Dave says:

“Web 2.0 is nothing more than an aftermarket for Google.”

Amen.

Dave predicts that we’ll know when the web 2.0 bubble bursts when Google’s stock crashes.

This will happen when the ad market stutters again. Google is the infrastructure that routes ad revenue to many startups, but the crash comes when the ad market stops growing at the same pace. My guess is that this will be half way through next year when consumer spending drops triggered by the real estate market crash.

Imagine what all those business plans look like with their eCPMs halved.

If the most stupid thing ever said about the Internet was Ted Stevens’ infamous “the Internet is a series of Tubes” speech, Andy Kessler’s pieces about the Internet as a series of pipes must rank amongst the most intelligent.

If you can create a ‘virtual pipe’ between the service and the customer, where the the customer cannot exit, and you can hold on to it, and broaden your base - you win.

But there are all sorts of pipes, and nothing special about the material the pipe is made of, what matters is where is links to and from, in the multi dimensional phase space that defines a market.

Unlike the days of mainframe and frame relay, there is nothing special about the technology of the pipe itself - there are lots of pipes, a road network rather than a railroad system, and you can try building them anywhere.

In many ways this is a decription of a natural ecosystem where there is no need for ‘intelligently designed’ infrastructure, but self emergent relationships based upon environmental niches.

Go read Kessler - its worth it.

Andy Kessler

I’m currently looking at a project based on self replicating content. Closest thing out there is Jeremy Rushton’s awesome TiddlyWiki, however it seems that PHP can self-write with no problems.

[PHP] Self-overwriting Scripts - GameDev.Net Discussion Forums

This thing written by Brian Donovan a couple of years ago, is very interesting.

Its basically like tinyurl, except that the links are to any point in a web page, regardless of whether there are any (named anchor) links created by the author.

I remember talking about this with Evan a while back.

Brian Donovan’s Ahoy

The only channel I ever watch on TV is PBS. I ditched Cable, because the only channel I ever watched was HBO. I like the Tivo interface, but there is no way that I’m paying a rental fee or premium for TV listings, as a very occasional viewer. I also don’t have a land line telephone.

The Toshiba PVR with DVD burner, below is ideal - it gets free listings from TV guide, directly from within the channel 13 signal, so you buy it and stick a co-ax cable into it and you’re done. No signup with any service and no phone connection required. Works with Cable but not Dish services, if you are into paying a mortgage for TV. Cheap: $320

Toshiba | RD-XS35: Multi-Drive DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive

Its like watching a real life version of the Risk board game.

Google is telling the other players, ‘I won’t attack you for the next ten moves’ as it prepares to roll the dice and line up all its armies next to Microsoft who will also do the same.

Because a Microsoft/Google battle royal is kind of innevitable, Google wants to avoid any other trouble.

Its caving on personal media with an Apple board seat for Google’s CEO and holding off a PayPal and listings assault on Ebay, with a ‘partnership’.

Both companies will lose in the medium term, in the long run one will survive.

Remember what happened to Novell, IBM, Commadore?

I think Google will win in ‘three rounds’, but nothing is certain. Its a game of dice , after all.

Microsoft: ‘We Are Watching Google’

Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete

In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank.

Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy.

In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy’s real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure).

This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax ‘page flakes’ but there is no advertising system for Ajax.

To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C’s.

Blogging showed that ITEMS were more important than PAGES, from a semantic perspective. The rise of Video and audio is also changing this view for obvious reasons. This now extends to an application perspective.

Here’s a lazyweb idea - an ‘item view’ stats package, with an ad serving system directly geared around Ajax driven sites.

In a sense this could seem hopelessly naiive - to try and re-educate advertisers around a new paradigm. But its not advertisers that need re-educated its techies. Advertisers measure IMPRESSIONS - and most page refreshes on sites like Myspace are not impressions, if the content remains the same, when you request some functionality, like an ‘email this’ form.

The sometimes delusional cycle of Web 2.0 companies and VCs looking at Alexa rankings, does often acknowledge that Alexa is a bit skewed, as if its out by perhaps 50%.

Well its a boat load skewed, Alexa is actually only about 5% accurate if one uses data from Gawker.

Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact - I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn’t, Deadspin, Alexa’s accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore.

Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month
Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month

According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin’s 10,000 ranking.

Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15 even within the top 10,000 sites where the accuracy is higher.

In short, Alexa is almost useless for websites outside of the top 1000, and no sensible investment or reporting should be influenced by it.

Website Statistics and Traffic Graphs comparing www.valleywag.com and www.deadspin.com

Amazon’s EC2 is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in a while - If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss.

EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2. From there on you pay only for CPU time and bandwidth.

This is the grid computing that Oracle has been bullshitting about, and chenges the landscape for hosting - allowing instant, on-demand scaleability and no upfront hardware costs, or per unit rackspace fees.

I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the ‘launch’ problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks.

I can’t help thinking that Amazons naming is a bit bland or too clever - Mechanical Turk, EC2, S3.

Perhaps they should buy anywhere.com off me for EC2.

Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services

Has Digg Been Hijacked, by FUD

Today a largely factually based story with referenced quotes and run by the Associated Press, which was also reported in most US newspapers is flagged by Digg as potentially Inacurate.

I’ve noticed recently that a large number of political stories, particularly left of center ones, get slapped with the ‘Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inacurate” - Because enough people who want to deliberately create uncertainty in light of the truth, say so.

This is the way wikipedia does it, and to be honest, with no other option for wikipedia, it means that Wikipedia is largely useless and hopelessly banal for contentious political issues.

But news is not like Wikipedia - users are directly linking to a source not editing it. If people on the political fringes moan, that does not necessarily mean that the source is innacurate.

The Wikipedia reputation system does not work on Digg.

digg - “Bush Misled America” - John McCain