12/5/2005

Instant comments to be outlawed in Germany

There has been an awful decision by the district court of Hamburg, Germany, that currently heats up the discussion in the German blogger scene. There have been some comments on the discussion forum of Heise, the premier German IT News site, which seem to violate a third partie’s rights.
Now the court decided Heise will have to check all bulletin board posts and all comments on their news before putting them on the net. At this sites popularity, that means they have to check more than 200.000 posts per month, which basically means they have to shut down their boards and disable comments on their news. If this decision holds up, this could be the end of the open comment system, as it is currently practised in weblogs around the world. While this may also stop the spam, in my eyes this will bring the German web back into stone age.
I’d like to know how my non German readers feel about this subject. Is this court’s decision sane at all?

11/27/2005

Open Source Cartoons

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams had an odd request for the readers of his blog today: He asked them to give him a line of text for one of his upcoming cartoons. Now collaborative online writing has been around for quite some time, but I think this is the first time a popular cartoonist offered his readership to work on his dialogues. Actually Scott chose one of the comments just an hour later. Had I noticed this early enough I would have contributed for sure. Being co author of a Dilbert cartoon would have been a high honor, just second to being featured in User Friendly.
[via Micro Persuation]

11/13/2005

Defining the Web 2.0 - Nice try

As much talk as there is on the Web 2.0, it seems nobody can give a precise definition on what the term actually means. Allthough I consider myself a Web 2.0 fanatic, I couldn’t define it either. Now over at del.icio.us, a site almost everyone counts to the core Web 2.0 assets, they tried to define the Web 2.0 by looking at their users tags. What they came up with is a collection of tags that are frequently used in association the with the term »Web 2.0«. Let’s have a look at these:

Ajax 9.9%
This came as a surprise to me. Sure, Ajaxian sites are cool, and there is a lot of hype around that technology, but I would not say that the use of Ajax by itself makes a web application 2.0. Both del.icio.us as well as Flickr started out without using Ajax, and I don’t think anyone would doubt that these have been Web 2.0 sites from the beginning.
Blog 6.1%
The blogging phenomenon sure goes hand in hand with a lot of things that are related to what most people feel are parts of the Web 2.0: RSS feeds, visitor interaction, open APIs and generous crosslinking come to mind. But then blogish sites like Slashdot or Kuro5hin have been around for a long time, most likely longer than the term Web 2.0 exists.
Social 4.2%
That is a strong one. I’d say every serious Web 2.0 site has some sort of social component to it. Of course, bulletin boards have been kind of social too long before, so being a »social site« might not be sufficient to be Web 2.0, but one might argue it is a requirement.
Tools 4.1%
Well, actually I don’t know what to make of this one. Sure, there are tools that belong to Web 2.0. But providing tools does not really define anything on the web.
Software 3.3%
So the Web 2.0 still relies on software. What a bummer. Maybe Web 3.0 will finally run without.
Tagging 3.3%
Next to social, I consider this rather on spot. Nearly every site that made the buzzlists in the Web 2.0 community uses some kind of tagging. It’s a social component nonetheless.
Javascript 2.8%
Same as with Ajax, actually a part of it. Heavy use of Javascript is often seen in Web 2.0 applications, but I don’t consider it a requirement.
Internet 2.6%
See »Software«
Programming 2.5%
Well, someone gotta code all these cool new webapps. Programming sure is a required skill. It is required for creating spreadsheet software too though. No winner here.
RSS 2.5%
Just as blogs, RSS has been there for a long time, but it looks like it really took of with the Web 2.0. Actually it has changed the way people look for information, so I think this one fits right in.

Conclusion: While some of these tags seem to name components of what we consider to be the Web 2.0, they fail to provide the final definition. Others are so vague, that they don’t provide any help on this question at all. Next try?

Is Adsense Smart Pricing healthy for the web?

There has been some talk recently on a more esoteric feature of Google Adsense called Smart Pricing. Smart Pricing looks at tracking data gathered from Adwords, to determine how well a given sites Adsense clicks convert to actual sales and leads for the advertiser. The higher the conversion rate, the more the publisher gets paid per click (also taking into consideration the usual factors like keyword pricing or click through rate).
Now there is an interesting twist to this: As pointed out recently on JenSense, Smart Pricing does not effect a single site, but a publisher’s entire Adsense account. That means that if you have Adsense on a site with a poor conversion, this may actually hurt your Adsense earnings across all your site. Now everybody knows these »Made for Adsense« sites, that focus on high paying keywords and flood the search engines with mediocre content. I would guess that these are the exact sites with low conversion, albeit a high click through rate.
If this is the case, Google has a win/win situation with Smart Pricing: First, Adwords customers will have to pay less for visitors coming from such trashy sites, which may well improve Adwords reputation among advertisers. Second, running a poor website with Adsense might actually hurt a webmasters income if he also has well performing sites. So maybe there is an encouragement for publishers to build sites that not only generate lots of clicks, but also generate qualified clicks. In the long run, this may lead to less clutter on the search results. What are your thoughts? Might Smart Pricing actually improve the net, or is this just another confusion measure by Google, making it impossible to analyse your Adsense performance?

11/12/2005

Turn your blog into a podcast

While podcasts are still gaining momentum, talking into a microphone is not everybodys cup of tea. I for example, feel a lot more comfortable typing on a keyboard, especially if in a foreign language (my native tongue is German). Seems like sometime soon, people like me will have the opportunity to have a podcast too with read.io, a service that automagically turns RSS Feeds into podcasts. While read.io is currently in private alpha and not yet available for the general public, one can listen to a demonstration at NonFiction. Looks like their text to speach still needs improvement, it doesn’t really sound that good.
[via Web 2.0 Central]

11/6/2005

All the best, Steve

Steve Rubel, a blogger who’s writings on Micro Persuation I value a lot, has recently been diagnosed with skin cancer. As a matter of fact, he opened a Skin Cancer blog, where he intends to track the progress of his own recovery, as well as provide helpful links and information on the subject. Best wishes Steve, I hope you recover soon.

Who’s next to me - Proximity based services

Yahoo just launched the next generation of their map services, finally moving on par with Google and MSN. Location based services seem all the rage these times, and almost daily some new website combining maps with some other service shows up (look at MapMyRun or Housingmaps for examples). But there is more to location than just answering the question „where is the next Pizza hut“. While restaurants, shops or apartements tend to be rather static, people are allways on the move. Say you are on a business trip to a foreign city, and a friend living far away happens to visit that city just about the same time. Of course, if neither you nor your friend informed each other about being in town, it is rather unlikely that you’ll meet in this scenario.
Enter proximity based services. A service like that could track your position, as well as the positions of people in your buddy list. If someone from your list gets closer to you than a defined value, you’d get a message informing you of the proximity of the other person. It would be sensible to set that treshold rather high for people usually far away, and correspondingly lower for people living near you anyway.
The first venture in this kind of service seems to be Meetro, kind of an instant messaging software, showing you which other Meetro users are around your current location. Plazes also has some proximity components, although I consider it more of a location based service (a pretty interesting one, by the way). Right now, these services still suffer from a lack of connectivity. Most people are not yet online wherever they move, but it is evident that wifi coverage is getting better and better and so is connectivity. Also the advancing proliferation of GPS equipment will improve such services, allowing much better tracking.
While the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN) have not yet arrived on the proximity scene, they have established working instant messaging solutions and are very proficient in location based services. They might show up with something as soon as they consider the time has come.

11/5/2005

This site - .reloaded

If you’ve been following this site - well, actually I don’t believe anyone is following but the comment spammers, as this has not been updated in months… If you had been following this site, you would have noticed some serious changes. I finally upgraded the word press version, and took the time to put the blog in a decent layout.
The home page of Fruetel.net is gone for good, as are a lot of useless clutter I’ve been hosting on this domain. For starters, I took the layout I have at Xyrox for this blog, as I think it is a modern and working layout. Still have to think about a decent logo though.
This domain bears my name, and I thought it was a shame it looks like some waste dump. So in the next days, there will be quite a few posts here. Expect to read my thoughts on various topics such as Web2.0, location based services, the social web and more. I hope someone will enjoy my writings.

4/30/2005

OS X Tiger: Blogger’s favourite

Seems like everyone is blogging on the new Apple OS X release right now. The screens I’ve seen so far look impressive, especially the desktop widgets, which, as I get it, can be created with HTML, CSS and Javascript. Guess that’s what Microsoft had on it’s mind when they released active desktop some years ago, but that technology never really seemed to take off. Guess I’ll have to get myself a powerbook some time to know what all the fuzz is about.

4/16/2005

German SEO competition

c’t, Germany’s most influential IT magazine, has launched a new SEO competition. The objective is to get a good position for the keyphrase Hommingberger Gepardenforelle on the major search engines. Top ranking sites will be listed on c’t publisher Heise’s website. Since Heise is a major authority for the German web, getting published there would be quite nice. I decided to enter the competition with the Hommingberger Gepardenforelle entry in my German Webmaster Blog. I often manage to get rather good search engine positions with my posts there, but they tend to drop in rankings after some time. Let’s see how far I can push that one.