This is a guest post by TK Kenyon, author of the bookRabid.digg_url = 'http://digg.com/business_finance/Internet_Marketing_for_Novel_Writers';digg_bgcolor = '#ffffff';digg_skin = 'compact';Writing, especially fiction writing, is a tough business to get into and a tougher one to stay in. Generally, neither authors nor publishers make a significant profit until an author’s fifth novel is published. Most of the time, the majority of the meager money that publishers put into publicizing books goes toward review copies and the usually unproductive author tour. How many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novelsare published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies.Yikes.To be in the other 30% of authors, you must seize every promotional advantage you can, especially by using the web and other new media. My first novel, Rabid, sold out of its first print run of 10,000 copies in under two months and is currently chewing through its second print run, which is better than average.To sell your book, (1) inform people that you and the novel exist, (2) interest readers enough to buy your book, and (3) build a relationship to keep them coming back for more.For all this, the Internet is the perfect medium.InformTo announce your presence to the world, first you blog. Before your book is published, start your own blog or blogs on subjects related to your book, especially controversial themes or subjects that people want to know more about on an easy, free blog host like Blogger/Blogspot, Livejournal, or Xanga. Join blogs. Be a guest blogger. Trade blog posts with other bloggers. Many small blogs and blogger networks, including those that you start or join and co-op blogs, allow you to write one blog post and then cross-post to them all, which means far more bang for your time and typing buck. Some blog networks also feed into search engine news services, which is an added publicity bonus.Personally, I have a science blog, Science for Non-Majors(general science essays including genetic engineering of food animals, opinions about recent research in autism and Alzheimer's Disease, and why snot is slimy,) and participate regularly in co-op blogs like Criminal Minds at Work(for authors of crime novels, as Rabidhas both a murder and a trial in it,) and The Write Type, plus one at my publisher'swebsite, and blogger networks Bloggernews.net and Opednews.com.Writing guest articlesfor newsletters, print, e-magazines, and other blogs is one of the best ways to reach new readers. Articles for big blogs and e-magazines, such as this one or Bookslut, are generally exclusive. Don't cross-post these, though you can link to the post from your other blogs with a teaser about the article. Query blogs via email with a paragraph about the topic of your article and why you should write it. Find popular places to post by using tools like Technoratior PageRank on the Google Toolbar, which is also an indication of popularity -- a higher number is better. Statsaholicand Alexaare other sources for traffic information that you can utilize.If you have the time to commit to writing several articles per week for only one site, Aboutis competitive but lucrative. Blogcritics is an excellent site, though less remunerative.Literary journals, especially e-journals, are excellent places to publicize. Excise self-contained nuggets out of your novel and submit them. You can also write stand-alone prequels, sequels, or exquels to your novel. Lists of literary journals, such as this one at Poets & Writers, abound.Social networking sitesare also great places to up your profile ante. Wikipedia has a good but incomplete list.A page at MySpace.comis the minimum. You can cross-post your blogessays on MySpace blogs, too. Add friends, join groups, and aim for 1000 friends as your first goal, then 5000, then 10,000.Goodreadsis a must-visit social networking site for authors. It's similar to MySpace except that it's geared toward bibliophiles -- a target-rich audience. Add friends, join groups, and post book reviews.Gatheris a community of writers and is another great place to make friends and turn them into readers by cross-posting your blogs and essays.Once your book is added to Amazon, enroll in the AmazonConnectauthors' program. You can post blogs, announce book tour dates, and connect with people who have purchased your books in the past. Your posts show up on your book's page.Forums and newsgroupsare the great underground for authors. Make a list of topics, especially controversial ones, in your novel, and search YahooGroups, GoogleGroups, and search engines for "forum" plus your topic. Post to the introductory thread with details about your book, then respond to other people's posts, and cross-post any topically related blog posts as thread starters. Include your book's title in your sig file, but don't actually advertise your book as that will likely just get you branded as a spammer. As long as your posts are on topic, helpful, thoughtful, and informative, people will visit your signature links. Forums are good places to enjoy yourself while "working." Caveat: trolls lurk under these cyberbridges, avoid getting involved in any flame wars.Where to get ideas for blog essays:news items (write an opinion piece, not necessarily contrary, and link back to the source article), forum posts (on a discussion thread, when you write a long answer to a post, copy/paste your answer, tidy it up, and post it on your blogs), your characters (write short stories about them, which you can then submit to literary journals, or do "interviews" with them, which is always an amusing exercise), or questions that people ask you about your book.InterestAfter you inform people that you and your book exists, give them more information. Seventy percent of readers who are thinking of buying a book by a new author search the Internet before they buy.The first thing you should do when you sign your book contract, if you haven't already, is buy your name as a web domain address. You might want to buy the dot-net and dot-org versions as well as the dot-com, because if you don't, someone else will.So what do you put on your web site? First and foremost and as always, content is king. Readers want to know more about you, your book, subjects in your book, writing your book, excerpts from your novel or other short stories, and your characters. Don't just slap up a couple sales pages.For example, my own website, TKKenyon.com,includes a bio about my scientific work (virology and neuroscience) as well as fiction writing, essays on the craft of fiction writing, and about subjects that are themes in my novel, and more about the characters in my first novel, Rabid. Most people want to know more about two of them: Dante the tormented Jesuit Catholic priest, and Leila the wild graduate student.Republish essaysthat you hold the e-rights to on your website. Link to others and to your blogs. Include a few pictures of yourself but nothing that will overly interest a stalker. Write content for the site that includes important key words and optimize your pages for search engines, which includes naming pages using commonly searched words that are also subjects of the essay and ensuring that the links between pages work. Add content frequently. Include a way to email you (important for building an email list, see below,) and a way to purchase your book immediately. To do that, join an affiliate program, such as from Amazon.com, BN.com, or Powells.com.BuildAfter you've found someone and sold them your novel, sell them the next one by building a relationship with them. As any MBA will tell you, the easiest customer is the repeat customer. To do this, build an email list.Anyone who emails you, write them back and add them to your emailing list. When you start out, you can do mass emailings to your friends, but as you get bigger you should have an opt-in email list. You can collect email addresses from people at bookstore signings if you buy a little $2 bag of truffles and have a drawing, no purchase required. (Note: if you require the purchase of your book to enter the raffle, your contest falls under state lottery and gambling laws, and you don't want that.) Send out at least a couple newsletters each year and make sure there is a way for people to remove themselves from the newsletter so you are in compliance with anti-spam laws. Definitely make use of your email distribution list to announce the pre-sale and sale of your next book.AmazonConnect, mentioned above, is a great way to contact people who have bought your book from Amazon.com. In addition, AmazonShorts is a program where you can post short stories about your novel's characters, or other short stories, 2000-10,000 words in length, and sell them on the cheap. While it will not provide retirement income, it is another way to introduce new people to your writing or update them on the further adventures of your charaters.On your website, add an address where your readers can send you snail mail (like a PO Box, not your street address) and send you a self-addressed, stamped envelope. Then, send them a personalized, signed bookplateto stick in their book. Use large, 2"x3" or larger, printer-label stickers, and write a quick note and sign them.So that's how to use the Internet to rise above the fray: find readers, give them information, and build relationships with them. In-store book signings sell only a few books and publishers may or may not allocate much in the way of publicity funds and manpower to first-time authors. Your own efforts on the Internet can make a dramatic difference in whether or not your novel succeeds.Image credit: Notebook/coffee photo by Lost in Scotland.

  Sponsor:Here is a summary of the week's Web Tech action on Read/WriteWeb. Note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feedor by email.Web NewsNewsvine Acquired By MSNBCThe week started with some big M&A news in the Citizen Journalism space - Newsvinewas acquired by MSNBC, the Microsoft/NBC joint venture, for an undisclosed sum. Newsvine CEO Mike Davidson said that "Newsvine will continue operating independently, just as it has been since launching in March of 2006." He also indicated there would be little change in the features of the site -- which is great news, because in our review of Newsvine in July, we noted that Newsvine "is probably more advanced in its design than other CJ [Citizen Journalism] sites, often trying new things and design techniques." Indeed we can't wait to see how MSNBC integrates some of the Newsvine features, which Davidson said will occur: "Over the next few years, Newsvine technology and content will make its way onto msnbc.com, and vice-versa where it makes sense."Google Acquires Microblogging Service JaikuThis week Finnish short messaging and microblogging service Jaikuwas acquired by Google. That Google bought this competitor of Twitter, the service founded by Blogger founder Evan Williams, instead of Twitter is notable. Jaiku may be stronger on the mobile platform than Twitter and probably came at a much lower price. Google has been rolling up no end of very young mobile services; while the comparison with the Dodgeball acquisition, which ended up going nowhere, is inevitable - we think there's a lot more going on this time around. For one thing, Jaiku will now have access to scaling that Twitter could desperately use. YouTube Videos Coming to AdSenseThis week Google announced YouTube integration with AdSense. Selected YouTube videos will be available to AdSense publishers and will appear wrapped in banner ads. We think there's a whole lot of potential here. Though cynics have said that there's little hope for video outside YouTube, small video ad networks insist that there's a growing, thriving ecosystem of niche video sites just waiting for more and better content and ads.In other YouTube news, YouTube Videos have also been added to Google Earth. Geotagged YouTube videos will now be viewable in a featured content layer of Google Earth.MySpace App Platform Coming SoonMySpace is set to launch its 3rd party developer platform in just a few weeks. R/WW's Marshall Kirkpatrick was somewhat skeptical of the news, writing that "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."In other big social network platform news, Read/WriteWeb heard from a couple of reliable sources that social network Bebois about to announce a developer platform very soon too. Although this news didn't seem to interest the US-focused tech blogosphere, 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). So along with the MySpace news, this is another significant step forward in the social network space - where third party apps can hook into those popular ecosystems much easier.Web ProductsBitTorrent DNA: Hollywood Hitches a Ride with the PiratesThis week BitTorrent announced their content delivery network acceleration service, BitTorrent DNA. DNA will add their peer-to-peer file sharing technology to any CDN to speed up download and streaming services for videos and files. BitTorrent essentially works by harnessing unused network capacity on end-user computers. Anyone downloading or streaming a file also distributes the file to other users, which is broken into smaller chunks and reassembled upon delivery. BitTorrent has long used the distributed peer-to-peer approach for file sharing, and the same idea is employed by companies like Joost for streaming media.Castfire Lands Next New Networks in Major Video PactIn a cross-country deal that will make big waves in the video blogging market, San Francisco's CastFire, the up and coming video publishing tool/ad network, announced a large deal to distribute and provide services for New York's high profile Next New Networks. NNN was founded by former MTV exec Herb Scannell and animation mogul Fred Seibert (MTV's first creative director), has raised $8m in venture fundingand publishes popular series JetSetand Talking Points Memo TV, among others. NNN has to date had a paltry video player and has not been able to monetize its content effectively - so it's no surprise that it's taken on another layer of services with another company. All the networks in NNN are reported to see a total of about 30 million unique visitors per month, but in the video world all metrics are in flux.You can find many other product reviews and startup profiles in our Startups category.AnalysisThe Structured Web - A PrimerAlex Iskold wrote an important article this week outlining the nature of structured information on the Web. He wrote that 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. Increasingly, wrote Alex, 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 mechanismAre Recommendation Engines a Threat to the Long Tail?Two Wharton academics released an interesting paper recently that asks whether online recommendation services are a threat to the aggregate diversity of items discovered by their users. The study is titled "Blockbuster Culture's Next Rise or Fall: The Impact of Recommender Systems on Sales Diversity". All indications point towards a rise in importance by recommendation engines, so this argument deserves examination. From eBay's acquisition of StumbleUpon to the CBS acquisition of Last.fm to this weekend's MSNBC acquisition of Newsvine - recommendation engines are big money. Marshall Kirkpatrick explored this topic for Read/WriteWeb...In a related post, check out Josh Catone's review of Criticker - Movie Recommendations Based on Taste.You can find more R/WW analysis posts here.ConferencesBIF-3This week R/WW's Josh Catone was at the BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summitin Providence, Rhode Island. The BIF-3 event reminded Josh 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. Josh's coverage from the event:BIF-3: Ellen Levy - Ask the Right QuestionsBIF-3: Euan Semple - Bringing Social Networking to the BBCBIF-3: Dan Heath - Think Inside the BoxBIF-3: Jason Fried - Software Should Be OpinionatedR/WW Network Blogslast100Check out a wrapof the week's Digital Lifestyle news on last100. There was lots of music industry news this week. The band Nine Inch Nails announced they were following Radiohead’s lead, by dumping their record label; and Madonna said she plans to do the same. On the digital front, online music service Rhapsody is now available on TiVo; and Universal is reportedly pushing ahead with Total Music, the latest assault on Apple’s iTunes.In Internet TV-related news, Sony’s PS3 game console is to become and IPTV set-top box for Korea Telecom; Vuze, which now boasts 10 million software downloads, has opened up it p2p video distribution platform; and Joost plans to add “live” television to its serviceearly next year.Alt Search EnginesAltSearchEnginesthis week had a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Search debate - Part oneand Part two. It featured Wolf Garbe of FAROO and Jeremie Miller of Wikia/Atlas. One of the questions was: what aspect is the architecture distributed and what are the benefits of this? Wolf said that "FAROO is using a fully distributed architecture: distributed index, distributed crawler, distributed ranking, and distributed search." Jeremie replied that "each entity within Atlas, whether it be the Factory, Collector, or Broker, can be entirely distinct and independent, and will likely be different companies or groups altogether."Read/WriteTalkThis week Sean Ammirati of Read/WriteTalk- our new podcast show - was at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. He sat down with Seth Goldstein, the CEO of Social Media. The podcast discusses Goldstein's work on the Attention Trust non-profit and vision for SocialMedia, his new advertising network for Facebook Applications.PollWe ran a late week pollon what you'd be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead's new album In Rainbows (or insert your favorite music artist). The results at press time:US$30 or over 3% US$20-29 2% US$15-19 6% US$10-14 27% US$5-9 40% US$3-4 11% US$1-2 3% less than US$1 1% Free 8% So US$5-9 was the happy medium, with US$10-14 the second most popular choice.That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

  Silicon Alley Insiderspotted the New York Times web site displaying reader comments prominently under the top story on their front page today. The comments in-and-of themselves are not newsworthy -- they came from a post on the site's news blogand the Times has linked to comment threads on the main page before. But this is, to anyone's recollection, the first time the site has actually displayed the actual comments themselves on the site.Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider thought the move was a good one, writing, "Hats off to the company's web team for this smart move!" Other bloggers weren't so upbeat. While it seems that the NYT times took pains to make sure that comments from both ends of the political spectrum were represented for their main page selections -- often to one extreme or the other -- and comments were edited to fit the space, I do question the wisdom of giving reader commentary such prominence on the site's index page.Image from Silicon Alley Insider.We've praised news sites for adding reader commentingas a feature to their web sites in the past, and we recently had kind words about the New York Times Facebook app. However, giving reader comments such a prominent position is dangerous. Readers of news sites (and blogs) go to those specific destinations to read news in the voice they expect -- not to see a public argument from commenters.I would applaud an expansion of New York Times comments beyond blogs to general news stories -- I think commenting is great; it gives readers an outlet for instant response and keeps writers honest. But publishing comments on the main page, especially so prominently under the main story, seems like a bad idea. What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below (we won't publish them on the main page, though!).

  Our poll this weekasks what you'd be prepared to pay for the download version of Radiohead's new album In Rainbows. In the comments to the original post, someone pointed to a Gizmodo reportstating that Radiohead will sell In Rainbows via CD early next year, through one of the 'big four' record companies. The Gizmodo post wrote that Radiohead had "pulled an about-face that feels like a betrayal and a dirty cop-out", because many fans would've downloaded the album thinking it would only be available via Radiohead's website. A later update to the Gizmodo post said that Radiohead had "been planning on dropping the album in CD form in '08 the entire time." So it wasn't an about-face, although it also wasn't reported in many initial news reports - or noted on the Radiohead website itself.A lot of the initial media coverageimplied that there wouldn't be a physical CD release, other than the box set that costs a whopping 40 pounds and will be available in December. There is no mention of a single CD version on the Radiohead website either. So it's fair to say that a lot of people (myself included) got the wrong message; and paid for the digital download assuming it was the only way to get the single album.According to our poll US$5-9 is the most popular price range that people are willing to pay for the digital download version. That pricing will be virtually all profit to Radiohead, so the download version will make some money for the band. However the eventual single CD release will reach a much wider audience, so the physical CDwill end up being the pot of gold at the end of In Rainbows. So much for the big revolution in record sales!But to be fair to Radiohead, they didn't hide that fact it would be on CD in January - it's just that the media didn't report that properly. Probably also some of us Webheads are guilty of over-hyping the Internet download (did I just say that?!) and thinking it would immediately replace the CD. Getting the album a few months ahead of time and for a very low price is still a great deal.There's still time to take part in our poll this week. Let us know what a digital download album, from an artist's website, is worth to you:Free Polls- Take Our Poll

  Born out of a closet dislike for "Shrek 2," Critickeris a new movie review community and recommendation engine that aims to match users with like-minded individuals who share the same cinematic taste. Once you've rated 10 movies at Criticker it begins to form what they call a Taste Compatibility Index (TCI) that matches you up with not only other users, but also professional reviewers who share your taste in movies (though, I found that site really doesn't start delivering usable results untily you've rated around 50 flicks).One of the most important features of the site is how painless they make the process of ranking first 10 films (or your next 100). While you can search out specific films and rank them one at a time, similar to any other movie community, you can also page through randomly generated lists of 10 films at once, ranking each on a 1-100 scale. I was able to rank 80 films in just about 30 minutes by going the random route. Certainly not all my favorite films were represented (I made sure they were ranked later by searching them out), but I did give the site a good sized sample to work with that covered both films I like and films I loathe. Had I been forced to search out movies on my own, my list likely would have been skewed toward mostly films I like -- recommendation engines should in theory work better if they also know what not to send your way.After ranking your first 50 or so movies, Criticker begins to fill in your TCI with users and critics who have similar tastes based on mutual rankings. The more films you rank, the better and more accurate your matches will become -- matches based on 100 rankings in common are bound to be more accurate than those based on 10.You can set a "films in common" minimum for Criticker to take into consideration when using your TCIs to power recommendations. I have mine set to the default of 10% (or about 8 films out of my 80+ rankings). That means that even though at the moment Jamie Levy of Variety is my top critic match, Criticker should ignore his recommendations for me because we only have 3 films in common.When Criticker makes a recommendation, it assigns movies a Probable Score Indicator (PSI), which estimates the ranking you would likely give the movie based on your past rankings the rankings of your TCIs. Based on critic reviews, the site is today recommending that I should go see "Into the Wild" with a PSI of 88, and based on users and critics the site is telling me I should rent "Casino Royale" with a PSI of 90. Those recommendations seem pretty accurate -- "Into the Wild" has been on the top of the list of movies I am looking forward to, and I enjoyed "Casino Royale" (I haven't rated it yet, which is why the site recommended it to me).Criticker lets you add friends (called "kumpels") as well, and track their ratings and reviews, even if their TCI score does not make them a match to your own. And this week the site launched a Facebook applicationthat brings their social film recommendation engine to your Facebook friends list and competes with popular Facebook film rating and review apps, such as Flixter's ubiquitous "Movies."ConclusionCriticker is a nice site that makes rating a lot of movies fun and easy -- I rated more in 30 minutes on the site than I have in 10 years of casual IMDb use. Their recommendation engine makes mostly good recommendations (with a few misses here and there), and the ability to tweak how it interacts with your Taste Compatibility Index to determine rankings means you can up the accuracy of ratings. Unlike sites that recommend products based on what everyone thinks of them, Criticker recommends films based only on the opinions of people who have a similar taste as you, which makes a big difference.The lesson there may be that the crowd as a whole isn't always smart (or at least isn't well suited to every task we try to throw at it). However, more focused crowd intelligence can yield potentially exceptional results.

  Everyone is jumping on the Facebook "open platform" bandwagon, but LinkedIncan at least say it was among the first to issue copycat-intent statements shortly after the Facebook event. Richard MacManus covered the possibilities offered by a LinkedIn platform here in June. Now LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye has done an interview with the New York Timeswhere he laid out some of the vision for the company's upcoming outreach to outside developers.It won't be a very warm welcome compared to the Facebook lovefest. Though this should be unsurprising, LinkedIn's platform will require permission from the company before developers can get in on the action. Though Facebook apps do need to be added by Facebook to the app directory, a quick look through there shows that the bar is low enough that it may as well be open to all.I've talked to many companies holding out for a future opportunity to score real estate on LinkedIn profile pages. Nye says in this interview that the average income of a LinkedIn user is $140k per year - it's a real injustice that such high-quality human beings won't have easy access to all our widgets.LinkedIn will focus its platform on letting developers tie LinkedIn functionality to outside services (Salesforce is the example given, surprise surprise) and to adding buttoned-up business functionality to LinkedIn itself. It's Not a Social Network!Nye also told the Times that LinkedIn doesn't consider itself a social network, either. That's funny, that's what Facebook loudly insisted on to its developers pre-platform launch, too. They weren't allowed to mention MySpace or the phrase social networking in their PR. Facebook is a social utility- they insisted. That was an eye-roller at the time and sounds even sillier now.We'll see what the LinkedIn platform looks like when the rubber finally hits the road, but when it happens - don't quit your day job to be a LinkedIn app developer.

  I'm regularly outspoken about my concerns that Google is going to take over the world and start passing out brain implants - but the fact of the matter is that I love Google services. Today's announcement that more GMail storage is on the wayis heartening, but you've got to wonder: why is this mighty giant messing around with anything other than a total storage solution for all my data across all their apps? Where is the GDrive already?Google told analystsmore than a year ago that it wanted to store 100% of our data, a "golden copy." Perhaps its failure to do so yet is a sign of the finite power it truly holds. Or perhaps its just a ruse to lull cynics like me into a false sense of security. That's probably not what's happening.I should probably pay $50 for super Google, as advocated this morning by Amit Agarwalin reference to the news. See also one estimate of forthcoming free storage capacity over at the blog Googlified.Finally, I'm sure there are some of you out there that still haven't seen the following video about the future of Google and the web in general. It's not to be missed, it's thought provoking and funny. See you in the "hive mind" if it ever arrives!

  A new Forrester reportanalyzes how the big IT vendors are utilizing Web 2.0 products in the enterprise. As with most Forrester reports, it overlooks the many innovative startups in the 'Web Office' space - focusing instead of the big fish such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle. However there is a new report coming soon that will address what Forrester calls "pure play" vendors. And it must be said that thebig vendors are the ones many enterprises look to for their IT solutions, including web 2.0 technology. So let's check out this report and see what it has to say.The crux of the report is that each of the biggest IT vendors Forrester looked at - Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, SAP and BEA - has a unique perspective on the market. States Forrester:- BEA, through acquisitions and new 2.0 products, now has numerous enterprise Web 2.0 capabilities, including blogs, wikis, communities, tagging, tag clouds, and a framework for building mash-up applications;- IBMmelds the world of application development with user experience with its WebSphere product family. It is a dominant player in the collaboration space and will deliver enterprise Web 2.0 functionality as part of its upcoming Lotus Quickr and Connections offerings;- Microsoft's entry into the market is clear: if you want enterprise Web 2.0, you get it in Sharepoint;- Oracleis a relevant infrastructure vendor and a thought leader in enterprise applications by offering Web 2.0 capabilities;- SAPis looking to create end-to-end processes.One company the report doesn't mention - at all - is Google. While not a traditional IT vendor for enterprise, Google is certainly a "big" vendor and making a lot of progress in enterprise. Forrester describes the enterprise 2.0 moves by big vendors like Microsoft and IBM as a "land grab". So Google should've been included, as it is grabbing its fair share of 'land' in the enterprise.Having said that, traditional IT people will be quick to remind me that vendors like Google haven't necessarily got all the right solutions for enterprise yet: security and compliance are two areas where Google and other web 2.0 vendors have work to do. And the ability to integrate with existing business processes is another hot spot - the Forrester report points out that "line-of-business applications have traditionally been very focused on structured business processes", which is something that Microsoft, IBM et al have a lot of experience in. Forrester came up with a good diagram showing how web 2.0 technologies could be implemented by the big vendors, to support business process:Collaboration is the name of the game with Enterprise 2.0, so I agree with Forrester that web 2.0 tools can be very useful here. In my time as a corporate worker (I used to manage intranet and internet sites), collaboration was very difficult to achieve with traditional IT tools - so wikis, blogs and Web Office tools such as Google Apps have really raised the bar for collaboration in enterprises.So which of the big vendors is making the most progress with Enterprise 2.0? According to Forrester, IBM has made "the boldest move into Enterprise 2.0 from any of the traditional vendors" - with Lotus Connections being their key product. Read/WriteWeb covered the launch of Connectionsin January 2007, noting also that Microsoft went on the defensive at that time with a press release touting SharePoint. Lotus Connections includes blogs, tagging, communities, profiles, and task management; Forrester wrote that it "represents a highly integratedplatform that is enterprise-ready."Forrester said of SharePoint that it "has had strong momentum in the market, and it’s installed and under evaluation in many enterprises serving a variety of purposes."In conclusion, the big vendors are all well and truly part of the web 2.0 landscape now. The products, like Lotus Connections and SharePoint, remain complex and broad in scope - which in many respects goes against the grain of simple and easy-to-use web 2.0 products. However Forrester points out what many of us have been saying for a while: that the big vendors will "acquire best-of-breed vendors to augment, extend, and cover gaps in their own enterprise Web 2.0 portfolios." Google has been on such a buying spreeover the past year or so, and the other big vendors will do the same.IBM 2.0 pic by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

  Portland, Oregon based Kumquatwent live today in a limited beta release. The service is a very light-weight but well thought-out tool for gathering self-initiated performance reviews in any field. Account registration will be open for the next 24 hours at the URL hellokumquat.com/rww- after that you'll have to provide an email and get in line. The company believes that there isn't a really easy way to secure performance evaluations from people you've worked for; they aim to make it simple and they do a pretty good job at launch. See also competitors iKarma, YouRaterand to some degree Rapleaf.It's got some early performance issues but scores high on usability otherwise. If you are seeking feedback on your work from clients or peers - Kumquat could be just what you're looking for. First some product description and good news, then the bad news last.Form creators can select from a list of 6 general questions to ask respondents about their work, ranging from the "value of the effort" to the proficiency with which it was managed. After each of the 6 basic questions is a field where more details can be added for specifics or clarification. Respondents can be allowed to respond anonymously or not and to either see the list of all recipients of the request for evaluation, or not.Those questions are answered with a series of sliders for scoring and text fields for details. The interface is crisp, clear and pleasing to use.Throughout both the admin and the resulting form, Kumquat uses clever witticisms to flirt with the line between a formal and informal tool; inquiry emails can even be sent out with a "more stuffy," "less stuffy" or custom message. The messages are well composed and genuinely useful.Results can be viewed individually, multiple replies to questions can be viewed as an average and replies can be viewed in PDF format.And Now for the Bad NewsFor all its elegance, Kumquat's also got a ways to go before anyone should be too enthusiastic about the product. Forms can only be sent out once, they can't be edited later. Templates are on the roadmap for later. There's performance issues - forms marked private by the creator are said to recipient to be notprivate. That's a deal breaker, but I'd be surprised if it wasn't fixed by the end of the weekend. The site is also honest about the fact that initial emails requesting a review will almost always land in your recipient's spam folder. That's bad. The company's working on that too, though it might be a bit trickier. Microformats are supported wherever possible, Kumquat says, and you can log in with an OpenID account. All great news, but the OpenID login is just a grunt and a request for a URL. OpenID is becoming widely enough known now that I'm going to start holding it against people if they don't treat it as a teachable moment and make logging in with brand-name accounts as easy as falling off a log. Kumquat does not.Finally, I can't help but think that there's something more that could be done here. Simplicity is good, maybe it's good enough. Integration with other reputation systems? A widget? I'm not sure, maybe those steps would be overkill and Kumquoat is just what independent workers need.Once the above problems are fixed, I'll likely try using it myself in some real-life situations.

  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.