Trying to follow…

Seems a bit strange maybe to post something with a title like that in Belgium, but it is a nice list. 

No there is more to it. Canada is the country with the highest internet penetration. The most people that are active on the internet are in Canada. So that makes it a nice showcase. I thought Belgium would also rank high on that scale, maybe a need to look in to that.

Anyway some of the more famous web 2.0 sites are from Canada, with most important export product flickr.
The article top-web-apps  gives a nice overview of some popular web 2.0 sites. I like the wiki and the penguin sites.

Check it out yourself…

This is something new. Joost embedded in setup boxes and so. That is TV over the internet.But perhaps the experience of TV on the PC is still not acceptable. Is Joost realizing that also or just covering the holes? Because I think that setup boxes are NOT the way to go. I believe more in the Apple system with Apple TV. A box to convert the internet options to a Television experience. A setupbox limits the experience, although the Joost interface is very easy and userfriendly.

More to find at http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/15/embedded-joost-will-change-the-market/

Rabobank gaat dus ook de widget tour op. Binnen dit en enkele jaren gaat het web ge-atomiseerd zijn. Geen pagina meer maar widgets, die hun eigen interactie en layout hebben.

Het leuke aan widgets is dat ze verschillende technologien verenigen. webservices, ajax,… maken het mogelijk om die widgets te maken met hun eigen data en services. Het belangrijkste wordt dan een platform te hebben voor die widgets en de interactie tussen de widgets bevorderen. Voorlopig zijn het vooral personalisatie platformen die de kar trekken maar er zit zeker toekomst in de andere mogelijkheden van zo een platform.

Ik ga  er toch eens over moeten nadenken.

the ending is nice. )

uitzending gemist met reclame.

A new player in search town, www.sputtr.com. This a not a search engine as such, but a mash up of a lot of different platforms their search options. Pretty nice design, very web 2.0 and a functionality that I never needed but is nice to have. Is it a killer app? Nhaa, but nice to know and to have. I find myself using it more and more… Actually it is one of the things I miss in aggregration platform as netvibes, even Google. The possibility to search easily on different platforms.
I have this plugin in Firefox that does that and I use that one a lot. Today sputtr became my new startpage.

Het schiet op. deze week is de kelder afgewerkt en begin volgende week worden de pre-dallen geleverd en het beton gegoten. Dus wordt er dan ook begonnen aan het gelijkvloers. Naar het schijnt gaat het dan goed vooruit maar de dakwerken zal pas moeten komen na het bouwverlof. waarschijnlijk de ramen ook, ik hoop gewoon dat alle vloeren er tegen dan wel liggen. Kwestie van te kunnen doorwerken in een ruk tijdens het bouwverlof.

google is buying again. This time some technical firm for a performance boost. Didn’t know Google needed it but who knows.

The dutch channel EenVandaag has its own netvibes page. I think we need that too so maybe it is time to go to Paris and talk to the guys at netvibes. trying to convince them of our needs.

Netvibes rocks in case you didn’t know i. It had become one of my all time favourites. I use it all the time, even together with Google Ig. Howcome? Well, for one, the google apps tab in iGoogle is convenient. The gmail widget is also an all time favourite and that is about it… I think I need those two to be sure not to miss anything. And that is a marketing trick I guess because we all miss lots of things…

I liked the definition posted on snipperoo.

“A widget can be anything. There won’t be any centralised production method or certification system, that would miss the point. Any bit of code that can be inserted into a site and which does something is a widget.
In the widgetsphere, there are three issues and they apply to all widgets. Value and Distribution.
Value is the value of the widget to the person who has to make a decision to insert that widget into their (limited) site real estate. The value can be direct (AdSense), indirect (gets traffic, subscribers) or emotional (esteem, kudos)or a mixture of these. Without value a widget will not get installed anywhere.
Distribution is how it actually gets installed, i.e. cut and paste, auto-insertion, walled-garden drag and drop.
So you can be in the Value business or you can be in the Distribution business (or both).
The value business is really the realm of marketing and/or advertising folk and I expect to see marketing companies jump on this big time. How do you create a widget that carries value, that will get big time adoption and that gives a ROI. This already is a specialist field without any specialists in it, but it looks very interesting.
Distribution is something different, how do you reach everyone who may want to insert your widget? How do you make it easy for them – not only to insert it, but to remove it again. Can you automate this process. How about widgets that auto delete. How about widgets that only show in response to certain conditions, or to certain visitors. This is a distribution issue. This is wehere Snipperoo is operating.
There is another issue, where several companies are operating, but its a red herring. That’s the area around ‘how do you make a widget’. As I said, a widget can be anything that will run in a web site. There are millions of people in the world who can build them using whatever technologies the like. Anthing that cramps this resource will not fly. That’s why Snipperoo are technology agnostic. We are the universal widget.”

A nice article that says it all about the upcoming widget hype. ClearSpring is a company that already has the right names in line. Now it is just waiting to get going. I think that widgets will be the next big thing on the internet and perhaps change it again. At least the business models will be changed by widgets and clearspring will be extremely well placed. the full article can be found via delicious tags but here are some quotes.

“According to Clearspring founder, Hooman Radfar, this is a first of kind deal between a widget platform and a media giant. In the interview earlier today, Radfar said that he sees this as a major step towards breaking silo/portal approach and embracing distributed content strategy for NBC.
According to Radfar, the platform has already served over 3 billion widgets. These numbers and Clearspring’s approach to the market is what attracted the interest of former AOL founders who recently led the second round of investments, putting together over $5.5 million. So what does Clearspring offer?

The company has build highly scalable platform for creating, maintaining and distributing widgets. Unlike Widgetbox, which we recently covered, Clearspring does not focus on building a widget marketplace, instead it focuses on building a platform for developers. Here are the is what the company advertises to developers:

• Write once run anywhere
• Automatic viral sharing of widgets across destinations
• Support for major social networking and blogging platforms
• Support for desktop and mobile
• Visual and API-based setup
• Content distribution across the web

All of these are compelling, but tracking, API and content distribution deserve special attention. Clearspring’s tracking is statistics on steroids. The information about widget usage gets sliced and diced across each and every possible metric that you can imagine. It’s a useful and powerful tool for understanding the audience and how it interacts with the widgets. The API (application programming interface) offering means that companies can provide a better user experience. This is particularly useful for widgets that need to be configured through an application. Finally, the content distribution means that widgets are automatically going to be syndicated to galleries and sites across the web.”

“During my interview with Radfar, he emphasized the shift he is observing in media companies. He says that these giants are recognizing that broadcasting/silo approach is not going to work for much longer. Instead, the companies are looking for platforms and channels to access the users, to get people’s attention anywhere online (this is something NBC rival CBS has also been doing — in fact, CBS is another Clearspring partner). And this is where Clearspring comes in.”"

“When NBC starts building on Clearspring’s platform, it will get a solid platform for delivering widgets to both its internal sites and anywhere else online. The scalability of Clearspring platform has probably been the first major factor in choosing to work with the startup. The second major factor was probably comprehensive metrics. According to Radfar, these metrics are critical in order to be able to monetize the content outside of the typical network portal environment. He explained that context and user interaction numbers will help NBC determine the right monetization model.”