Just a quick post to point you to some great exploratory work performed by Roger Jennings with GoogleBase and atom bulk uploads, reported on his blog in the post - Google Base and atom 0.3 bulk uploads.

Thanks Roger great post with some excellent trouble shooting, particularly with the g:labels issue..

Technorati Tags: Atom, Google, GoogleBase

AdBase - what the hell is that?

Well I made it up (Al here), it's what you get when you take AdSense and GoogleBase and mash them up in a hypothetical manner. But lets move forward into the future (not to far though) and imagine what AdBase could be like.

I would first assume that the two pieces had been fused and an API is provided using Atom, not because I like it or anything political, it's just a good candidate given Google's history.

Now the scenario is I have a web application/service/site whatever, its revenue is generated primarily from advertising just like before, but now I use AdBase rather than AdSense (I have just switched). In this case the site is just a blog with very high traffic (It's my dream I can do this ok!) that pays quite well (It could be any web 2.0 thing really).

But it is not paying well enough for me, google's AdSense was pretty cool , but the ads where not really geared toward my audience (too generic), so my ad revenue per participant/reader/suscriber was very low.

Now however I am using AdBase, my blog is part of a new generation of blogging software (web 2.0 platform) using GoogleBase as its backend store (via atom) . GoogleBase backend gives me all sorts of metadata benefits to my blog such as : search, posts by category (calculated by google's AI), Googles GB ontologies, social ratings on subject matter my posts cover with all related posts from others in the blogoshpere and beyond, how hot my post is (in a meme/attention sense), attention stats, analytics... the list goes on. But now with AdBase I can be very specific about my contextual advertising, I can specify that a lot of my readers are geeky and or love web 2.0 stuff (Actually google already knows this, as it knows them..). I can hand tags etc to AdBase with each post that make my advertising much more contextual than it could ever be before, I can also use my Attention credits to buy a little more audience if I think it's a prime post and use the higher paying ads.

In fact I believe pretty soon the contextual sensitivity of the advertising will actually approach my own editorial creativity, in that it is actually finding other posts and input from other bloggers (as i research my post with google's tools) to actually insert into my posts! Sure they are paying the new micropayment currency of AdCents (for their AdWords inclusion), but this just comes out of their own AdCents Wallets or is that AdSense Wallets...

I think you get the picture .. thoughts?

Just to show I can remix further :- GoogleSense or BaseSense are other possibilities ;)

Sorry back down to earth again now.... must stop thing about G

Technorati Tags: AdBase, AdSense, API, Folknology, Google, memes, web2.0

Yeah yeah I know it was leaked before, but now it's official and some of my questions can be answered by looking through the documentation. This in turn generates more questions of course but thats to be expected. Here are some of my initial conversations.

Also this pretty much confirms what Adam Bosworth hinted at the last MySQL conference.

Joe Gregorio has been Dreaming of an atom store for some time now, with the advent of GoogleBase that dream may be becoming a reality, but maybe not quite as expected (see GB's atom support). In fact Google seems to have created their own Taxonomy which can be used with Atom 0.3. Although Mike Arrington see this as little more than a web version of DBase, I believe this is very significant on a number of fronts.

1) This DBase supports RSS and Atom, it will also feature a widely implemented Taxonomy.
2) It's contents could appear in the search results (given the caveats described)
3) This is a social DBase that will end up supporting social effects vial labels/tags or whatever google will call them, along with the Attention data that google collects.

I still have a lot of questions and really need to play with it some more, but the kind of things I am thinking are:

1) Can I just point it to current RSS feeds from Ebay and have it republish (I might need to add a filter).
2) Will google support more advanced atom api features such as api based search. If so one could build all sorts of finding classifying and grouping front ends to it as services.
3) Can one create a atom store interface in javascript for Google Base ? that would be cool because then ajax apis might not need a backend server!!

I am sure there are much more profound effects of this like how one dovetails one's blogs or web sites into it etc.. but I will leave this for another post.

Well google have finally done it, they have integrated their Urchin web analytics acquisition with their Adwords program. You can nor sign up for free analytics that integrates with the adwords account, about time to. Don't know why they didn't do this before. Not good for the other analytics players out there mind you.

Hi everyone

Sorry for the outage over the weekend, I am still not 100% clear on what was causing the issue. From the logs it appears that there was an error between our blogging engine and the database (PostgreSQL - http://www.postgresql.org/). A lot of changes were made to the live server code throughout last week to add in MeasureMap support and fix issues with the comments. I believe these live changes may have resulted in an accumulated errors with the Database pooling handler. Restarting the server engine solved it immediately , Ho hum..

I also notice from MeasureMap over the weekend that my traffic is spreading out from just Europe to stateside, which is very cool, thank you for listening in folks..

Technorati Tags: blogs, Folknology, MeasureMap, oops, tracking

I figured it was about time for a more off the trodden path post. I have been tackling some fairly complex models and what ifs around Folknology's up and coming projects, particularly WebacUs. You see WebacUs has a really import social aspect to it. It is at heart social software. Although I understand it is such I have difficulty in imagining what the social effects will be if it becomes successful (I am hoping that their will be a modicum of interest here of course).

Heres how I think a some of the positive effects play out in social software. First it happens at different levels or scales. here is a low level example :

Your coding (or concentrating on something complex) and you hit a brick wall, you just can't figure out what is wrong, you try everything in vein it's really frustrating. Eventually you stop what your doing and go off and do something else, this is often, get up and possible talk to someone else, listen to something or just break of for a period of time long enough to forget the issue. You then return and bingo the solution is obvious, it's like magic. But actually it isn't because what happened before was you got stuck into a domain rut, deep deep down in a big hole that you couldn't see out of. One of the easiest ways out of such holes (apart from a long break) is random, just think of something else at random or do something random. In fact the best sort of random is someone else not involved with a new task or idea for you, people are really good at random, they are rarely in the same domain rut.

It's the same sort of thing at greater scales with many eyes looking at a complex problem space or subject matter - an open source project, a wiki , the blogosphere or WebacUs, Sure WebacUs is numerical, actually that doesn't really limit the problem space, it can be used in so many unimaginable ways that I couldn't possibly conceive. But everyone between them could, that the benefit of social software it solve complex multidimensional problems naturally in a distributed fashion, thats the key.

Thus my solution is simple, I must let go of it, just get it out there and let you folks have your wicked way with it sooner rather than later, cast aside my embarrassment about it's quality and immaturity and just let random take it's higgledy piggledy course, so that is what I will be doing next week.............

I really like LinkPut yes sure it's another search site, but we at Folknology like this one. Why ?

1. Anyone can add comments to the search results, I think thats really cool, as has been quoted, it's like having a mini wiki for each url.
2. They have some great RSS feeds for a bunch of useful predetermined URL searches, covering tags, user comments, activity etc.. Look out for Folknology utilising these feeds soon...
3. Delicious support
4. I really like Daniel Goodwin's attitude, have a read on ehub for an interview with him about LinkPut.

Check it out you will probably find even more features.

Technorati Tags: eHub, LinkPut, web2.0, Yahoo

Folknology is now using MeasureMap's service to track this blog. I am looking forward to see how it works out.

First impressions are good in terms of how the tracking information is shown, nice and simple.

Setting it up is however much more difficult for us as we have built our own custom blogging engine (which we integrate with our web apps). We have just implemented their javascript tracking and are now testing, it took about 30 minutes in total excluding the tests. We will keep you up to date as it progresses.

Sorry if this caused any minor glitches in the meantime.

Technorati Tags: Folknology, MeasureMap, tracking

Dan Bricklin is working on a new product called wikiCalc - Starting November 9, 2005. You can find out about wikiCalc and even try it here. (Just in case you have been under a rock for the last 30 years and you don't know who Dan is check out his blog - we are not worthy...) . It would be naive to not acknowledge how import Dan is given his background in numerical computing innovation (Spreadsheets anyone), thus given WebacUs focus on the numeric web, seeing Dans name popping up again with a new product is just Awesome.

This tool we think will fit in nicely with our planned WebacUs services (Aggregator etc..), I am trying to contact Dan about it now to ensure that the products will play nicely together. We are hoping to get at least an early alpha version out of the gate next week which will allow you to start playing and experimenting with it.

We are also hoping to get the ancillary WebacUs features up such as the blog and web site. We are considering product reviews/explorations around these new classes of web products and their developing markets. I already have several projects I have found to write about in more detail along with our own services etc. We already have the server setup and we just need to configure it and connect the domain up.

more soon I promise...

Technorati Tags: numericalAggregator, WebaCus, WikiCalc

Bill Gates' Birthday Memo : Well done Dave for the getting the exclusive following scoble's headsup earlier, I too prefer to have my coverage through the blogosphere rather than the big media.

It certainly makes good reading, Ozzie is laying it down to the folks fairly clearly. I would add that they need a lot more focus on the grass roots as well as the top down approach. i.e. revolution from the inside out rather than just top down. here is some of the things I personally would like to see change wise :

1) Developers, developers, developers - remember that speech ? Microsoft need to capture those developers, right now their stuff isn't cool and certainly isn't attractive to start-ups and the new generation of developers. I know this because I am working with these folks. We don't use Microsoft dev tools at all.

One of the problems I think is Microsoft's monolithic approach to developers. They are building these huge ivory towered platforms like ".net" . Guess what we are more interested in Ruby or Groovy etc.., why because they are simple agile, open and very very cool. Microsoft has nothing to compete with this category! But here is a clue how they can. Go straight to the grass roots of these developer communities and say hi we want to start using your great stuff, we realise it's better than what we have developed and we want our internal developers to use the best most agile tools for our new move forward embracing web 2.0 and open standards. Also whilst we are here is there anyway we can help? Can we add developers to your cause we don't want to "embrace and extend" we just want to contribute and make you even more successful (Maybe they might even suggest ports to the CLR).

If you can do that and succeed you will be well on your way to encouraging the next generation developers back into working with you.

2) Seperate your developers and tools from your operating system, don't weigh us down with that nonsense, the new platform is the internet and it's open standards. Don't punish developers that use Macs, linux or even BSD, encourage them, many of these are the Alpha geeks for christ sake, you need these guys on your side!

3) Stop reinventing standards such as your new gadgets. As Robert's ICC's are a fantastic idea, but only if they work in all web pages not just with Windows Live platform, duh.. you need these to be used by every developer , use open standards don't re-invent the wheel.

4) This is the toughest (real disruptive, google would never figure this), I think you need to spin of the Windows and office Apps divisions. If you don't I'm afraid that they will act like a damper on your plans, they will impose a massive drag on your vision to move forward. The new Microsoft needs to be Operating system agnostic, it's new platform is the internet, it's new apps are web pages/apps/gadgets and ICC's. Make a clean break separate the different interests or suffer the consequences.

There is probably a lot more to add to this list what do you think ?

Technorati Tags: API, birthdaymemo, developers, memo, Microsoft, Scobleizer, web2.0, windowslive

I recently started experimenting with adSense, we at Folknology are working on a couple of projects that may heavily leaverage adSense or rather the customers information around it.

One of our key target markets is likely to be web based businessses using adSense and we need to unlock some of the information collected by google on behalf of the customer.

Unfortunately Google's adSense does not offer an API, unlike Google's adWords which offers a comprehensive one. The information we need access to is the financial information (accounts) like earnings on clicks, hits etc... We may be able to Hack something as it does offer custom reports and even CSV downloads, although there is still the logging on issues etc.. What we really need is to be able to log onto to our customers accounts (with their permission) and collect earnings information through a regular REST based or SOAP based API. requests have been put in in their user groups/forums but with little response as of yet.

I also notice there are quite a few people requesting other API like features for adSense like being able to control or suggest keywords etc.. all very interesting so if your listening Google get to it!! And if your competing with google here's an opportunity for you..

PS I think Scoble touched on some of this with his disruption posts

Report card : Google could do better here, they are the market leader after all, is an API asking to much? does Yahoo offer anything better, what is Microsoft's offering going to be like ?

Technorati Tags: AdSense, API, Google, Microsoft, web2.0, Yahoo

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Scobleizer, service

Technorati Tags: googledesktop, live, windowslive

Nick Carr's Amorality (Ross Mayfield): Cast aside the anti-hype rhetoric, and keep in mind it is an argument not of fact or policy, but value, and you will find Nicolas Carr’s post on the amorality of Web 2.0 has a salient point — that...

Yes, the economics favor the bottom-up. This allows the creation of an alternative we have never had before. A choice. But media selection theory holds that old media simply doesn’t die. Carr’s very desire to retain professional media as his selection is one consumer’s proof point.

Technorati Tags: blogs, Folknology, web2.0

The sandbox is about people!: ...in part. (In my original definition of the sandbox, I said the sandbox was comprised of information, people, and tools, and hinged on a philosophy of letting go.)... Before recorded media, participation in the arts was more egalitarian -- people sat around and played music for and with one another...

Technorati Tags: folk, Folknology, memes, web2.0

Onsite Mashups... (Officially Supported 3rd Party Website Plugins): Here's an idea. Right now all/most of the existing mashups run on external sites.

Technorati Tags: Folknology, mashup, microformats, remix, web2.0

Technorati Tags: blogs, Folknology, memes, microbrand

Consumption is Communication (Sometimes): Kids can [spend $50 a month on ringtones](http://www.reemer.com/archives/2005/10/08/web_20_conversation_with_five_teenagers/) because their ringtones are communication. They're a fashion statement just like the brand of jeans they wear. Their ringtones are real world avatars: a ringtone says "this is what I am" to their friends and the girls they like. __Consumption is communication__ (sometimes).

It is folk art. We're seeing a revival of folk art and folk culture after a brief interlude of mass media domination. Folk art is usually about remixing traditional materials: musical themes, stories, plays, etc.

Technorati Tags: folk, Folknology, mashup, memes, remix, ringtones

1. Blogs don't belong in the margin, they belong in the main results. There's so much confusion about what is and isn't a blog, why bother even trying to make a distinction. BusinessWeek has a blog, but it's not the same thing as Scripting News, right? Or is it? Where should BW's blog be? Why should it be in a different place from their editorial stuff? Don't expect the line to get more solid in the future, it's going the other way, getting more blurry all the time.

Technorati Tags: blogsearch, blogs, puppy, Yahoo, yahoo!