Posts Tagged: Del.icio.us

Thoughts — No Comments
24
Jun 08

Web 2.0’s Breakpoint

This was big news Friday, but I’m still processing the fact Joshua Schacter has left Yahoo, and del.icio.us. I’ve never met Schacter, but I’ve been a fan of his work for a long time. Memepool distracted me endlessly when I was working for TMF during the first dot com, and Del.icio.us has profoundly shaped my lens on Web 2.0. I’m also hopelessly addicted to del.icio.us – I use it extensively for academic research, it has shaped my thinking about all things social, and Terrell and I employed its design patterns for ClaimID. As Joshua leaves Yahoo and Del.icio.us, I wanted to acknowledge his work and the legacy he leaves behind.

It also strikes me that Schacter’s exit, as well as the exit of Flickr co-founders Butterfield and Fake, create a nice breakpoint for Web 2.0. In 2005, we saw the success of Flickr and Del.icio.us as beacons of hope – not only that the web remained monetizable, but that people still cared, that “web people” hadn’t just been chasing false hopes and dreams. Looking back from 2008, the frenzy of Web 2.0 looks more like gentle turbulence. Web 2.0 marked a change, in which our software enabled participation, identity and peer production. Perhaps it is now time to realize those facets are no longer novel, as the web turns and searches for its next transformation.

Software / Thoughts — 2 Comments
10
May 07

Structural holes in del.icio.us, or, the value of editorship

Last year, Joshua Schachter raised some eyebrows when he announced that del.icio.us would be adding enhanced social features. This announcement generated some pushback, and I haven’t noticed much work towards integrating meaningful social tools in the meantime. Ultimately, this is dissapointing, because the integration of better social tools in delicious is a good idea, and without these tools, del.icio.us is comprimising its value significantly.

When we first started bookmarking links in del.icio.us, the notion of transportable, social, rss-able bookmarks was a great concept. It remains a great concept, and del.icio.us’ growth is evidence of the strategy’s value. Del.icio.us’ UI also appealed to many – it was fast, stripped down and eminently usable. Schachter had elected to design with an eye towards utility, not Web 2.0 fluff. This design reduced complexity and barriers to entry; combined with its core value, del.icio.us had all the right stuff to really take off.

And take off it did. The acquisition of del.icio.us by Yahoo (along with the acquisition of Flickr) proved to be one of the best marketing moves Yahoo has made in the past few years. In the wake of the acquisition, more people joined, the networks grew stronger, and the value of the bookmarks stored in del.icio.us grew exponentially.

Social bookmarking is a cool idea. If you follow del.icio.us/popular, you can see bookmarks that lots of people like. In doing so, you can spend lots of time reading top ten lists ad nauseam. This is the crowdsourcing model, the Digg model, whatever you want to call it. It flies in the face of editorship and control, and is one of the key concepts of Web 2.0. Unfortunately, del.icio.us has overinvested in the crowdsourcing concept. In fact, I’d argue that the key value of del.icio.us is editorship, a value that seems to fly in the face of Web 2.0.

What is del.icio.us other than an editorial tool? Each person that uses del.icio.us is slicing up the web it their own special way. And as millions of people have flocked to del.icio.us, its userbase has grown to include academics, experts, notables and laymen alike. And the slices of the web created by these people are all potentially valuable to someone else.

If you look at my network, you’ll see a list of people who I follow, as well as a list of people who follow me. I follow a small collection of friends, academics and industry experts. You’ll notice that I only follow about 15 people (on average) – the reason I do so is because that’s about all the people I can meaningfully follow in the current state of del.icio.us networks. In my opinion, there’s a lot of work del.icio.us could endeavor to make the editorial aspects of the service (the true long-tail value) more usable. Here’s a start:

  • Make people findable. Currently, del.icio.us offers you a single field that you can use to tell others who you are. You can basically offer a link to your blog or website, that’s it. This is terribly inefficient. Give people fields to describe their interests, occupation, areas of expertise. Make it searchable! If I want to find people who bookmark in the social networking field, let me search for people who describe themselves thusly. I’ll look over their bookmarks and decide if I want to follow them. Don’t make me use Google to find danah boyd’s bookmarks!
  • Enable people browsing. I want to know who is bookmarking or tagging stuff in a way similar to my own. If delicious would compute some rudimentary similarity metrics, I’d be able to find other people that share my interests. I want to know who these people are! I want to follow their bookmarks because doing so makes my life easier. Give me the tools so I can better find people who are like me, or who are popular for a certain topic area, or who are widely followed. People follow danah or Howard Rheingold or Fred Wilson for a reason – so make it easier for people to find these luminaries.
  • Improve the social UI. As I previously mentioned, I can only follow the bookmarks of around 15 people. Any more than that and I can’t keep track of what’s what. I wrote in to Yahoo some months back suggeesting that they set a cookie that would tell me what links are new when I refresh the network page – that’s a start. The social interface needs work – I should be able to follow groups of people, specific tags individuals use, and so on. The UI is a key limitation to the entire social strategy.

As it stands, the fact that del.icio.us overlooks the value of the individual is a key structural hole in the service. Del.icio.us is populated by many brilliant minds, but they are simply too hard to find! Its almost as if everyone on del.icio.us is blogging anonymously. It might have made sense a few years ago, but it doesn’t anymore. Del.icio.us can improve the social aspects of the service without becoming another social network; the idea that adding social to del.icio.us is somehow a negative is completely bunk. Social can be added well, and it will make del.icio.us even more popular. It’s time for del.icio.us to realize the value of editorship.

Hacks / Software — 4 Comments
21
Dec 06

Customizing the Del.icio.us Tagometer in two steps

Note: This may not render properly in a feedreader.

Yay to Del.icio.us and (Les) for the release of the Tagometer product today. I spend way too much time manually looking up the tagclouds of various blog posts, so this is going to be a nice little time saver. I noticed a post over on Stowe’s blog about how the Tagometer isn’t customizable/stylable – so I’ve run a little amateur reverse engineering that will explain how to customize the Tagometer. The only requirement for customizing the Tagometer is a knowledge of CSS – so I’ll assume you’ve got this covered.

The basic idea is you want to locally override the stylesheet. To do this, you’re going to need to embed the relevant section of the stylesheet in your page, and then make your style changes locally. So first, here is a link to the stylesheet. As you can see, there are three classes (delicious-blogbadge-tall, delicious-blogbadge-line and delicious-blogbadge-full). Each of these classes is a different look for the tagometer, so you’ll want to base your tagometer around the look of one of them. Let’s arbitrarily choose delicious-blogbadge-tall. However, since we’re going to be overriding delicious, we’re going to change the name from delicious-blogbadge-tall to delicious-blogbadge-custom.

Step One: Embed the stylesheet in your blog template.

<style type="text/css">

.delicious-blogbadge-custom {
font: 12px arial; border: 2px solid #B1B1B1; width: 190px; text-align: center; position: relative;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .save-to-link {
clear: both; display: block; padding: 0 0 0 12px; margin: 0.5em; text-align: center; color: blue !important;
text-decoration: none;
font-weight: bold;
background: url(http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif) no-repeat 2px 50%;
border: none !important;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .url-link {
text-align: right; display: block; float: right;
color: #999 !important;
text-decoration: none; padding: 4px 6px;
position: absolute; bottom: 0px; right: 0px;
border: none !important;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .url-link .post-count {
background-color: #00f; color: #fff; padding: 0 0.25em 0 0.25em;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .empty-save-to-link {
display: none;
border: none !important;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .empty-save-to-link-label {
display: block; font-size: 85%; text-align: center;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .empty-message {
background-color: #E6E6E6; float: right; font-size: 95%; display: block; font-weight: normal; width: 100%; padding: 2px 0 2px 0;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .post-count-label-before {
display: inline;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .post-count {
display: inline; text-align: center;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .post-count-label-after {
display: inline;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .top-tags-container {
background-color: #E6E6E6; text-align: left; padding: 4px 6px 4px 6px; margin-bottom: 0.75em;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .top-tags-title {
display: inline; font-size: 95%; font-weight: bold;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .top-tags {
display: inline; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-indent: 0;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .top-tags li {
font-size: 95%; display: inline; list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0 0.15em 0.15em 0;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom .top-tags li a {
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
text-decoration: none;
border: none !important;
color: blue !important;
}
.delicious-blogbadge-custom br {
clear: both;
}

</style>

Step Two: Embed the tagometer with the style override

Next, you simply need to place the tagometer code into your blog.

<script type="text/javascript">
if (typeof window.Delicious == "undefined") window.Delicious = {};
Delicious.BLOGBADGE_DEFAULT_CLASS = 'delicious-blogbadge-custom';
</script>
<script src="http://images.del.icio.us/static/js/blogbadge.js"></script>

As you can see, the tagometer has been embedded and is now looking for the locally defined, custom style (delicious-blogbadge-custom) as its default class. You can simply edit that embedded style to change around the look, feel and behavior. Good luck!

Thoughts — No Comments
5
Oct 06

Del.icio.us is already a social network

I’ve been watching some of the reactions to the latest news about del.icio.us, a service that I love and use extensively. According to a post in Read/Write Web, Joshua Schachter and the team will be introducing more social features to del.icio.us. Schachter states:

“In the future I hope to allow our users themselves to come forward within the system. Additionally, I want to help people connect with others within the system, either to people they already know or discovering new people and communities based on interest.”

The post on Read/Write Web is misleadingly titled “Del.icio.us plans to become a social network.” First, the title frames an assumption that del.icio.us is planning to change its focus in some way to be more like our current definitions of social networks (Facebook, Myspace). Joshua’s quote clearly shows that del.icio.us is not planning to change the focus of the service. Second, the title misses the reality that del.icio.us is already a social network, and a very vibrant one at that. Social networks come in many forms – and many times those forms are much more nuanced than “social network websites” where the explicit focus of the service is people (like Facebook, Myspace).

Social networks connect us – something that del.icio.us has been doing since its very inception. The difference here is that the link is the object center of the sociality in the network. It is most useful to compare to Flickr. In Flickr, we browse photographs through a number of paths – tags, groups, pools – and while the photographs are still the center of the network, these social features enable a deeper form of sharing and browsing. The social aspects compliment the core content, rather than replacing it.

I believe the del.icio.us will stick firmly to keeping the link the object center of the network. By adding social features, we’ll have new ways to find content – and we’ll be able to find out more about the people who share content. This will be very valuable to those who use del.icio.us for research and analysis – and it stands to unite communities of practice. When I see 10 other people bookmarking an obscure link about social networks, I want to know more about those people. With lightweight social features, we all stand to gain from our link-centric connections.

Of course, a large part of the backlash against this news is simply because the term “social network” was used. People are tired of YASNS and I can’t blame them. However, in the case of del.icio.us, the service is in very capable hands, and reading into the tea leaves, I see the addition of social features being very useful to the service. Yes, del.icio.us is moving more social, but this is Flickr, not Myspace.

Thoughts — 4 Comments
4
Sep 06

Del.icio.us Spam, Social Technology and Trust

This morning, del.icio.us/popular delivered a link to a new service called my:eego, which I promptly decided to check out. My:eego has a cool looking site, a cool idea, and they look like a new player in the ever-growing identity management space.

As I’ve written, I’ve lately been spending a lot of time exploring tag clouds. I thought it would be cool to see what other identity services the folks who had saved my:eego had bookmarked. I’m usually one of the first to find out about new identity services, so I wanted to know what these in-the-know folks knew that I didn’t!

What I found amazed me. The first 16 folks who had bookmarked my:eego had virtually identical bookmark patterns. In addition to my:eego, these 16 accounts had bookmarked Oddress and the Mecenax Project, two upstart companies. Their accounts contained little else – few other bookmarks if any, no personal information. It was very clear that these 16 accounts were under the control of a single entity, who used them solely to spam links to del.icio.us/popular. Indeed, I had caught a link spammer in the wild.

Examples of link spam:
Link Spammer Link Spammer

(Note, the 16 accounts can be seen by visiting the del.icio.us link for my:eego, but I will list them here: fasthand83, freaking_guit, the_bass, singyourway, nowayicant, sovool, holykitty, excel4all, crazy_1, thevoice82, allaroundyou, morefun78, sofarsogood52, outrageous_kid, paul_k, john1023. Screenshots available upon request.)

Of course, this isn’t the first time that spam has come through del.icio.us/popular – I’ve seen links come through for mortgage lenders and pill sellers that were obviously spam. Del.icio.us is imperfect, as is any social technology – so no big deal. This is, however, the first time I’ve seen del.icio.us spammers put a company’s brand in front of people. Looking at the bookmarks of the 16 accounts, obviously this isn’t the first time it has happened – just the first time I’ve noticed.

It makes you wonder how much content you see coming through the Pop URL services that is actually spam. The clickthroughs you get from being on del.icio.us or digg are enormous – I can personally attest to this fact. A-lists and natural cartels I can deal with, but my faith in these services dips when I see egregious examples of abuse like this.

It is unfortunate that I had to find about my:eego this way. The identity space needs to work constantly to maintain the trust of its users. Those of us who work to help people protect and manage their identity must work very hard to stay on the up-and-up; trust is all we offer our consumers. As Jeff Jarvis points out, the “most valuable and necessary networks of the next economy will be built around trust.”

This should, however, serve as a cautionary tale for all of us who manage brands. Yes, social technology can be gamed, but we believe in social technology because it follows an order that we’re well accustomed to – a natural social order. Our actions online carry real consequence – a lesson we’re learning over and over again. As Tara Hunt points out, honesty and trust are the currency of the new economy – “if you spend it, you can’t replenish it – it’s a valuable, non-renewable resource.”

This morning, some of that currency was spent.

(In the interest of disclosure, please know that I have no way of knowing whether the companies on the spammer’s accounts had anything to do with their brands being spammed to del.icio.us/popular. I make no claims of the sort – other than that spamming did clearly occur. I hope del.icio.us will deal with it appropriately.)

P.S. I’ve started a new tag called “identityspace” (del.icio.us/fstutzman/identityspace) that you can follow to keep up with the growing identity space if you wish.

Update – Del.icio.us has removed the spam accounts. Of note is the fact they removed the accounts within a few short hours, on Labor Day. That is dedication. Go del.icio.us!!

Thoughts — 2 Comments
17
May 06

User-Centric Tagging, or, Let’s Throw Away Namespace

A post on David Weinberger’s blog caught my attention today. In the post, Weinberger addresses some of the problems with tagging to a singular namespace. In slightly human terms, when you tag an item, that item has value in the context of a namespace. For example, my del.icio.us tags are valid in the context of the del.icio.us namespace, David’s blog tags are valid in the Technorati namespace, and so on. Weinberger, who has a healthy distrust of authority, fears what might happen if a particular namespace were to go away.

In the context of this discussion, we can think of a namespace as a website. If you go to del.icio.us/fstutzman/facebook, you get all of the items I’ve tagged with Facebook. In tagging all of these items, I’ve created content that is valuable for myself and del.icio.us. If del.icio.us were to go away, all of that value would be lost. Weinberger’s notion of moving tags to an “open” namespace – one that isn’t under singular control – is a possible solution. However, it doesn’t really feel like a satisfying solution. Opening the namespace just seems to shift the problem around. So what about this for a possible solution: we throw away the namespace.

There are three key facets of a tagging system. They are the user, the tag, and the tagged entity. In a tagging system, I control the user (myself) and the tag, and the tagged entity is simply a reference locator. Now, I could create such a system with pen and paper, or a text file on the desktop – systems like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia.com are just enterprise implementations of this basic concept. Imagine, though, if I were able to extract my tags from del.icio.us in some standardized form; doesn’t it stand to reason I could simply input them to ma.gnolia and keep chugging along? Obviously, there would be technical issues, but at the core, these systems are based on this simple user-tag-entity relationship model.

The notion of user-centricity implies a level of control. User-centric identity lets me control who sees distributed identity facets of my choice. Imagine a user-centric tagging system. In the system I’d have all my tags, reference locators for the tagged entities, and probably a bunch of metadata on the types of tags they are, in what context they occur, and so forth. In this system, I’d have tag “fred”, and there would be two entities tagged fred. The first entity would be a reference to my homepage, and the second entity would be a picture of me on flickr. Both would be tagged fred, the first tag being a url tag, and the second being a photo tag. Imagining that this “tag file” was transportable, I’d be able to stick it into delicious and flickr, the systems would recognize the types of tags, the permissions I’ve set, and display them accordingly.

When we tag, we give tremendous value to websites. The 661 items I’ve tagged in delicious are valuable – they make the site interesting, lively, more rich. They’re also valuable to me – and when del.icio.us goes offline, it hurts. More and more, I’m tagging stuff everywhere; in claimID, in flickr, in citeulike – the list goes on. And all of these tags are doing the same thing – representing a simple user-tag-entity relationship that is value-added by the website. If I were to extract, from each website, this user-tag-entity relationship, it would still have value to me; in fact, it would have a lot of value to me. However, there’s no way for me to do that today.

When we build our tag clouds, we’re just associating records with our identity through a tag. That I’ve got accounts on tagging websites only means I dilute my tagcloud. I’m doing the same process at in each website, but the value isn’t centralized. For an analogy, imagine that you have 5 email accounts on various webmail around the net. People write to you on these 5 different email accounts, but you really would like to have all those messages delivered to your main email account. To do this, you set up a forward, and the mail to the 5 webmails gets sent to your main account. In your mail account you now have a centralized record of your mail – no need to check 5 webmails anymore.

What if you wanted to do this with a tagging system? Sure, you could parse the xml output of the tag systems into a single xml file – but that would take a lot of work because taggers haven’t agreed on a standard (nor do they really want you taking your tags out of their systems). Furthermore, if you wanted to push this centralized tagging file into one of the services, would it work? No. (But if you wanted to do it with your centralized email accounts, that would work because all of those systems read mbox files.) There’s no reason why an analogous situation can’t work for tagging.

Imagine another scenario, where you and 5 friends were tagging items on the web for a project you’re working on. In a system like del.icio.us, you’d have to use an obscure tag to make sure that no one out of your group has co-tagged items. In a user-centric tag system, you’d be able to specify what entities have what tags for what contexts. It’s a fine granularity, but it is very important in the context of collaborative tagging. I keep thinking how tagging fits so well into the YADIS model; that we could control our tags just makes sense as a next-step for standards bodies. I should note there is a standards body exploring tagging – the i-tags project fits quite logically into this concept of user-centricity (though I make no claims to have any mastery of the standards, so I could be understating or just plain wrong).

If we are to make tags truly user-centric, how would we deal with the fact that we’d need tag repositories? We might want to follow the email model – our tags would be kept in stores (just like mailstores) that we could forward as necessary to sites. The real answer, though, seems to be tie-ins to user-centric identity. If I can maintain my tagcloud as part of my identity, a tag provider would broker certain tags-in-context to websites. Flickr could see all my tags, some of my tags, or none of my tags. Flickr’s system could maintain my tag contexts; it could know I was tagging photos for a group; del.icio.us could as well. When I left the site, I’d be able to take my tags with me – sharing them with my group at a (de)centralized location where we agree to meet up. There’s no logical reason why I can’t do such a thing.

Tags are new. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s population isn’t tagging. However, for those of us who have seen the light about the power of folksonomy and tagging, it stands to reason that this space will grow. If we’re to be tagging “things” in multiple locations, doesn’t it stand to reason that one day we’ll realize this is inefficient? I don’t want to check email in 5 different locations; why are tags any different?

Thoughts — 4 Comments
14
May 06

The Web is Fundamentally Ours

That sentence, more or less, ends David Weinberger’s 2002 book Small Pieces Loosely Joined. I read this book a few years ago, and I re-read it recently to see what I might get out of it in the context of Web 2.0. A lot of Small Pieces is about explaining the paradigm-shifting changes caused by the web’s late-nineties explosion; i.e. our new ways of life enabled by the net. Weinberger, interestingly, explains the changes as not really changes after all – the web reveals the selves we want to occupy in a place where the cultural and legal precedents are not yet established.

In a sense, Small Pieces frames Web 2.0 perfectly. The hope we shared during Web 1.0 is still alive; the connected masses want to speak, communicate, and establish their place. Blogging, LiveJournaling, being on MySpace and Facebook, talking with Skype and Gtalk – the promise of the web is very much still alive, and I’d argue our dreams have been wildly exceeded. The Web is our place; and Web 2.0 is about us.

This brings me to a number of posts I’ve come across or been sent recently. Read/Write Web covers it as the 53,651 meme, and has links to all the relevant posts. It is worth a read. To sum, 53,651 are the number of subscribers to Techcrunch.com’s RSS feed. Techcrunch is a fun website that dishes scoops on new Web 2.0 software; to be featured on Techcrunch is to have the captive audience of the web’s tastemakers for a brief moment – something that can jump-start a new web venture. The 53,651 bloggers sum up two points: the traffic spike (and users) you get from this coverage aren’t a “real” audience, and to design for this audience is not to design for the web in general.

During Web 1.0, I worked for a large dot com; I spent the bust working in open source, and now I find myself running a “Web 2.0″ company. It’s a fairly unique perspective. As such, web 2.0 is a unique phenomenon – certainly, a lot of the old faces are back, but there are a lot of new faces – the late-teens/early 20’s set who sat out Web 1.0 from the sidelines. Web 2.0 is a unique hybrid of the large and small; a Google may be mentioned in the same paragraph as a one- or two-person firm from middle America. Designers are torn between Tim O’Reilly’s vision and the need to create catchy, career-defining applications. At the same time, the media holds traffic darlings up as exemplars of the new web; it’s no wonder that the soul searching has begun again in earnest.

For so many of us, Web 2.0 feels so fundamentally right for the reasons Weinberger lays out in Small Pieces. We’ve had a chance to wash away the sins of the past, and now we can celebrate those who design software that answers our needs – a lot of those needs being artifactual needs of living online. We feel fundamentally at ease supporting (financially and otherwise) projects that are truly good ideas; we’ve even got generationally appropriate geek-heroes like Mark Zuckerberg and Joshua Schachter. To the geeks and skeptics, Web 2.0 just does feel right.

The bloggers taking on the 53,651 meme have noticed something, though. The Web 2.0 that is being represented in the blogosphere is becoming a self-referential cycle of non-innovation. Deconstruct a few ideas of Web 2.0 – “social”, “tagging”, “sharing”, “remix” – take them and apply them to a few areas – search, media, bookmarks – and you’ve got the next Web 2.0 application. How many photo and media sharing sites are there? How many vertical search engines are there? How many social networking sites are there? Have we run out of ideas?

No, we haven’t run out of ideas, but the ecosystem that supports Web 2.0 has proven to be more of a sycophant than an actual marketplace of ideas. And since this ecosystem seems to only accept a few notions of Web 2.0, and is more than willing to parrot the thought leaders, we’re seeing a genuine echo-chamber effect. At the same time, the re-introduction of venture capital changes the democratic nature of the blogosphere; the story is no longer a nifty web application doing something genuinely different or useful, but of yet another (social networking/media hosting/rss-enabling) site securing funding. The air of innovation is being sucked out of the room’s conversation.

I think this rightfully scares a lot of us. We bought back into the hype because Web 2.0 was genuinely different. It smelled of grass roots. It smelled egalitarian. And what has that brought us? Valleywag.

It is time to refocus, because there’s a lot to be learned from the Web 2.0 success stories. The sites that are winning in the Web 2.0 market are qualitatively different from their Web 1.0 precursors. The founders of the sites thought smaller, worked to solve real problems, and created usable software that did a few things, and did them well. In tackling a problem area, a few of these sites found breakout success, but many are happy operating within a niche. A big part of Web 2.0 is understanding that you start small – solving one group’s problem and moving on. That we’re not designing macro is a built-in – this is not a point to lament.

That we can be excited about the web again feels good. The web is exciting. The web’s resurgence makes us feel as if the last 10 years of our lives weren’t wasted on a fool’s errand. We bought in to the web, and now we’re being repaid. The web is fundamentally ours, and Weinberger says. However, let us not lose focus; the exemplars of Web 2.0 are great ideas that would have been funded in 2006, 1996 or any time in between. Original, problem-solving thinking is always needed; copycats less so. As someone involved in an “original” venture, I’m gambling on this. For us, the road is long, it requires focus and perseverance. If our ideas are good, the users will come. Our ideas have entered the marketplace of ideas – and it feel so much better to be behind something original than something cloned.

In a sense, Web 2.0 is built on original thought. As long as the innovators keep solving useful problems in usable ways, this movement will go forward. The Web is ours; web 2.0 is about our users’ needs. As long as we can keep that in focus, we’ve got a long and interesting road ahead.