The post links to a PDF document written by three Google researchers, and covers a subject I've been experimenting with a lot lately - the semantic extraction of data.

The document is a nice read though probably too technical for most, and it brings up the difficulty of implementation as one of the barriers for taking the next step towards structured data on the web. The argument is that most small content publishers do not posses the knowledge and expertise required to publish their content in a semantically meaningful way.

It seems to me that there's an easy solution for that - and that is to embed semantic awareness in the publishing tools themselves. Most people publish content through one of several high-profile content management systems (WordPress, Moveable type, Blogger, etc), meaning it is possible to reach a very large segment of content publishers from relatively few integration points.

Expecting people to learn about and implement web semantics is unreasonable, as the document suggests. Delegating that responsibility to the authoring tools by enhancing the backend logic and the interface, is very much doable. Need to add a calender event? allow the interface to add it in the proper microformat. Want to affect the styling of your content? allow the interface to give several semantically significant options (headers, paragraphs etc.). Most of those options are available today, yet they are not obvious enough that they are used in a consistent manner.

HTML 5 is around the corner, with more semantically relevant tags (such as header, footer, navigation, sections). Integrating support for it in those content management systems is a good first step towards more semantically accessible content.

Going even further with this, content management systems could provide more structured data on demand - or wait, they are already doing this! XML feeds, anyone? seems to me that if you poke a little beneath the surface you find that there is actually a lot of structure in modern online content. What's lacking is uniformity, but even so the number of dominant standards is not great.

Who will be "the next Google" who can examine this structure and extract meta-meaning that can provide value? you can be certain some bright minds are already on the case.

A web browser built on the webkit engine (same as Safari), Chrome offers a simple UI and extensive support for web technologies. Having used it for a couple of days now, it is striking to me how obvious it is that Google is a web company - in bold contrast to another software giant currently pushing for their next-gen browser.

There is a lot to like about Chrome: It is open-source. The tab oriented UI is a great innovation. The simple UI allows for an impressively large work area in the browser. It comes with a built in DOM inspector and Javascript debugger (almost rivaling Firebug for functionality). The tab/process manager is an awesome feature (though a possible source of contention). And most importantly - aside from minor inconsistencies from the standards (shared by Safari), all web sites render perfectly under Chrome.

I was somehow surprised though it only reaches a score of 79 on the acid3 test, since it is based on an engine that already scored a perfect 100 (webkit). For comparison, Firefox 3.0.1 achieves a score of 71 (though with less graphical glitches), IE7 achieves a measly score of 13 in about triple the time, and IE8 beta 2 just barely beats that with a very low 21.

It is my personal hope that Chrome steals enough market share from Microsoft to help push out older IE versions, thus catapulting the web forward. This has been a fantastic move by Google, and the online world is watching to see how the market will respond. Is a Google OS next on the agenda?

Some very well known and successful online entities can be considered as such - Wikipedia in which users contribute knowledge, Digg in which users help others find interesting articles by voting and facebook which is the current golden standard for social networking (in which user generated content - UGC - is a given).

However, those sites are not thought of as having strong business models. Wikipedia, of course, is free. Digg and facebook rely on advertising, which is the fallback business model on the web - conversion is relatively low and you can only count on decent revenue when you reach the size of the aforementioned sites.

As can be guessed from the title of this article, I would like to discuss a couple of sites / services that use UGC as the basis for a viable business model:

Case 1: Threadless

Threadless is an online t-shirt retailer with a twist - the concepts for the t-shirts are submitted by users, voted on by the community and finally hand picked by the staff. A winning design will be printed and sold through the site, and its creator wins a nice sum of 2,500$. That's the basic premise - there are several variations such as contests and reprints, but at its base - its a marketplace for ideas.

Threadless is already an established online brand, existing since 2000. It proves that you can crowd source creativity for fresh product ideas in a way that is both beneficial for the product distributor and the creative contributor. Threadless builds on this premise and succeeds because of their excellent blend of branding, community integration and good service. I have personally purchased at threadless multiple times and I've had nothing but satisfaction and enjoyment from the service.

Threadless currently has revenue in excess of 30$ million, and income of 10$ million annually. Not bad for a startup funded with a 1000$ seed (earned in an online t-shirt content, no less).

Case 2: crowdSPRING

I had just recently discovered crowdSPRING, an online service that mates graphical design talent with design related projects. The concept is to try to improve traditional design projects proceedings for both sides:

- Project requesting parties (called buyers) are guaranteed to get at least 25 different concepts for their needs (be it a logo, website design, print and others), with a money-back guarantee.

- Graphical designers (called creatives) are given a global stage to show their work and generate income. Also, since buyers pay in advance, the winning piece is guaranteed to receive payment - there is no scenario in which a buyer can say he doesn't like anything and walk away.

- crowdSPRING itself takes a small commission on top of the project award money. This is the main business model for the site.

What drives the service is the interaction between buyers and creatives. Creating a project and watching the concepts improve as both sides learn more about the requirements through iteration and communication is a very interesting experience.

We've recently created a logo design project on crowdSPRING, and the reaction has been phenomenal. Though we have a couple of designers on board at Octabox, we felt we needed a fresh approach as we have been too deeply involved for a long time now. There are still 9 days (out of 14) till the project ends, and we already have an incredible amount of entries (over 300).

The process itself was worth the price of admission - through the interaction with the many contributors, we achieved some insights on what we want in a logo and a design direction for our new website.

crowdSPRING is not yet an established entity like Threadless, but it is well on its way to becoming one. Another example of how to crowd source creativity in a win-win situation for all involved.

Web 2.0 as a viable business model

Those two sites are just a small sample of many successful sites / services built on UGC as the driving force. I believe this market is still mainly untapped - there are plenty of possibilities to be explored. Despite that the basic premise is always the same:

- Create a community around a product / service concept
- Allow / encourage the talent within the community to offer their skills to the rest of the community
- Facilitate the interaction between the talent and the community, while trying to interfere as little as possible

What other successful web2.0 business models have you seen?

Comet is an event driven communication scheme with between a web-browser and a web-server. In the normal flow of an http request, a web server can not initiate communications with the client (the web browser) - it can only respond to requests. Comet declares a reversal of roles, in which the server can notify the client whenever new data is available. This technique is very useful in a constantly changing environment such as stock prices or online messaging (chat).

The term was coined by Alex Russell of Dojo fame, in a blog piece a little more than two years ago. It has since gained minor traction in the development community, with several projects actively promoting it and educating on it. It never reached AJAX-levels in popularity though, mainly due to it being somewhat difficult to implement and use.

Enter HTML 5. The working draft of the HTML 5 specifications declares server-sent DOM events. This API allows for native implementation of Comet techniques without using elaborate client-server setups which will finally make Comet accessible enough to be considered mainstream. The specs go even further, and declare an interface for bidirectional communications between client and server and client and client (P2P). Such an interface would render current AJAX techniques absolute, as the XHR object would no longer be required to poll the server for data on demand. The peer-to-peer options offer an incredible opportunity to multi-user environment by removing the server as the middle-man (and the bottleneck).

Comet Daily gives an overview of this API and the WebSockets API in a recent piece. Michael Carter mentions the new network API and how it will affect future client-server communication in some detail and even shows some mock code of ridiculously simple setup for server-listening events.

So yeah, HTML 5 is definitely something to watch for. Hopefully the draft will be finalized as soon as possible so browser vendors could start pushing out implementations and make us developers very happy.

I will now try to predict the future: Using several statistical sources, I have plotted the usage patterns of the three major browsers (IE6, IE7 and Firefox) and extrapolated the timespan in which IE6 will become redundant.

I used three sources for my data:

• w3Counter, a hosted web-analytics service (no relation to the w3c)
• w3 Schools, a veteran repository of web development tutorials
• The Counter, a website analytics tool

As could be expected, the statistics provided by each site differ quite substantially, however since I am looking only for the trends of browser usage in theory it shouldn't have a big impact on the results.

I plotted all three browsers usage percentage against their timeline, calculated the rate in which IE6 usage is decreasing and used some basic algebra to derive the timespan for IE6 theoretical oblivion.

The graphs:

That R-squared box you see in the graphs is the correlation coefficient for the linear approximation on the usage pattern of IE6. It stands for how well does the data represent a linear pattern, with values closer to 1 mean a better fit. Luckily, for all three graphs I got pretty good matches, with data from "The Counter" bottoms out at a 0.96 match.

As a side note, I found the data from "The Counter" to be the least consitent and reliable - all of its 2008 data is smoothed out over a period of 150 days, providing much less detail in the numbers, its precision level is low (no decimal point) and if you look at the IE7 data you will see a strange bump in the beginning of 2007 not seen in other sources. Pretty strange.

Continuing with the analysis - since I got pretty good fit for my linear approximations (pretty good for this blog post anyway. I won't be submitting any of this to Scientific American), I will use a linear equation to extraploate future usage values.

Formulating:

- Usage percentage is a function a of time (t)

- We approximate usage to a linear function

- We want to know the time at which IE6 usage will drop to 1%

- Some minor formula rearrangements give us what we need

The time we would want to count from would be the present day, so we will assign the last value for each graph as usage at t=0. The slope coeffcient 'a' is the slope extracted from the graphs. This gives us for each data-set the amount of months from now that IE6 usage will drop to 1 percent:

As I've mentioned previously, the data from "The Counter" looked suspicious so it's not surprising that the results it produced are skewed from the others.

How relevant are those numbers - The approximations I performed here are very basic and contain no error treatment. It also does not account for outside factors, such as the release of new browsers and operating systems. We have however an indicator for the life expectancy of IE6 - it has somewhere between 2 to 2.5 years of major shelf life.

Don't throw away your IE6 browser just yet

(The excel file I used is provided for your discretion here.)

Direct usage statistics are hard to ascertain with great precision, but they revolve around 4%-6% of the total Internet population, which is not much. More feeds are being consumed indirectly by aggregation sites, such as my yahoo and iGoogle (as this Yahoo! paper shows), which shows that there is market ready to consume more feeds.

So why feed usage isn't more widespread?

1. Lack of awareness
Most people are simply unaware of the benefits of using feeds. When asked about what are feeds, only 12% of the Internet public were aware of its meaning. I will admit myself to be one of the ignorant up until not too long ago (about 6 months). For me that is mind boggling - I consider myself an extremely technical user and I love the Internet. How was I not aware of how useful this technology is?

2. Confusing terminology
What is a feed? syndication? aggregators? to someone hearing those terms for the first time it can be very discouraging. There is alternative terminology such as subscriptions and readers which is more similar to natural language but it isn't used enough to explain the technology.

3. Competing standards
Atom and RSS are competing standards for web syndication. Both are offering basically the same solution, so why haven't they merged yet? (actually there are reasons, but not very good ones). Most sites now offer both, which only add to the confusion as the names of the different formats are sometimes use interchangeably with the term Feed.

Content syndication is just waiting to erupt. Someone needs to take initiative and promote this technology to the masses:

1. Create awareness
The same way open standards such as OpenID made a splash some time ago, content syndication needs visibility. And in contrast to open standards, web syndication is useful now.

2. Improve description
Hand in hand in creating visibility, a low-tech explanation of the benefits of syndication should be drafted and used liberally. This will go a long way to break the barriers of adoption.

3. Unify standards
One to rule them all as they say. Since this is an open standard and certainly not for profit, the only real consideration would be backwards compatibility. Declare RSS officially as the standby for compatibility and Atom as the active standard for future development.

4. Do not call the technology by its standards name!
Stop using RSS or Atom feeds as the name for the subscription feature. People are much more likely to hit 'Subscribe' than 'Join my RSS feeds'...

P.S.
Syndication always reminds me of the PC classic 'Syndicate' in which rival clans fight for world domination in a futuristic setting using cyborg agents. Good times...

• Formal support for the CANVAS drawing API. Already implemented to various degrees in some browsers (excluding the usual suspect), the CANVAS drawing API is very useful for creating web graphics and interactions programmatically. (I recently wrote about a very interesting port of the Processing language using the Canvas element)
• Native drag-and-drop API (finally!)
• Formal API for editing (contentEditable/designMode). Gone are the days of 150kb+ WYSIWYG javascript libraries.
• An offline storage API
• Browser history API (for fixing broken behavior with modern techniques, ie AJAX)
• Server notifications API (standardizing a technique known as COMET).
• New attributes such as a global 'href' allowing every element to potentially be a hyperlink.

This partial list has enough improvements to make any sane web-developer happy. HTML is definitely heading in the right direction to retain its dominant position as the markup language for the web (its biggest advantage over XHTML being a much more user friendly error handling).

Now it remains to be seen how long it takes for this proposal to be finalized and implemented.

Despite Google's mantra of 'do no evil', there have been past incidents in which dubious discretion was used. Google can cripple websites and companies that depend on them by cutting off their oxygen and removing them from their index. If even their biggest competitor can't make a stand, who will?

I used to be a Google fan. I think their search engine algorithm was a true breakthrough and their continuing efforts to improve it are very much appreciated. They also created one of the flagships of modern web-applications - Gmail, which changed a lot of perceptions of what can be done with web technologies to provide an alternative for desktop applications. Lately though innovations have been scarce, unless they are related to search monetization.

Google today is the industry standard for search, a slow moving enterprise entity where once they were an innovative start-up with an idealistic mantra. It's now up to as of yet unformed start-up to be the next market disruptor and show us how the next generation of web search should be. If history is any indication, it is only a matter of time.

(Now I just hope I don't get removed from the Google index by the powers that be )

When I sense that a client might be open for developing his idea beyond merely technical implementation, I usually try to involve my partner Adam. Adam is the business and marketing guru at Octabox, and as much as I'd like to think I have plenty to contribute on the side of web business development, when it comes to marketing it's very obvious that I'm no match for Adam. He has a very unique approach to web concepts, and often sees business and marketing 'angles' that others miss, making him a perfect complement to my straightforward and best-practices approach.

Today we had a meeting with just that type of client. A person I met at a previous entrepreneurship event, who has a technical background in algorithms but not much in the web environment has approached me to develop a concept he came up for a web start-up. When he initially approached me, he was doing so on the basis of my reputation as a web developer and not looking for any business development or marketing ideas. I got Adam involved however, and at today's meeting we managed to do a little of everything - technical guidance, business development, marketing strategy - you name it.

They say speakers have "on" and "off" days. Well today Adam had a very "on" day, as he gave his own version of the "make a meaning" speech, daring our client to think outside the box and understand that doing a web startup is different to the traditional avenues he has worked in before. I was barely holding my self from giving him a standing ovation at the end of his rhetorics, as he really made an inspiring and insightful speech delivering a message that was heard loud and clear. He definitely gave our client much to think about, and provided a showcase of what we could contribute as more than just implementors.

Our client now has more questions to answer to himself than he did before he came to to the meeting, but in a good way. We could definitely see a long-term collaboration evolving, as we have with several other web start-ups.

It was good day for being a web entrepreuner, and also for remembering the good karma I have for being surrounded by extremely talented individuals (my other partner is Adam's equivalent in graphic design and concept. Our team is definitely very complete skill wise).

In the end, you are only as good as the people you work with.