Being a big Radiohead fan, I was quick to go and buy their new album 'In Rainbows' via their website. As has been reported, there is no set price for the album - you input your own price, or get it for free. I mulled it over in my head what I should pay and in the end I opted for 7.50 pounds, equivalent to US$15. It came through on my credit card as NZ$22, which is almost exactly what I paid recently for the latest Foo Fighters CD (an actual physical CD that I bought from a shop). My reasoning for 7.50 pounds for Radiohead was that I'd pay what I usually pay for CDs - but in the knowledge that the extra profit will go to the artist (Radiohead) instead of the record company and shop. Being a fan of Radiohead - and of artists ability to earn a living independently - I figured this was fair. However reading Fred Wilson's post today, in which he said he paid 2 pounds for In Rainbows, made me wonder what others think is a fair price. I'm sure some people paid more than me, and others would've paid less. It's chump change whatever way you look at it, for anyone earning a wage, so it's not really about the money from the consumer's perspective. But there is certainly an interesting principle here about what you think an album sold via an artist's website (or their social network page) is worth. So even if you're not a fan of Radiohead, insert your favorite artist in the poll below and let us know what you're prepared to pay if the 'middleman' is cut out.Free Polls- Take Our Poll

  Next week I'll be in San Francisco for the Web 2.0 Summit. I'm also attending the Mobile 2.0 Conferenceon Monday 15 October, and will pop my head into the Widget Summitevent being held by Niall Kennedyon the same day.Today Read/WriteWeb is the first to announce the Mobile Launch Pad demo companies at Mobile 2.0. These are all exciting and up-and-coming mobile web startups; I'm looking forward to checking them out next week. Here is the launchpad list:Part 1:Heysan- http://heysan.com/Taptu- http://taptu.comMippin- http://mippin.comMobile Research- http://www.mobileresearch.com/Part 2:Webwag- http://www.webwag.com/RuleSpace- http://www.rulespace.com/KyteTV- http://www.kyte.tv/ExMachina- http://exmachina.nl/We'll be reviewing some of these products over the coming weeks.As well as the above startups, the speaker listat Mobile 2.0 is a who's who of the Mobile Web world -- so keep an eye on Read/WriteWeb next week as we provide coverage of this event.

  Our digital lifestyle Network blog last100has been tracking the upheavals in the music industry over the past couple of weeks. First Radiohead releasedtheir new album entirely via their website (I got it and it's awesome!), then Nine Inch Nails (a band which has experimented with the Internet a lot before) announced it has freed itself from recording contractsand become a free agent, and now Madonna is reported to beclose to leaving her long-time label Warner Bros. Records for a reported $120 million deal with concert promoter Live Nation, Inc.last100 has been tracking all of this news and editor Steve O'Hear today offers up an analysis of where the music industry is at. The artists are experimenting and the record labels themselves are under big pressure. Steve wrote:The record industry is in dire trouble and the major record companies know it. According to the IFPI’s most recent figures, “physical” music sales were down 11% to $17.5bn in 2006, and, blaming piracy — both CD copying and online file-sharing — the IFPI says that overall music sales have fallen for the seventh year running.However, none of this was unpredicted, and in post-Napster2003, Steve Jobs appeared to offer the recording industry a way into the future, through the iTunes Music Store. People didn’t wantto steal music, argued Jobs, and if paid-for downloads could compete on price and convenience, then many of those illegal file traders would be converted back into paying customers. As a result, Jobs insisted on the unbundling of albums; instead all tracks would be offered for purchase individually, at the same price — 99c — whether they be a new release, top 40 hit, or an older and more obscure song. To which the majors reluctantly complied, and would later learn to regret.Fast-forward again to 2007, and although paid-for downloads are on the increase, they aren’t rising nearly fast enough to make up for the loss in revenue from falling CD sales. By Jobs’ own admission, on average only three percent of music on an iPod originates from the iTunes Music Store. As if to rub salt in the wound, iPod sales accounted for nearly half of Apple’s total revenuefor 2006.Instead of recognizing that the record industry’s aging business model, even with the intervention of Jobs, is a broken one and in desperate need of a fix, the response has largely been litigationcoupled with the introduction of technology, in the form of DRM, designed to enforce copy protection, which, ultimately, just inconveniences paying customers.If the iTunes model isn’t the answer, and business can’t go on as usual, then what is? Here are five alternative models for selling music, many of which are actually being tested by artists, entrepreneurs, and even the major record labels themselves.Read full story at last100

  Ellen Levy, a Silicon Valley veteran who has worked at companies like Apple and Softbank Venture Capital, built her new firm, Silicon Valley Connect, on the principles she learned while Director of Industry Collaboration and Research at Stanford's Media X. Media X is an industry affiliate program that liaises between industry representatives and the university.Upon arriving at Media X, Levy quickly realized that "the university" was a complex ecosystem and not a single entity. For outside businesses, interacting with the university in a manner that was beneficial to their goals was not always a simple task. Levy realized that the key to getting things moving in the right direction was to ask good questions.She decided that Stanford needed a virtual reorganization around ideas (which was plausible, where a structural reorganization was not). Using common tools of engagement (requests for proposals, graduate student funding, focus days, conferences, and meetings and correspondence, Levy was able to build the Media X program to a peak of 25 partner companies with a minimum investment of $50,000 in the university. Twice she had to close the door to new companies because they had all they could handle. Her biggest innovation was that you have to ask the right questions to get the ball rolling.Levy talked about an RFP she put together for Cisco and Nokia which was basically a sheet of questions that they had focused on hashing out over a month. By asking who at the university was doing research that informs about how mobile phone applications can be used around the world, Levy received 17 proposals from colleges around the university -- and not just technology focused areas of the school. The right question led to the involvement of the entire university from medicine to law to engineering.Of course, Levy said, it's all about ROI. But ROI doesn't mean the same thing to everyone involved and has to be translated accordingly. For businesses, it means return on investment, for universities in means research of interest, and for the government it means results of importance. For everyone, the bottom line is: what can we get out of this?Levy left the audience at the BIF-3 conference, with three guiding principles the she learned from her experience at Stanford:Start with good questions. The question, said Levy, is the universal language.Relationships over transactions. Translate why people should be at the table together.Sufficient metrics don't yet exist to measure what you get out of the network effect (which says that every time to add someone to your network, everyone in the network benefits).

  Google announced this morningthat geotagged YouTube videos will now be viewable in a featured content layer of Google Earth. The company quietly addedthe ability to easily associate a geographic location with your videos at upload over the summer. At least in my part of the world, there's quite a few videos that have been geotagged already. This new layer sounds like a lot of fun and could be quite an educational experience as well, depending on video selection (see below).As far as I can tell video is not yet integrated with Google Maps, so that would be the next logical step. Video is one of the most compelling mediums in existence and its inclusion in local search could really bring some zing to a search field everyone expects to be huge. Google Earth is likely another service with the bulk of its impact still far ahead of it.The company didn't discuss whether there was any kind of filtering of the videos, though up until now there has been little incentive for video spammers to geotag their content. Now that geotags will take on a new relevance for searchers it will be interesting to see if existing filtering tools or perhaps simple popularity will be sufficient criteria to vet this content for inclusion in Google Earth. YouTube cynics who think nothing on the site is worth watching should spend some time on the community filtered StumbleUpon Video.The Google Maps team says the YouTube layer is similar to its Google Book Search layer added in August.

  About 15 years ago, Euan Semple had a rather serious medical problem. He talked to his local general practitioner, then to an expert who after a few weeks of impersonal tests and questions told him there was nothing wrong with him. Disheartened, Semple went online to seek out people with a similar issue and ended up finding groups and forums that led to a solution to his problem.This experience stuck with Semple, who 7 or 8 years ago launched talk.gateway, an online, internal social networking platform for the 30,000 employees of the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Today, 23,000 BBC employees talk on the talk.gateway forums, 5,000 are using wikis to collaborate on projects, and 4-500 are blogging. Bringing social networking to the BBC seemed like the inevitable thing to do, says Semple, recalling the early days of the project.There exists a potential for collaboration over the web that didn't exist before, according to Semple, but not everyone at the BBC agreed with him. Some at the BBC saw his project as a waste of time and he initially had to fight to get people to accept it. Semple recalled that at times forum threads would grow divisive or silly, but he encouraged people to self moderate and asked questions to elevate the discussion rather than stepping in and being the "grown-up." The result of creating an environment where users were trusted was that they began to learn how to take responsibility for themselves.Erica Driver from Forrester Research has an excellent postabout Semple where she identifies 4 lessons learned from enterprise web 2.0 adoption at the BBC. Briefly (I'm paraphrasing):Enterprise web 2.0 can encourage collaboration.Start small and define ownership clearly. (At the BCC, their system was owned by everyone.)Trust your users and they'll trust you (and each other).Push your comfort boundaries.I think Semple best sums up the lesson to be learned from his experience at the BBC in a quote from the bio distributed to conference goers, "If you make systems too serious or too business-like, people won’t use them. But, as a consequence of blogs and networks, it is possible to connect your brightest and best people with each other and with their organizations. Business is based on relationships, and this way you actually talk to the people you want to talk to."

  digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/tech_deals/New_VC_Model_For_Small_Scale_Financing';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';There is a great meme circulating about how the VC industry needs to adapt to a world with massively lower barriers to entry. Paul Graham - from YCombinator - who is leading this change more than anybody has the definitive post. Its worth a careful read. Fred Wilson, from a more traditional but still very innovative VC (Union Square Ventures) agrees with the general trendand is well positioned to play by the emerging new rules.There is a wonderfully entertaining rant by Dave McCLureabout how VCs had better get with the program or else. He hits a very serious point about standardisation of deal terms and online closing process being essential. Here is another clearly heartfelt postthat would probably be echoed by a lot of entrepreneurs.When I first heard about YCombinator, I thought “incubator” and even worse “drive by VC”, both late cycle excesses in the Web 1.0 boom that led to a lot of capital destruction (in small chunks of course). As is so often the case, when history repeats itself, it does so with a surprising twist. Which now makes me think that this might be a sustainable new model.The model clearly has almost nothing to do with traditional VC. The big “VC aristocrats” (aka “Tier 1″) with their $multi-billion funds and huge success stories behind them will almost all say that it is classic late stage bubble excess. At some level they have to think this as they certainly cannot play in the new rules where $300k might be a Series A. Many of the Tier 1 players, who made their fortunes in IT, are also generally thinking, along with Nick Carr, that IT Does Not Matter. They believe that the big wave of opportunity has moved onto frontiers such as CleanTech and personalized medicine.The A&R model from the music industry offers some interesting parallels for this new world of lots of small web start-ups. A&R(Artist & Repertoire) defined by Wikiepdia as:“In the music industry, Artists and Repertoire (A&R) is the division of a record label company that is responsible for scouting and artist development. It is the link between the recording artist/act and the record label, generally to help with the artistic and commercial development of the label’s artists. An A&R person is often required to handle contractual negotiations, find songwriters and record producers for the act, and schedule recording sessions.”In this new world the A&R function - scouting and entrepreneur development - is done by new style VCs such as YCombinator, angels and angel networks. They are independent of the “record label”, which we can now think of as the big platform acquirers (GYM and the newly energized AOL and maybe soon Facebook - making a rather unpronouncable GYMAF), but they have good connections with these platform companies when it comes time to exit.The A&R guy would hang out in the Clubs checking out new bands. Years of experience gave them great intuition to make quick judgement calls, essential when a bit of dithering might mean you went down in history as “Decca Records turning down the Beatles”. The most fundamental skill however was a well tuned ear for the “clapometer”, seeing the enthusiasm of the audience at first hand in a tiny basement and extrapolating from there to Shea Stadium.Like any analogy it cannot be stretched that far, but it does fit some recent trends, particuarly the trend to younger entrepreneurs. Fred Wilson kicked up a storm a few months agowhen he simply observed that they were seeing a lot more young entrepreneurs. Young people obviously know better what appeals to other young people.More fundamentally, the music business and this new start-up model have fundamentally different power laws to traditional VC. “Classic VC” worked on a portfolio with say 10 deals, 1 could be a megastar, 3 reasonable returns, 3 make their money back and 3 bomb totally - or some variant on that theme. The new model might have 100, but still only 1 megastar. There is only one top of the charts or only one Google/Facebook/eBay. That sounds like a bad deal but it is not because the returns to the megastars are massive, many will make a reasonable income (derided by VC as “lifestyle businesses”) and even the weak ones can get sold to at least recoup the money. The maturity of “pay as you go infrastructure” changes the financing rules dramatically. You don’t need to use precious equity to finance capital expenditure. You use a small amount to build the service and get some traction. By the time you need to scale the risk profile is dramatically different. This is where quasi-debt structures are likely to evolve (i.e. with some Warrants so the debt provider gets a small equity (”kicker”). It is like the record company saying “wow the kids love this, crank up the presses”.This new model also dramatically changes what the entrepreneur needs from their VC in addition to cash. In Enterprise IT, the VC’s “golden Rolodex” and reputation was worth more than the cash; it signalled “survivability” to a CIO burnt by doing deals with start-ups. In the new era many sites don’t even bother with About Us, as the decisions are taken one click at a time based solely on the value of the service.The new VC may show some additional value by advising on how to scale and maximizing valuation on exit. These are valuable but not mission critical. The sustainability of this new model is based on three fundamentals:1. The continued evolution of mature web standards so that new services can easily be “plugged and played” in the acquirers platform. This trend looks pretty solid. It should be a key financing criteria. 2. The continued growth of online advertising. The gap between time spent online and $$ spent online is still “big enough to drive a truck through” so this should be OK. There is still a lot of innovation needed to generate engagement and to demonstrate measurability - but that will probably happen and “is another story”. 3. GYMAF and other large companies continue to fail to meet the emerging trends with internal R&D and therefore will always be willing to pay a premium to acquire from outside. This trend looks solid. It has been true for decades and is even more true when the next “hit” is completely outside the normal range and is so dependent on fickle consumer taste. Record companies that tried creating their own bands ended up with The Monkees (and that was the success story!).

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/tech_news/Bebo_Set_to_Announce_Developer_Platform_Too';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';We've heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebois about to announce a developer platform very soon. Apparently it will be a "platform API". The source of these rumors is a Bebo investor, so we think it's on the mark. Bebo is one of the largest social networks in the world and is above MySpace and Facebook in some parts of the world (e.g. it is number 1 in the UK).Earlier this week we heard that MySpace will launch its 3rd party developer platformin just a few weeks. And of course the instigator of large scale social networking platforms, Facebook, announced their "open platform" in May 2007. Although it turned out to be not quite so open, the Facebook platform has been probably the year's biggest Web success story to date.So the social network 'platform wars' will be well and truly on, once MySpace and now Bebo launch their developer platforms! Watch this space for more on the Bebo news...

  Linden Labs, makers of Second Life, announced a partnership with IBM and nearly 30 other companiestoday to work on creating a layer of interoperability across all online virtual worlds. This layer, the plans for which are being discussed publicly for the first time at today's Virtual Worlds Expoin San Jose, would allow users to port identities and other assets from one virtual world to another.It's a logical next step for the medium of virtual worlds and one that could cause their number and size to grow substantially. It could also lead to bitter, if sometimes humorous, conflict between users identified primarily with different sites. Nick Carr warned this morningthat the move will likely lead attacks on peaceful Second Life residents by ogres from World of Warcraft.Is the move towards interoperability a meaningful announcement and what kind of future could it lead to? I asked three industry experts for their opinion this morning.A Musical Tour of Select SecondLife LocationsIncreasing User NumbersWagner James Au is the founder of New World Notes, a blog focused on Second Life. He was an embedded reporter on staff with Linden Labs in the games early years and is now working on a forthcoming book about SL. Au told me that he sees the interoperability announcement as very related to today's release of the Electric Sheep Company's simplified Second Life browser; both are events that could be key in turning Second Life into "a truly mass market phenomenon." That seems plausible to me; other virtual worlds are far more populated than Second Life and its official client is notoriously difficult for beginners to use.Making mass access to virtual worlds more viable could lead to any number of events. IBM dealt with a relevant situation just last month when it was the target of what's believed to be the first labor strike in Second Life. Nearly 2000 people from around the world stormed the company's SL business center is solidarity with striking Italian IBM workers on the 27th of September. Innovation in IdentityBarb Dybwad, Producer of the gaming Joystiqand Engadgetnetworks at Weblogs, Inc, says the interoperability announcement raises the possibility of a standards based environment of incredible fecundity - the kind of thing the web at large should embrace more than it does. "It's basically mashing up Second Life with concepts like OpenID and web standards and turning a once proprietary walled garden model into open architecture," she said, "and that's a good thing for users and businesses alike."Professional virtual world gadfly Eric Ricetold me this morning that it would not be easy to translate identities from one platform to another. He's known as the character Spin Martin in most of the worlds he visits, including Second Life where he's the owner of one of the premier event spaces in the world. That's not the case in the warfighting world of Halo, however, where Rice feels the need to operate under a more battle-ready identity. Likewise, graphics standards are wildly different from world to world and Rice said that residents of some of the more visually high-end worlds would likely take on a "Not in My Backyard" attitude about ugly avatars from less visually compelling worlds if interoperability presumes a direct translation of avatars. Rice also predicted that some worlds would only respect standards in theory while in practice building non-compliant but technically superior avatars and functionality for their users.Innovation Through Open Architecture"I think digital identity/avatars is one component of it," Barb Dybwad told me in response to Rice's concerns, "but they go beyond that and are talking about opening the architecture in the platform itself - including transactions and integration with existing web services using web standards. That could be big."I asked Barb if she thought the move could make Linden Labs more relevant to the virtual world market in general than it currently is. "What this work could do is open the market completely so almost everyone could add virtual world functionality on top of their existing services; so there would be a million second lifes. It distributes the virtual world market instead of hoarding it under linden lab and i think that's a smart move for them."Dybwad believes this type of platform could become nearly ubiquitous online someday soon. "I'm playing a few other MMOs and I definitely see a future where gamers and even people who don't identify as gamers are spending much more time inside virtual worlds," she told me. "It's an incredibly compelling experience. It's experiential in a way that things like Facebook and Myspace don't quite get ... until they make their own 3D platform on top of themselves."Standards are never an easy thing to agree upon but it's exciting to thing that these questions could be close to seeing some working answers developed. One thing's for sure - when the time comes I'd appreciate if you'll have pity on my poor, under-dressed avatar.

  Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that's white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that's white. Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list.Dan Heath, who co-authored the book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Diewith his brother Chip, started his talk at BIF-3this afternoon by asking the audience to complete the exercise I described above. A good number (perhaps nearly half) of audience members were able to name more white things the second time around. But that's an odd outcome, said Heath, because there are more white things that exist in the universe than in your refrigerator. The constraint, however, helped focus your thinking and made the task of identifying objects easier because of the stricter perameters.We've all heard the term "thinking outside of the box," Heath told the audience. But thinking out of the box isn't really as great as it sounds. As his exercise demonstrated, it can make things harder. "We don't need to think outside the box, we don't need to escape it, what we need to do is find the right box and get in it," said Heath.Improv actors, said Heath, have long utilized the benefits of inside the box thinking. Improvisation needs a clear catalyst, something to motivate the action, and for that reason improv actors are trained to be very specific with their dialogue. They don't say, "what's the matter?" they say, "are you still angry about that time I threw your necklace in the toilet?" The added constraints help them to jump into the scene and continue to be creative and riff off the idea.Inside the box thinking is found all around business in the form of what Heath called a "high concept pitch." Example he gave are Jaws in space = Alien, Die Hard on a bus = Speed, and Blockbuster by mail = Netflix. These pitches are boxes that inform creative decisions down the line. For example, if you were the set designer for the movie Alien and needed to design a spaceship, looking at the type of thing that had already been done, you'd probably end up with something clean and futuristic like the sets seen on Star Trek. But since the pitch is "Jaws in space," that design aesthetic won't work. Jaws is gritty, frantic, and sweaty, which changes your perception.The box can inform many decisions taking place throughout an organization. The concreteness and specificity of constraints aide in decision making, and the box can be a guide to thinking, an inspiration to thinking. But you have to find the rightbox, said Heath, who told a story about pitching one of his earlier businesses to venture capitalists and failing because he was stuck in the wrong box. He was pitching his product (online textbooks) as a product rather than pitching it as an investment, and not getting any bites from VCs as a result. In that case, being stuck in the wrong box was detrimental."The idea that we need to think out of the box is wrong," concluded Heath, "instead we should go box shopping. We need to try on as many boxes as possible."

  digg_url = 'http://digg.com/programming/The_Structured_Web_A_Primer';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';There is some controversyfloating around the blogosphere about the nature of the next web.We got a clear signalfromTim O'Reilly that there is no need to continue the versioning fad and call it "Web 3.0," but still, people disagree about what's coming next. To me, what iscoming is not a single thing, but a web that is characterized by several major themes.Among the evolving aspects of the new web are Semantics, Attention(Implicit Behavior) and Personalization. Regardless of what we are decide to call this next web, theinformation in it is going to be more meaningful, more automatic, and more tailored to each of us.A critical piece of the next web evolution is the introduction of structured information. This concept is so basic to us as humans,that we completely overlook the fact that it is quite foreign to computers. When a person looks at a book on Amazon, she seesa book, with the author, ISBN number, publisher and the publication date. To a computer that page on Amazon is nothing more thana bunch of HTML. Increasingly, information on the web is becoming more and more structured. This process is happening viaseveral major movements:The rise of APIsThe proliferation of vertical applications that run on top of existing dataAn increase in classic Semantic Technologies and MicroformatsThe spread of RSS as an information delivery mechanismIn this post we'll look at how these movements collectively help power a more structured web.The Basic ProblemTo understand the basic issue with unstructured information consider the following example - a description of a bookin HTML and XML. Here is a typical representation that you find if you look at the source of a web page:Compare this with a representation typically found in XML:The HTML does not capture the structure of the information, and mixes the information with the representation.XML, on the other hand, is focused on structure only and does not say anything at all about how information shouldbe presented. Billions of web pages today contain unstructured information. To people, this is a non-issue because we aregood at semantics and we do not need primitive XML annotation to make us understand. But for computers, lack of structure isa deal-breaker - they can't interpret unstructured, non-standardized information very well.Why Unstructured Information Is BadWay before people created the web, they created relational databases - the platform on which many corporationsand web sites are built today. A great thing about relational databases is that they represent the information in a structured way.The query language know as Structured Query Language (SQL) supports fetching the information from a single database table.More importantly SQL allows queries that correlate or select information from multiple database tables. Simply speaking,SQL allows the data to be remixed. The only condition for this is that the data must be structured.On the other hand, if the information is not structured, it is effectively stuck in a proprietary silo - closed and immobile.Its representation is only understood by the creator, and it is not readily consumable byany other application or a web service. In a way, this is sort of wasteful because it can not be remixed with the restof the information on the web.The Key Drivers of Structured Information1. The Rise of APIs.APIs are in fashion these days. Since del.icio.us, the web sites that have definedthe social web era have offered interfaces to access their proprietary databases. This effectively accomplishes two things.First, APIs make it easy to fetch information. Second, most APIs these days emit the informationas XML, so it is automatically structured. For more about the impact of APIs on the web read our "When Web Sites Become Web Services" post.2. Top-Down Semantic Applications.We've written recently about the proliferation of top-down semantic applications.In addition to creating utility by extracting meaning from content, these applications do another very important thing:they automatically transform unstructured content into structured information. It happens because after extracting the info, theservices offer an API or structured RSS feeds, effectively injecting the structured information back into the web.3. Classic Semantic Technologies and Microformats.The main goal of the Semantic Web is to make information structured. XML-based languages like RDF and OWL are designedto capture information so that not only things, but also their attributes and the relationships between them, are represented clearly.The classic approach, however, is running into many difficulties.People are enthusiastic about the prospects and theory behind it, but lack of consumer focus and business value, as well as technical difficulties, have made the implementation of classic ideas elusive.In the mean time, microformats, a more simple approach to information annotation, has gained some momentum. The idea behind microformatsits simple: embed markup that indicates the structured information within HTML pages. What's good about this approach is thatannotations are compact and can be interpreted by web browsers as well as any other program that reads the HTML page.The approach also has issues, though. First, the number of things that can be described by microformats is limited. A popular microformat ishCard, which describes contact information about people, organizations, and places.The diagram above is from the Microformats web site.A bigger issue revolves around how microformats are intended to be used. According to the designers, they are nota new language, not infinitely extensible and open-ended, nor are they made for defining the whole world. Rather, microformats are an evolving solution, initiallyaimed at designers as a "set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementingfor more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general." Despite its simplicity, microformats are doing a lot of publicgood by adding structure to unstructured content and pushing the envelope along with other solutions.4. RSS As A Delivery Mechanism.There is a common misconception about RSS - people think that it is a structured language. It is not. Basic RSSis a simple format for delivering news. Each RSS entry contains a title, a link and a description. In addition, RSS allows flexible embeds to deliver things like images, video and podcasts.However, what is true is that RSS, like the XML language, is extensible. What has been happening is that companies have started usingRSS extensions to deliver results from their APIs. For example, as we've written,Wine.com does exactly that - its API calls return RSS.What does this mean? In addition to the standard RSS attributes, Wine.com outputs proprietary ones like id, skuand price.Any application that would like to interact with this API can leverage the additional attributes. It is likely that companies will continue to useRSS like this in the future. That's becauseRSS is already well known and the bottom line is that it doesn't matter what XML-based language we use.Technically speaking, any RSS extension is just XML and does not really have much to do with RSS. But if the world wants to thinkthat it is RSS and is willing to agree on a standard - so be it!The Big PictureSo what happens if we take all of this and put it together? Something really profound - a structured web.Possibly a precursor to the Semantic Web, the structured web would be much more readily remixable. It truly will bethe web as a database. Yes, a good old relational database, but instead of tables we would be remixing web sites and web services.Probably the most interesting thing to note about the structured web of the future is that it will still be non-standard.Just because information is represented as RSS or XML does not mean that two different services will have the same representation of a book.However, the problem of mapping one representation onto another is generally not difficult, as long as the information is structured(financial companies have been doing this for decades). So structure promises to bring nearly automatic interoperability.Another outcome, is that the web where information is structured is much more amicable to be transformed into what iscurrently envisioned as the Semantic Web. The ontologies and relationships are much more readily overlayed on top of structured information.Likely, RDF and OWL would be used to do just that, as they were originally intended, except on top of the new structured layer.Then the coming next web becomes a direct precursor to the Semantic Web. The leap of faith thatwe are now being asked to make would disappear, and instead, the jump to semantics becomes obvious.ConclusionThe next web is not just about one thing, its about many themes. However, what is fueling the web of the future is structured information.As we discussed in this post, many different technologies, in their own way, are gradually transforming the web from its current HTML chaosinto a structured XML heaven. It has already happened in quite a few places and over the next few years we will be seeing more and morestructured information online.The benefits? We hope that some of the promised semantic tools will be able to take advantage of the structured information.We look forward to smarter search, and mashups that bring us exciting remixes that were not possible in yesterday's world of unstructured HTML silos.If you enjoyed this article, please digg it here:digg_url = 'http://digg.com/programming/The_Structured_Web_A_Primer';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';

  I'm at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summitin Providence, Rhode Island this morning. The BIF-3 event reminds me of the TED conference, in that it brings together great minds from across a multitude of disciplines to tell stories and have a converation about innovation. In fact, TED founder Richard Saul Wurman is here and will be speaking later today.The BIF-3 is structured so that in between blocks of short presentations by "storytellers," conference goers can get up and mingle and have a conversation about what they just heard. The first of the day's four sessions concluded with an interesting chat between 37Signalsfounder and CEO Jason Fried and Wall Street Journaltechnology columnist and blogger Walt Mossberg.Mossberg began by saying they weren't going to be talking about technology, but it quickly became clear that he meant they weren't going to talk about technology from a technical standpoint. Instead, Mossberg focused on what Fried knows best: what makes technology good. Anyone who has read anything from 37Signals can guess Fried's answer: simplicity.Fried introduced 37Signals as a company that makes software for small businesses, but quickly corrected himself, "We don't really think of it as software," he said, "we think of it as tools to get things done." 37Signals focuses on the simplest way to solve a problem and then "gets out of the way," said Fried. The problem with traditional software is that it often gets in the way. It gets complicated, bloated, and hard to use.The reason, argued Jason, is that the software industry is structured to build crap (borrowing the term Mossberg used to describe Outlook). Software is designed to make money on new versions shipped every year or so, and in order to convince users to keep upgrading developers feel pressure to add new features. 37Signals, on the other hand, offers its software over the web as a service. When people are paying a monthly fee, the company can release updates on a continuous basis and focus on making things work as simply as possible, rather than adding more features.Always the skeptic, Mossberg didn't buy it. How do you balance your mantra of simplicity with demands of self selected vocal customers who want more, he asked. How do you avoid feature creep?Echoing a post he madeon his company's blog this morning, Fried said that good software needs editors. The same way a museum needs a curator or a writer needs an editor, software development too demands a leader with a clear voice who is willing to say, "no." "You have to be a hard ass," said Fried. 37Signals is what Fried calls an "opinionated company." They believe in their way of doing things, and users who agree with those ideas will have a great time using their software. Another company built in this mold is Apple."But Steve Jobs is a dictator," said Mossberg of the comparison to Apple. "And I love that," said Fried. "I think it's unbelievably fantastic."In their book Getting Real, 37Signals talks about making software for a core group of customers. "The customer is not always right," they write. "The truth is you have to sort out who's right and who's wrong for your app." The number one person who is right for you app is you, the developer. If you're not making software that you would use, and is built with your vision in mind, then the software will suffer because as a result. As Fried told the crowd here, "Fundamentally, people need to say no more."

  The folks at Mozilla posted last night to a company blogabout the new plans they have to make a mobile browser a first-class consideration, a core platform, when working on the forthcoming Mozilla2. The new mobile browser is probably still a year away. I sure wish we didn't have to wait too long, but hopefully it will be worth it.The company said it will "ship a version of "Mobile Firefox" which can, among other things, run Firefox extensions on mobile devices and allow others to build rich applications via XUL."Two new additions to the Mozilla mobile team were also announced, Christian Sejersen and Brad Lassey, both mobile industry heavyweights. Sejersen will head a new R&D center in Copenhagen, Denmark.This sounds like great news to me. I spend more than an hour a day on a mobile browser; I feel dirty using IE mobile but can't stand the crawling fidelity and frequent freezing of Opera Mini. I will be very excited to bring extensions into a new mobile browser from Mozilla, the first will be a del.icio.us toolbar.For more analysis of this and other mobile news, check out coverage from mobile industry experts Russell Beattieand JkOnTheRun.

  MySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks, according to sources speaking to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. If what Arrington is reporting is true (and it almost always is) then things are really changing at the industry leading social network. By this time next year you'll be getting spam from MySpace applicationsand be running to shut off your account altogether. If you feel embarrassed perusing the Facebook apps directory ("yes mom, these are my peers, this is the new frontier - let's send some 'booze mail!'"), you'll feel nauseas when you see the MySpace apps directory.It was just one year ago last monththat News Corp. chief operating officer Peter Chernin told company investors that "if you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application...almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace." Chernin's statement was a hostile one, said in the context of the company blocking access to some third party widgets and shutting off outbound links that were key to viral spread of all widgets, for purported security purposes.The company aimed instead to drive users towards its own photo, video and audio services. Those services are remarkably good compared to the 3rd party alternatives, and yet the debate raged on.Tech bloggers, and TechCrunch in particular, kept a running tallyof third party developers whose companies were shut down by threats from MySpace. MySpace engaged in a huge battle with Photobucket over running ads on MySpace pages, ending in a large acquisition of Photobucket.Now Arrington reports that rumor has it MySpace platform developers will be allowed to run ads and keep 100% of the revenue. What's This All About?Does MySpace see the writing on the wall? If so, what does it say? I have said before and I'll say again that the rise of Facebook has been in spite of the opening of the Facebook platform, if anything. It's a result of the maturing demographics of social networking services, a backlash against the wretched user experience of the poorly designed and spam ridden MySpace and the power of syndication represented by the Facebook wall. That wall functionality will be the most significant development that other companies take from Facebook. The open development platform may very well make a difference at Google, it could move the needle at LinkedIn (in a year when that platform launches) but it's very unlikely that it will be important at MySpace or anywhere else. As Kara Swisher wrote today, the vast majority of apps developed for the much-vaunted Facebook platform - including the most successful ones, are vapid wastes of time. It's the newsfeed, clean site and well designed user experience of Facebook that really matters - and perhaps privacy. These platforms will just be the bush leagues for the real companies to watch features be developed before building the same things - as features, and they'll be ad networks for a handful of lowest-common-denominator, dust-weight apps. Arrington says the MySpace platform will require that apps built on it are hosted on the MySpace platform!In other words, I don't expect a MySpace platform to account for a whole lot. If the "open platform on huge monolith's terms" meme ever has any meat on it, I don't expect it will be in the long-hostile quarters of MySpace.