So… some random surfing led me to Scoble’s “post”:http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/04/06.html#a9821 about why Google might be syndication shy.

This lead me to Steve Rubel’s post on that “subject”:http://www.micropersuasion.com/2005/04/why_google_is_s.html which, in turn, lead me to an article on how Overature is working with Feedburner to deliver “ads”:http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3439321 within RSS feeds.

That’s the important point.

“Feedburner”:http://www.feedburner.com… Yahoo! or Google should either re-create this service (unlikely) or purchase Feedburner (more likely). Since Feedburner’s business model places it as an intermediary between blogs and their readers (readers that use RSS anyway) Yahoo!/Google would be buying reach into blogs. Oh, and they get a _little thing_ called reach into RSS feeds. “Clearly”:http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home RSS is looking like it will be a mass-medium… ie, everyone will use it in the future.

Perhaps in a few years RSS becomes a big part of how users interact with the web. Heck, you can already get a Gmail RSS “feed”:https://gmail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=13474&query=atom&topic=0&type=f&ctx=search, do “package tracking”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/04/03/22.18.02/ via RSS, so why not? Being stuck in the “old school” of browsing-only ad serving — ie, not offering RSS reach and ad-serving technologies — could be a huge shortcoming for web media companies.

The Feedburner model is pretty cool… publishers get ad revenue from their RSS feeds by merely letting Feedburner “serve”:http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/create the feed, and advertisers get reach into RSS via a targeted, contextual ad-serving technology. Right on!

“History Flow”:http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/index.htm is a tool created by IBM’s reseach team to study the history of collaborative documents. Specifically, they study how subjects on Wikipedia evolve over time. I found out about History Flow over at Nate Koechley’s “blog”:http://natek.typepad.com/blog/2005/01/wikis_rss_and_w.html. As the IBM folks say…

bq.. history flow provides answers at a glance to questions like, Has a community contributed to the text or has it been mostly written by a single author? How much has a particular contributor influenced the current version of the document? Is the text’s evolution marked by spurts of intense revision activity or does it reflect a smooth transition from its beginning to the present?

p. Here’s a screen shot of one of the History Flow displays for term “_Islam_”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam.

“!http://www.zoinger.com/img/history_flow.gif!”:http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm

This and Jon Udell’s “screencast”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/02/27/19.14.47/ looking at how the the heavy-metal umlaut page on Wikipedia evolved give a good overview on how the Wikipedia community is working.

I used to work at a company that had access to all sorts of marketing and metric reports from the likes of “Jupiter Research”:http://www.jupiterresearch.com/bin/item.pl/home, “Forrester Research”:http://www.forrester.com/my/1,,1-0,FF.html, etc. These types of companies can supply you with just about any metric that you’d like in areas that they cover, which is great to get a “feel” for a market. Now, I have access to none of these reports.

However, not all is lost thanks to the power of the web. There are a couple of sites out there (and probably more) that let you roll your own metrics: “Alexa”:http://www.forrester.com/my/1,,1-0,FF.html and “Intelliseek”:http://www.intelliseek.com/.

Alexa, which is owned by Amazon, has a service called _Alexa Traffic History Graph_ found “here”:http://www.alexa.com/site/site_stats/signup?mode=graph. This allows you to create traffic graphs in various time domains for any URL on the web. I created one in a previous “post”:http://www.zoinger.com/archives/2005/03/28/10.04.46/ for WordPress.org to show their rapid growth over the past few months. Below I’ve created one showing Flickr’s reach over the past six months.

!http://www.zoinger.com/img/flickr_alexa.png!

With Intelliseek’s “BlogPulse”:http://www.blogpulse.com/trend you can create a graph that illustrates the percentage of blogs that include your search term vs. various time periods. For example, here’s one showing the percentage of blogs that mentioned “Flickr” over the past six months.

!http://www.zoinger.com/img/flickr_blogpulse.png!

Together these two graphs help illustrates why Yahoo! acquired Flickr.

“Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com an online RSS reader (recently “purchased”:http://www.bloglines.com/about/pr_02082005 by Ask Jeeves which in turn is being “aquired”:http://www.irconnect.com/askjinc/pages/news_releases.html?d=74889 by Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp) “announced”:http://www.bloglines.com/about/pr_03302005 last week that _Bloglines is First to Go Beyond the Blog with Unique-to-Me Info Updates_. What does that mean?

bq.. Starting today, people can track the shipping progress of package deliveries from some of the world’s largest parcel shipping companies—FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service within their Bloglines MyFeeds page. Package tracking in Bloglines encompasses international shipments, in English. Bloglines readers can look forward to collecting more kinds of unique-to-me information on Bloglines in the near future, such as neighborhood weather updates and stock portfolio tracking.

p. You can check out the package tracking “here”:http://www.bloglines.com/preview?siteid=11967&itemid=79.

With IE7 “rumored”:http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1776290,00.asp to have a built-in RSS reader, services like Blogline’s package tracking and My Yahoo!’s RSS “integration”:http://my.yahoo.com/s/about/rss/?.src=my&.page=&.done=, RSS (or some type of syndication… why do we have RSS, Atom, et al.?) sure seems like it will be mainstream pretty soon.

I’m sure that everyone has heard that Yahoo! recently acquired Flickr. In my opinion, this was a brilliant, strategic move. Flickr has the “feel” of an early Hotmail or Paypal and maybe even Ebay (hey, with those tags you can definitely see some network effects going on).

Sure Flickr’s not making money now, but who cares when you are acquiring users like mad? It’s like “homesteading”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homesteading right now. Land, that is users, will never, ever be this inexpensive to acquire, so “Internet companies” better make the most of it RFN(right fucking now).

It’s interesting that Yahoo! would buy Flickr in that Yahoo! already has Yahoo! Photos. Yahoo!’s been in the online photo business for many years now, and is probably doing pretty well. However, the Flickr acquisition could end up making them _the_ online image archive of choice.

Google’s Picasa is a fine little application, but that’s it. It’s not an online image store (yet?), and doesn’t have any network effects (yet?).

So WTF(what the fuck) was Google thinking in letting Yahoo! snatch up Flickr? You go IPO to generate a pile of cash that you use to grow the company (oh, and to make a bunch of insiders rich). With Google’s P/E ratio, investors want to see that IPO cash working… not sitting in some bank earning a negative real interest rate (heard of inflation lately?).

In other words, Google needed Flickr more than Yahoo!. And more along that line of math: everyone will own a cellphone in the future + every cellphone will have a camera + everyone loves photos + everyone loves _sharing_ photos = a really, really big, strategic market.

Acqusitions are like movies. Out of 10, 7 will be duds, 2 will break even and 1 will be mega-hit. I’d say there’s a better than 10% chance that Flickr will be a hit, and make Yahoo! a pile of cash in the future.

Google, what where you thinking???