quite a lot of them said ‘blogging’. At that point, I had no idea what that meant. *laughs* I went and Googled it, and there seemed to only be about 150-200 blogs out there.

So I had a look, and it was interesting but I didn’t think it was good enough to do a session on - which is so ironic, given that there are entire conferences on the subject now. However, I thought I’d have a go. I was really lucky, after about a week, I was linked by Dave Winer, and that suddenly brought about 3000 readers. From then on, the readership just grew.

And so then you got hired by Microsoft. What was their attitude towards your blogging?

Well, I kind of assumed that they had hired me partly for my blogging. So that gave me the impetus to carry on in the same style. Before I went there, I had criticised the company and advised Steve Ballmer to split it in two. I thought that gave me a go-ahead to carry on in the same way. And so that’s what I did.

What did MS gain from the blog?

It showed that they were listening. Which is so rare. They got a lot of PR out of it, and I suppose that was the main thing. But it also affected the way the rest of the company communicated with users. I used to get technical queries about certain products and I used to just forward them on to tech support. I didn’t know who the people were who were really responsible and neither did any of the users. Nowadays, though, all of the product groups have their own blogs with the product manager in charge, and they’re engaging with customers all the time.

And so for businesses in general, what do they have to gain?

Well, the PR effect is mostly because companies never listen and the blog format creates a vehicle for that. Any kind of listening is a major thing. At the same time, it goes both ways. A blog post can be a lot better than sending out a press release.

On the other hand, companies that hire agencies to do their blogs for them aren’t doing the right thing. South West Airlines have set up a blog, but it seems to be written by their PR company. It isn’t human. You need to get the idea of real human beings behind the posts.

So why have blogs become so popular?

I think we have to start with Google, and the way Google works. Blogs are extremely search-friendly. And blogs also create an environment where linking is natural. If you link to someone, then the chances are that they will link back to you. It’s just human nature - people will return a favour. That affects your Google ranking. Also, journalists are using blogs as a source for stories and so they get good quality inbound links. Word of mouth is important. People just saying ‘have you seen this site?’. Also there are new mechanisms for blogs to gain a lot of traffic. The digg site, for example. People are posting on there, ‘have you seen this site today?’ And it works really well.

Your blogging style is very like a diary. You don’t really do articles, for example.

I just tried to write on my blog in the same way that I talk. I picked up the style from Dave Winer. I just wanted to try to be conversational and talk to the readers on my blog the same way that I would talk to you.

Sometimes you find your audience by accident, though. A lot of people just blog for their family and friends, and if they do that well, then the audience will extend beyond that and it becomes a different thing.

So this blog thing, is it a fashion or here to stay?

Maybe, but it’s hard to know where we’re going. At the moment, I am experimenting with video, and I’ll be doing a video thing later this year. However, what you have to bear in mind is that video is a lot more difficult to consume than blogs. Everyone can write because they were taught that at school, but far fewer people know the grammar of good video, how to tell a story with a camera.

You can’t consume video in the same way, either. I can read maybe a 1000 blogs in an hour or two, but you can’t do the same thing with video. You have to give up after half-an-hour or so.

The thing is, that you can still get a lot of value out of a poor writer. You can scan their post for the good information. The same thing isn’t true of video, you can’t scan it.

That’s what makes me confident about podcasts, in a way. The audio element is so much more important than the visual element. If you remember the reports from Baghdad, when it was getting bombed. The pictures were appalling, but because you could hear all the sound, those reports were very affecting, picture or no picture. Also, podcasts are more location-independent. You can listen to a podcast while you’re in your car or while you are exercising.

So what makes for a successful blog?

Well, if I knew that… *we both laugh. There was a note of bitterness in mine*

Write about the stuff that people want to know about. You should spend a little time thinking about that if being successful is your aim.

Link a lot. People will link back to you. It’s human nature. They want to know that they’re being talked about and they will be generous in response.

People who have done it really well. Techcrunch. What they have is compelling graphics alongside really tight writing. That sort of format seems to be working well.

But for someone just starting, I’d advise they read 50 blogs for a couple of weeks. See what really interests you and try to be as good as them.

Any guidelines on posting frequency or length?

I would say that more is generally better. But then that depends on the area that you are in. If you want to be the best trucking blogger, then work out how much the current champion does and do a little better. If that guy posts once a week, then posting twice a week is obviously better. But I would say that most people who blog don’t care about having a big audience. They just want something they can be proud of.

If you are good and interesting then you will get an audience. That might take a little while, but I have known of blogs that have become famous overnight due to just one thing. For example, I search for the word ‘geek’ in blog posts and if I find it, then the likelihood is that I will go and read that post. This world - the blogosphere - is doubling every six months, though. It’s going to always be changing as a consequence of that.

Is blogging part of Web 2.0?

Sort of. The way I see Web 2.0 is that it’s mixing technology and communities together. Someone could reverse engineer digg, for example, and create an identical site on the technical level. But what they wouldn’t have is the community. And that community is what has made digg, in many respects.

Blogging kind of plays into that space. It’s user-created media. But also the communities around blogs are as important as the blogs themselves. When you participate, say by offering a comment, then you become a part owner.

Well, anyway. Here’s what I managed to get.

Can you give me some facts and figures about digg? Number of users, number of registered users, average visits per user, postings per day, comments per day? Number of staff? Startup costs?

Digg has approximately 475,000 registered users (you need to register to participate in the voting process). There are 4100 stories submitted every day as of 8/11/06, of which perhaps 40-50 make the front page. Right now, the digg workforce is 15 people strong. As for startup costs, digg was very lucky to receive interest from many venture capitalists, and so we were in a position to choose who we took money from. One note about starting up is that having a presence on the Internet costs less today than it did two years ago. Bandwidth, servers and the other necessities for a Web presence are a fraction of the cost than a few years back. I doubt this could have been done several years ago without going to a VC first and getting that start up capital and building it from that point.

What was your revenue for the last year? Projected revenue for this year?

We cannot comment on digg’s revenue at this time.

Any other sources of revenue aside from advertising? Any planned?

Right now we’re driven by Google AdSense ads, and we also have a partnership with Federated Media. We feel pretty strongly about not bombarding users with ads, so we’re trying to be as non-invasive as possible

To what do you attribute the success of the site?

Digg’s success lies in the democratic collaboration of its users, also known as web democracy. It wasn’t any type of business when it was first conceived. It was just an experiment that took off. There were others out there that were attempting similar things, but others didn’t come together like digg did. I’ve seen over 200 digg clones since we launched, some backed by billion dollar corporations -but they don’t get it. To succeed you need to innovate, not just duplicate someone else.

In what respects is digg a Web 2.0 site/service?

One part of Web 2.0 the really fascinates me is social open sharing of information. For the first time, masses of users are getting together to perform useful tasks online. And digg is a huge part of that. Not only can you read the stories your friends are interested in and talk about them, but digg itself really came into prominence because networks of friends spread, through word of mouth, that digg was the place to go.

Did you invent Web 2.0 or discover it?

Neither! It’s a name attempting to point people at something that existed. It wasn’t even me who came up with the expression. However, it’s an idea that I’ve been pursuing since 1997. I started talking about ‘infoware’, which is much the same thing, at the same conference [Linux Kongress, May 1997] that Eric Raymond started talking about The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Many applications and services that use the web as a platform (e.g. Writely) seem very different from those that use the alleged wisdom of crowds (e.g. digg). Hasn’t it been misleading to call them the same thing?

Web 2.0 is a catch-all term, for sure. But when I talk about the web as platform, we’re talking about using the network as a platform. And that does include the examples you point to, albeit with different emphases. This means a completely different approach to software development and to distributing that software. We’re still getting used to that and adjusting.

In the same way, the original PC applications were very much like mainframe applications. It took a long time before we arrived at the idea of shrink-wrapped software you can buy in a regular store. In the same way, we’re still getting used to the idea of what Web 2.0 means. The people who realise where the leverage points are will win. There’s a shift in power from software APIs to big databases. The people who own the databases will win. Those databases might be records of people, or it might be devices, behaviours or geographical information.

A lot of critics of Web 2.0 ventures point to flakey business models built on CPC advertising. Is this a fair characterisation?

Focusing on the failure of companies and ventures is always a big mistake. It stops people making real progress and draws attention away from what is successful. However, Web 2.0 is not about these bubble companies, it’s about the new approaches we are trying.

Most of the experimentation happening now is wrong. But by having those experiments it means we are learning what distinguishes the survivors. These new paradigms mean that there is a lower barrier to innovation. I think maybe the top ten of the Web 2.0 experiments that are big now will survive.

In any case, I think bubbles are a good thing. That’s how you get capital redeployed.

There’s a lot of controversy at the moment about paying the users of, or contributors to, Web 2.0 applications. What’s your take on that?

It’s what we ultimately have to figure out. The applications have to give the users a payback of some kind, whether that be in the experience or the outputs they get from them, If the applications aren’t working well in that way for users, then they’ll want to get paid in cash. There’s more than one answer.

To what extent do you think that Web 2.0 principles like communities, social networking, openness and software-as-a-service will become a permanent feature of the internet?

Communities and social networking have always been with us on the internet and they always will be. However, I think that other things will change. It will become harder and more closed. It’s like when the internet first started, everyone was equal, then barriers started to appear. Access to data will become more guarded in Web 2.0, I think, and so there’ll be fewer, more powerful players as time goes by. That’s not so true of the software, where I think openness is a lot more important to success.

How long do you think the term Web 2.0 will last before we start talking about something different?

I originally thought is was good for a couple of years. Now, I think it’s probably got another four to five years in it. There’s still a lot to talk about and learn.

Is that something different the semantic web?

Hmm. Before we had the web, there was going to be something called Open Systems Interconnect (OSI). It had been researched by all the top academics and was mandated by the government. It was a lot more comprehensive and clever. There wouldn’t have been things like 404 errors or out-of-date pages.

Then came along this crappy thing called the internet. And, as it turned out, though it was inferior to the OSI in many respects, it was good enough for most people, and as we know it’s never looked back. I think the academics think way too hard about these things. In a lot of ways, worse is better.

That’s not to say that I think the semantic web people have got it wrong. They have a lot of ideas that are right. However, I believe that Web 2.0 is already the semantic web. We are building meaning into the pages. Ultimately, people will solve the problems that need solving and ignore the little things that don’t bother anyone. Only the solutions that offer value to lots of people will be propagated.

As a publisher, doesn’t this boom in self-publishing make you uneasy?

Inasmuch as it does threaten what we do, so that has to change. People buy much fewer reference books than they used to, so we don’t publish as many. But we’re also interacting with this movement. We’re doing more to build interactivity into our books, even building Web 2.0 apps ourselves to extend the book experience onto the internet. Make magazine is closest to our new model. That was put together by people we found on the internet who had something new and different to share. We can help them do that. We’re also experimenting with using internet wikis as a way of putting together books.

The role of the publisher is in selecting and adding value to information, and the need for that won’t go away. Our business is changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. However, as with all this stuff, there’s going to be a period of upset and disruption before we discover the new rules.

How are the new changes to Yahoo’s homepage reflecting the mood and approaches of what we might call Web 2.0, and what remains the same?

It’s definitely evolution. Ever since we started, eleven years ago, the heart and soul of our business has been to allow people to find and discover stuff on the web. A little more formally, there have been what we describe as four pillars to what we do on the site: content, search, community and personalisation.

The redesign is intended to strengthen those things and to ensure that our front page reflects them in equal measure. There are more community links and personalisation opportunities now, but that is both to redress the balance and because that’s where we think we ought to be. Going forward, I imagine we’ll have more personalisation features and the ability to draw in more user-created content. This might include user’s photographs, their own RSS feeds and community-created videos.

We’ve also started to use quite a lot of AJAX on the site [AJAX is a web technology that allows pages to be updated without reloads, among other things]. It helps us to make better use of the space - so that email, messaging and weather can now occupy the same area of the page, for example. It also helps to make displaying new information far more seamless and hopefully that keeps our users on the site for a little bit longer.

What’s happened to the Yahoo! directory?

When Yahoo! was first set up, then, yes, the directory was *the thing*. Back then, it seemed like there were only a few thousand web sites and you could categorise and classify them and it seemed to Jerry Yang and David Filo that was what needed to be done.

Now, of course, the web has grown and that’s no longer such a sensible approach. Yes, we still have a few people working on maintaining it, but our focus has come to be on providing the best search results and our own content.

Will Yahoo! maintain and grow flickr and del.cicio.us, or will it blend them into its own branded product offerings?

We will build and enhance these services, definitely.

On the other hand, we need to be extremely sensitive to those communities, the users who have created del.icio.us and flickr. In many senses, those sites belong to them to a greater extent than us. They have uploaded the pictures and shared the bookmarks. We want flickr and del.cicio.us to flourish and grow organically rather than imposing things from above.

At the moment, we’re learning a great deal from both of those products. Flickr, in particular, is very much at the cutting edge of web development. And, yes, we want to take what is good about those companies and feed it back into the rest of what we do.

What we’re giving back to these products is the infrastructure and scalability. I think a lot of services that are currently very fashionable lack the capital backing to be very scalable and they will fade away again before too long.

Yahoo! is very excited by the possibilities of user communities and sharing: our Yahoo! Groups offering was one of the first ’social networks’, though we’ve never called it by such a trendy title.

How else is Yahoo! embracing Web 2.0 approaches?

On the technological level, we’ve already talked about the use of AJAX on the home page. We also employ it across other products. We’ve introduced it into our Yahoo! Local mapping services. AJAX simply allows us to present more information easily. Users will only come to a site and only stay for as long as there are things for them to see and do. The technology enables this to be done more simply, from the user’s perspective.

We’re also deeply embedded in creating social networks. Yahoo! groups has been a huge part of our business for years, as I’ve said. In some respects, this isn’t a new thing at all. People have always wanted to communicate with peers on the web. But now it’s become trendier than previously and also the technology has evolved to let you do more with it. We’re now also offering the Yahoo! 360 blogging community for people with self-publishing aspirations.

In addition, we’re deeply committed to open API’s. From a business point of view, it’s central to us. Overture, now Yahoo! Search Marketing, has had an Open API for some time. That lets agencies develop their own views into the data. But so does flickr. Yahoo! Answers and our Yahoo! Local products will also have Open APIs. In the end, it means people are buying into our technologies and that’s got to be a good thing.

We’ve recently launched Yahoo! Answers which arguably fits into the Web 2.0 approach. I don’t know if it’s the “wisdom of crowds”, but when I wanted to take my children ice skating at Christmas in New York, I didn’t know the best place to go. Yes, I could search for skating rinks in New York, but which is the best one for young children, at that time of year?

That sort of information has always been hard to find on the web because it’s difficult for computers and search engines to process it. However, within a few minutes of sticking it on Yahoo! Answers, I had a dozen answers to my question, including several useful suggestions from New Yorkers. As we take the product forward, those pieces of information will be stored and categorised and start to make our web search capable of answering very specialised queries like that that haven’t been possible before. It’s a knowledge database around what lies inside people’s heads. There are already millions of answers and it continues to expand really rapidly.

What motivates people to answer questions?

To be honest, I’ve been absolutely amazed by people’s willingness to share their knowledge. I guess this willingness, which has never been picked up on properly before, is one of the big drivers of many Web 2.0 projects.

On Yahoo! Answers, you can reach different grades by answering more questions. But there’s no financial or other incentive and yet people are more than willing to share what they know. It’s something that I’m seriously impressed by.

Yahoo! is clearly investing heavily in user communities and user content sites. Is that not off-putting to brand advertisers?

The thing with advertising is that it’s the users who need to accept it for it to work. When we put sponsored, relevant results at the top of a search answer, it actually makes that search response better.

I’ve heard people say it’s off-putting on user-generated sites, but I think that’s down to the nature of the advertising. I think the advertisers themselves will need to think more creatively and laterally to find forms that attract the users of these sites.

In any case, we’re conscious that there are things that you can and can’t monetise. We don’t monetise Yahoo! Widgets, because there isn’t a way to do that which users wouldn’t find difficult to accept. Those things are more about giving more weight to the whole Yahoo! brand.

How will trends develop over the next couple of years, and what will disappear?

Well, if I knew that then maybe…*laughs* I think that there are certain things that are here to stay. Communities, sharing and user-generated content. The web has always been good for those things and it will continue to be. It’s a big part of how people want to use the internet.
Yahoo! has established support for the microformats that will drive the semantic web, which many feel is the next stage. It’s about making the content of web pages more understandable to machines and therefore more easy for humans to find and manage information. That may be some time in coming of age, though.