Will Boston succeed in a Web 2.0 world?
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To understand the Boston-based high-tech community, it seems you must understand baseball: Bostonians' signature neurosis over being second-best flowers in both arenas. And when financiers and technology executives met recently to talk about creating a climate for Web 2.0 startup success here, they used the language of the operatically accursed, beloved Red Sox, invoking RBI more often than ROI.
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Web applications and online life take center stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
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(InfoWorld) - Web 2.0 has come to search engine optimization. Or rather, search engine optimizers have discovered Web 2.0. That's according to experts who spoke on Monday at the Search Marketing Expo in Seattle. "We all go to Google and Yahoo and MSN and Ask.com and make them work for us, that's our job," said Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, an SEO (search engine optimization) consulting company. "Our job is now extended into this new realm." Fishkin and others said that they're carefully using social networking sites to improve traffic to their customers' sites and build their brands. By attracting more traffic and links, sites can improve their search rankings. Some of the social networking sites Fishkin likes to use are YouTube, Wikipedia, Yelp, MySpace, Flickr, and Technorati. Other sites, such as Digg, Del.icio.us, TechCrunch, and Reddit, can also be used to boost brands and awareness through viral marketing, he said. "Social media marketing is about going out to Web 2.0-style sites and approaching them with the mentality of 'I'm going to contribute to this community,'" Fishkin said. That's an important distinction because marketers that use Web 2.0 sites in ways that counter the community's accepted use can run into trouble. "If you break these rules, users get nasty," said Neil Patel, author of the Pronet Advertising blog andÂ CTO at ACS, a search engine optimization company. "They'll keep pestering you and really ruin your life." For instance, a company that submits lots of its own content, creates multiple accounts in order to vote repeatedly, adds biased content, and asks friends for votes will run afoul of most communities, he said. But Patel also had advice for how marketers make the sites work for them. For instance, he recommends working hard to grow your "friends" list. If a marketer submits content and a lot of people vote on it, that marketer should add those people to their friends list. "Or, if you vote on stories and others vote on the same, they probably have similar interests" and could also be added as friends, he said. Also, becoming a top user on one site can translate onto others. Patel is well known on Digg, and when he goes onto Netscape, people there recognize him and then "show me love," he said. MySpace can also be a good outlet to build a brand and improve a company's online presence, said Cindy Krum, senior SEO analyst at Blue Moon Works. Companies can have MySpace profiles for different brands or products or even for specific people at the company who may be well known. Videos, coupons for free stuff, games, and podcasts are all good content for attracting people to MySpace pages, she said. "It's especially powerful because [social networking sites] allow users to publicly affiliate themselves with a brand in a way that is highly visible to their peer set," she said. While some companies may think that their target customer doesn't fit with the demographic of people using many of these social networking sites, the experts say participating in the sites is still worth it. "It's a jump-off point," said Todd Malicoat, an Internet marketing consultant at Stuntdubl, an SEO consulting company. "It may not be my audience at Digg, but if they like what I have to say, it will get to Techmeme, and then I'll get in front of the demographic I really want to go after." They all agreed that social networking sites can really improve a company's online reputation, but only if used carefully. Patel's ultimate words of wisdom: "Do what is ethical, don't jeopardize your brand, think long term."
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CAMBRIDGE -- A favorite parlor game in Greater Boston technology circles has been guessing which area company will grow up to be the next Google Inc., the Silicon Valley search provider that has become the behemoth of the Internet economy.
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SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 31  /PRNewswire/ -- Social networking website bebo.com is one of the largest and most successful drivers in the evolution of "Web 2.0" services, the second generation of Internet-based services that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.
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As an impressive roster of technology industry celebrities gather at this week&#39;s&#160;Web 2.0 Summit&#160;in San Francisco, all eyes are on emerging opportunities for Internet companies.Experts point to online video, mobile Internet services, social networking, and enterprise adoption of advanced Web technologies as areas that are ripe for further innovation and capitalization.At the event, CEOs, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurs will offer their views, in keynote speeches and panels, on a myriad of topics, both specific to their businesses as well as applicable to the Internet market in general.The lineup of speakers includes CEOs like News Corp.&#39;s Rupert Murdoch, Microsoft&#39;s Steve Ballmer, Facebook&#39;s Mark Zuckerberg, eBay&#39;s Meg Whitman, Viacom&#39;s Philippe Dauman and AT&amp;T&#39;s Randall Stephenson.Still, by now, the term&#160;Web 2.0, once synonymous with bold innovation in online services and applications, &quot;is getting a little tired,&quot; said industry analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence.&quot;It has always been an elusive term, but now it is very mainstream. It&#39;s widely used and the features that were characteristic of those early Web 2.0 companies are now widely adopted,&quot; Sterling said in a phone interview, referring to things like content tagging and sharing, blogs, wikis, and syndicated feeds.While receptive to the possibility that new, fresh ideas may come out of the conference, Sterling wonders how much the economic uncertainty in the U.S. is affecting the spirit of innovation so emblematic of the Web 2.0 era.On the other hand, Tim Draper, founder and managing director of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, sees big opportunities in the application of Web 2.0 technologies in large organizations, particularly in areas like hosted software, project management and communication, and networking.&quot;All the applications that have driven the enterprise over the last client server generation will be renewed with Web 2.0 applications that will replace or enhance those applications. Big opportunities [lie] here,&quot; he said in an e-mail interview.Opportunities also exist in the adaptation of online services to mobile devices, as demand for accessing these services from cell phones continues growing strongly, he said.Draper is also confident that players in the online video space will find business models that will satisfy the video creators, artists, and the providers of online video platforms, like Google&#39;s YouTube. &quot;Entrepreneurs are honing in on models that work,&quot; he said.Meanwhile, Andrew Parker, an associate analyst at venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, has great faith in online services that, with permission, monitor users&#39; activities and, based on that data, personalize their offerings.&quot;I call this set of services &#39;implicit Web services&#39; because they involve implicit data collection instead of explicit data entry,&quot; he said in an e-mail interview. &quot;I think we&#39;ll see more valuable implicit web services going forward.&quot;Some big vendors are taking advantage of the conference&#39;s popularity to announce new products and partnerships. Among them are:-- Hewlett-Packard, as part of its Print 2.0 initiative to improve printing from Web sites, will announce new relationships with large Web publishers, like Disney.com, Microsoft&#39;s Windows Live Spaces social network and blogging service, Yahoo&#39;s Flickr photo sharing site, and the popular Graffiti application for Facebook.--&#160;MySpace and Skype are partnering&#160;to let MySpace members make free voice calls via the MySpace instant messaging service. The new service, called MySpace IM with Skype, will integrate MySpace&#39;s IM service with Skype&#39;s Internet voice communications services, and will be generally available in November.-- Fast Search &amp; Transfer will unveil Fast Active Mobile, a mobile search and personal recommendations platform that wireless carriers can implement to offer these services to their customers. Fast Active Mobile will build a profile for every wireless subscriber, taking into account their searches, product views, purchases and other activities and information.-- NewsGator Technologies, an enterprise RSS vendor, will announce Social Sites, an add-on to its RSS Enterprise Server, designed to enhance Microsoft&#39;s Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 by making it easier to discover what colleagues within the organization are doing.The Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.
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The debate over your social capital -- your personal data, how you access it and who owns it -- will be a central topic at the Web 2.0 Summit, the invitation-only web services conference which runs through Friday in San Francisco.
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Nine traps you can easily fall into when you're starting a Web 2.0 company
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Web applications are hot--and either destined to be the next big thing on the Web or the next bubble.
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Loaded with Web 2.0 applications, the N810 could help usher in location-aware computing.
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Telecoms companies are failing to make the most of the growing  popularity of the online information-sharing services of "Web 2.0",  according to new research 'Web re-loaded:  Driving convergence in the real world.' by  global consultancy Arthur D. Little.
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As the internet cafÃ© celebrates its 10th birthday, what future does it face as net access at home becomes an everyday reality for more and more people?
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The Internet is the wave of the future, the technology that changes everything. Just donât try to get a job in it.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.  - LinkedIn is drawing notice as perhaps the next big thing in the so-called Web 2.0 space of Internet social and professional networking companies.
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Never a dull moment in local these days as I learn of new sites almost daily. I spoke this morning with Ben Saren, CEO of Boston-based Citysquares, another &#8220;hyperlocal&#8221; site focused on building out neighborhood listings and community. Right now the site only covers the Boston area but Saren envisions expansion and scaling.  We discussed all [...]
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At the Web 2.0 Summit, the troubled Internet giant was everywhere. But what was it trying to say?
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While many industry and internet specialists agree that a genuine convergence between technology and content for mobile has been achieved, many questions still remain on what exactly are the opportunities for local merchants and search marketers. Is now the time for search marketers to enter mobile and bring their clients with them?