The value of the Eqentia aggregation is that it facilitates following this event from a single point of entry without the daunting impact of managing the social media system. This isn’t so different from the experience that Robert Scoble describes well in his post ““To create or curate? That is the Apple question” where he decided to stay at home to watch, curate and follow the Apple launch, instead of being physically at the event. Scoble uses a number of specially assembled social media accounts and relies on his vast network which will feed him all kinds of information.

Unfortunately, not everyone has the luxury (or the time) to set-up the type of sensory network that Scoble has. That’s where the Eqentia platform steps in, and serves that same purpose for the busy professional who just wants to consume the news, rather than be consumed by it.

This is the link to the World Economic Forum channel, powered by Eqentia.

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, Robert Scoble, Semantic Portal, World Economic Forum

Every 2-3 months, the future of RSS gets debated feverously and simultaneously on a few blogs. The spark that fuels the fire has always been Twitter and an intricately related subject: the future of RSS readers.

Last week, Richard MacManus kicked off another debate that I commented on. And Ross Mayfield wrote an insightful post “The More Than RSS Market” in response to Jeff Nolan’s “There is No RSS Market”.

When reading the comments on these blogs, I noticed that several people were still confusing RSS (the transport/publish method) with RSS Readers (the human readable method). And to add to the confusion, Twitter is simultaneously a reader, a publishing platform and has an RSS out.

Yes, there is a problem with RSS readers. Aside from Feedly and Google Reader, RSS readers have not innovated in useful ways. So, I went to my iPhone and downloaded a number of new RSS readers and topical streamers that claimed to contain innovation. My assessment: #fail.

Fact is that most RSS Readers don’t offer a very compelling user experience, unless you’re a dedicated researcher:

1) Feed management is time-consuming, especially when you’re into the hundreds of feeds.
2) RSS readers have very poor filtering and curation capabilities (although Google Reader has social filtering now).
3) RSS readers offer mediocre ways to search or archive content.
4) You cannot re-publish / social share content from RSS readers (except for Google Reader & Feedly).

That said, the future of RSS is bright because what matters now is “what you do with RSS” from a processing point of view, not just as a collection exercise. Hint: that’s what we have been focused on doing at Eqentia where we continuously process and analyze content from thousands of RSS feeds.

Amidst this optimism, there’s a potential threat from Twitter. For some users, Twitter has replaced reading RSS via an RSS reader. But this trend is offset by another segment of users who are flocking to topical readers where RSS is often part of the plumbing.

Will Twitter-published content totally usurp RSS-published content one day? That’s a difficult question to answer, although some publishing platforms are directly pushing content to Twitter without using RSS, e.g. WordPress and Tumblr recently. It would be tragic if websites published to Twitter only and not to RSS, but as long as they are publishing to both,- RSS is safe.

Comparing RSS to Twitter, RSS transports more content than Twitter, but Twitter contains attention-data. Both RSS and Twitter need to go to the source URL to extract more meaning about the content, but users need more than just re-tweet data to get a 360 view on social media engagement. Problem is- today, not all content is surfaced on Twitter. Therefore Twitter is a complementary channel, not a replacement to the Web. Plus, it’s still quite a bit messy and noisy.

To follow the future of RSS in a very comprehensive manner, this Eqentia portal has an archive of 2,000 articles on that topic,- all done via RSS processing, and without letting the user lift a finger on RSS (also on Twitter here).

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Technorati Tags: Google Reader, RSS, Syndication and Feeds, Twitter

I was shocked to read that Twitter’s architecture is still centralized, after reading TC’s post where they advocate that it should be. I agree that it’s time for Twitter to take a page from Google’s massively decentralized architecture and to start showing us they can scale ad nauseam, just like Google. It’s a necessity.

Twitter is becoming a utility. I’ve already hinted at that in a previous blog post. Twitter will become the first, and largest Global Utility Company. Imagine if there was one global ISP company collecting our Internet fees centrally. The result would be a huge corporation.

Let’s face it. Twitter has failed to innovate beyond providing the basic service, and they will never be able to make a difference given the plethora of applications already here. They are distracting themselves by introducing overlapping features such as Lists, whereas they should be focused on strengthening their infrastructure, further enhancing their APIs, and figuring out a way to make money so they can continue to finance the growth of their infrastructure.

They can start to make money tomorrow by introducing an enterprise Twitter server version (as TC suggested). The analogy with email servers is perfect and right on. It follows the analogy of Virtual Private Networks and corporate Intranets. Some Twitter messages will be private, and others public, and the whole will flow seamlessly across firewalls. We should start talking about the “Public Twitter” and “Private Twitter”, just as we did of the public Internet and private Intranet. Twitter’s value lies in the critical mass of its users. A “Twitter inside” will boost the number of corporate users, and therefore Twitter’s overall value.

I’ve also argued they should limit the # of tweets per day or charge if a user wants to post more than 75-100 tweets per day. That would bracket businesses in the paid segment and wouldn’t take anything away, because 99% of users tweet less than 10/day. This would also curb the usage of some abusers and spammers, something that will raise the overall quality of Tweets.

I am betting on these two concepts and will predict they will happen: 1) Twitter- the Global Utility Company, 2) the Private Twitter vs. Public Twitter.

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Technorati Tags: Business Models, Google, Twitter

As an RSS and news junkie, I’ve been on cloud nine in the past 48 hours because of the excitement surrounding Dave Winer’s rssCloud implementation. In an email this morning, Fred Wilson asked me to explain why this was so special and important. And Dave Winer who has already gone to great length at taking us with him on his journey to unravel this feature also asked me if I could explain my understanding of the impact of this capability.

So, let me try to simply answer the “So what?” of the rssCloud.

# 1 It’s a new feature.
First, it’s something new for RSS. Although this hook was originally developed and used in 2001 (I used it in 2003 in my Radio and Manila sites), it was only available on a limited basis. With its current re-incarnation, it is bringing along the excitement that accompanies new technology features- and that’s usually a great impetus for increased momentum in market expansion.

The recent barrage of online discussions over RSS’s future had placed some doubts or cloudiness over its evolution, in the eyes of some users, not because of anything of its own making, but partly because some people got too focused on novelties (e.g. FriendFeed, Twitter, Lifestreaming, Real-Time status updates), and RSS had lost the perception of being new or having latched on to “real-time” or “social media”.

Today, the perception that RSS was stale or outdated is gone.
rssCloud is that new shiny object that is now crowning RSS. Enjoy it.

# 2 It’s faster, but that’s only the beginning
The end-result is that rssCloud will allow an RSS feed to propagate faster, from the “creators” to the “consumers” of content. Previously, if you wrote a post, it wouldn’t be visible to another Reader unless the Reader or user decided the ping your RSS URL address (or via Feedburner) in order to see if there was a new post. With rssCloud, the feed will notify the “cloud” which in turn updates right away anyone who is a subscriber to that RSS feed. So, it’s like a constant push of content, so that content will always be there, waiting to be read or published. Let’s hold this thought until point #4 below.

# 3 Getting on-board: it’s a two-way street
Let’s be realistic. The fact that rssCloud is available now doesn’t make all content available in real-time right away. The feature has to be implemented on one side by the Blogging and Authoring platforms (e.g. Wordpress, TypePad, Posterous, CMS’s, etc.); and it has to be implemented by the “receiving end”, i.e. the Readers and Aggregators (e.g. Google Reader, Eqentia, Zemanta, etc.). So, it’s a 2-way street. Therefore, it will take some time to be fully adopted, but that’s OK. Note that there’s a somewhat equivalent method using Google’s PubSubhubbub (which Google Reader is already supporting). So, until everybody is either on rssCloud or PubSubhubbub, RSS will have 2 speeds: regular and pubsubhubbub/rssCloud. Again, that’s OK, as long as the trend is moving in the right direction.

#4 Instant publishing for the masses: more than 140 characters at a time
Twitter showed us the excitement of instant gratification via seeing something we just typed 30 seconds ago instantly appear for everyone around the world to see. If I were to explain Twitter using an RSS paradigm, I would say it’s like a web-based window into an RSS feed. You enter something and it gets registered into an RSS feed, but I would have to stop there. I couldn’t say it would propagate to various publishing destinations automatically, and I couldn’t say that it was real-time. Now, with rssCloud, I can say that.

Dave Winer hinted at what this means by outlining 2 use cases that Twitter desktop publishers could tackle in order to push the envelope further and build on rssCloud. Dave suggested that a Twitter desktop or mobile app should allow the user to intermesh rssCloud-enabled feeds into the Twitter mix. That’s a brilliant proposition. In essence, this would break open the Twitter real-time paradigm and make room for RSS to also be a catalyst for real-time.

Imagine if you could enter longer than 140 character posts via Twitter client, and let that content be transported via rssCloud to the end of the world, the same way as a Twitter post does today. Bingo.

You’re probably thinking about where this is leading- well, this might cannibalize a part of the Twitter streams that were going to Twitter just to beat the real-time crunch. That’s OK. To each content, its own mechanism, whether it’s tweeted or cloudified will not be the issue.

So basically, we’ll have another distributed “Instant publish” mechanism (via RSS) across users/publishers, in addition to Tweets. Great.

5# Make room for innovation as a way forward
rssCloud is good from a perception point of view as much as from a technical implementation point of view. I think that rssCloud has in essence validated Google’s PubHubSubbub approach, and as a result of having 2 non-competing methods now, they can both prosper valiantly, in the name of Real Time.

My company, Eqentia has been all about innovating in and around RSS, from Day 1. We touch close to 14,000 RSS feeds. Daily, hourly, minute by minute, we’re manipulating, indexing, analyzing, semanticizing, publishing and re-propagating content that came to us via RSS; and we produce highly customized content streams via public or private portals.

And it’s great to be in an RSS-based business. Now, we will support rssCloud on both the receiving and sending ends (we receive RSS, and we send processed, customized RSS).

To showcase this, and to show you that the Future of RSS is bright, we have quickly put together a news mega-aggregator on that topic. You can read all about the Future of RSS here, or follow us on Twitter at @rssfuture, or sign-up and get a daily email on anything that has touched RSS while you were sleeping.

I’m glad that we can now shift this discussion away from RSS’s survivability, and onward towards the real innovation in and around RSS. This isn’t about ‘my feed is faster than yours’, but rather about end-user solutions that solve real needs.

Let knowledge and ideas move freely, speedily and with abundance, thanks to RSS.

Technorati Tags: Aggregation, Dave Winer, Google Reader, RSS

Today, we have publicly launched (Beta). Although the Eqentia service has been available for a few months as we worked with early customers, we weren’t as public as we wanted to be. Now we are.

Richard MacManus has written a launch post about Eqentia in ReadWriteWeb where we are compared to two highly respected companies: OpenCalais and Evri. But we are different.

One of our differentiations is that we have focused on providing a ready-to-use, out-of-the-box experience by serving the needs of a business user who is not interested in tinkering with the technology or manually managing feeds, while requiring deep and rich content at the same time. These users will not be satisfied with general-purpose news aggregators, and will be missing a lot of content if they rely entirely on Twitter feeds.

Another point is that we have we have tried to “dumb down” the implementation of a specific customization via business-level dialogs and text-based configurators that insulate the user from the technology and hopefully speed up the personalization process.

In essence, we have 3 products:
1) Out-of-the-box portals with access to 14 topic streams (and growing). Registered users can customize their email preferences. Widgets and RSS are available by request for any portal or any of the 4,000 Connections.
2) Personalized portals. These can be configured either for an individual, a community or an enterprise. And they can be private or public.
3) Enterprise. We make our platform available via a SaaS, and provide users with admin capabilities to customize and configure several environments according to their different internal departmental needs.

Here are some use cases. If these resonate with your needs, please send me an email.

• Rapid creation of topic portals or semantically enhanced widgets for publishers who can choose from existing topics or create new ones. Content is pre-semanticized and governed by your own taxonomy.
• Companies that want to track very unique and specific subjects for competitive or business development reasons.
• Power users who want to aggregate news around their interests into a private or public portal.
• Large companies that want to disseminate organized news intelligence for their employees across distinct groups or market segments
• PR agencies who want to provide customized news tracking for their clients without the pains of daily manual curation or edits.

This market segment is still defining itself, as users are trying things and getting educated on the value of semantically-enhanced news streams.

It’s a great time to be in the field of providing knowledge to users. Our mission is to help in improving the productivity of knowledge consumption.

Key question is: how much time do you want to spend customizing news versus consuming it?

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Technorati Tags: Aggregator, Launch, Semantic Web, Twitter

Following the technology Venture Capital space, what VC’s say and how their firms rank is fascinating, especially for me: I’m starting the process for an early stage round of finance.

Recently, two respectable rankings caught my attention. First Larry Cheng at Fidelity Ventures published the Global VC Blog Directory, as ranked by the number of Google Reader subscribers. A few weeks later, TechCrunch published The Top 100 Networked Venture Capitalists, a list influenced by the firm’s network, “defined as being made up of all the other venture firms who co-invested with it in funding rounds”.

Both lists offered insights, but I did not see an immediate correlation. Only 21 companies appeared on both lists. Whereas the Google Reader list had a definite social media bias, the TechCrunch list was anchored in the realities of actual deals.

So, I decided to merge the two lists by re-computing a normalized score from the Google Reader and combining both scores. That, in essence should provide a balanced view that takes into account both the online social footprint and deal-based networking clout.

Going forward, I believe the wind is favoring the social media footprint and online social networking. A VC company with a strong online social network should be able to translate that power into an increased deal flow and more quality deals.

Here are the results of the combined ranking. And if you’d like to follow all these companies blogs, their deals, and the Tech VC industry as a whole, we’ve set-up an Eqentia TechVC vertical news environment to do that. Expect about 100-120 new stories per day, and you can personalize email alerts per semantic Connection for any VC, company, issue or relevant topic. On Twitter, it’s @techvcnews.

Rankings, based on combined, normalized score:

1. Union Square Ventures (7608)
2. Draper Fisher Jurvetson (6981)
3. First Round Capital (6417)
4. Benchmark Capital (5587)
5. Marc Andreesen (4416)
6. Bessemer Venture Parners (4228)
7. Charles River Ventures (4140)
8. Lightspeed Venture Partners (3585)
9. Index Ventures (3537)
10. Mayfield Fund (3325)
11. Sigma Partners (3255)
12. SAP Ventures (2966)
13. Venrock (2942)
14. Fidelity Ventures (2865)
15. Atlas Ventures (2359)
16. Mohr Davidow Ventures (2300)
17. Spark Capital (2171)
18. Polaris Venture Partners (1960)
19. Sutter Hill Ventures (1813)
20. Battery Ventures (1519)
21. Bluerun Ventures (1473)

Do you think this provides the right balanced view?
Which is more important: social media networking or deal-based networking?
Does one drive the other and are they equally synergistic?

Footnote on method:
. The Google Reader score was normalized down to match the TechCrunch score. For e.g. Guy Kawasaki’s score of 17,555 was divided by 2.61 to match 6,721 given to Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the #1 VC on TechCrunch’s list. All other scores were normalized by the same factor, then both scores were added
. Whereas a firm had more than 1 blogger or blog that appeared on Cheng’s list, their combined score was utilized because that represents the overall social media footprint for that firm.

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Technorati Tags: Social Media, Social Networking, Venture Capital

On the heels of the very insightful and brilliant Time magazine essay written by Steven B Johnson How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live, it has become evident that Twitter is ushering an unprecedented wave of innovation, not seen since the early days of the Internet. The more Twitter is written about by mainstream media, the better it is for Twitter. This Time article reminded me of another seminal piece in the Economist back in 1995 when they characterized the Internet’s impact perhaps not a big as the automobile’s invention, but certainly more important than the printing press or the telegraph.

We’re seeing an amazing number and stunning variety of applications being built on top of Twitter, all of which are leaving Twitter’s shortcomings in the dust. Day after day, we hear of a new theme, new business, new sector, new country, new person, new organization, anything about anything- being moved to, created or re-created on Twitter.

The Internet is being re-configured, re-wired, and re-spun. And we, as users are re-learning it, in large due to Twitter, not Facebook. Browsing websites or having vibrant followers on Facebook will still get you very far, but knowing which Twitter apps to juggle will definitely give you an edge.

Having been part of the early Internet days (reference my book Opening Digital Markets, 1996), I’m seeing that we’re asking the same questions about Twitter as we did about the Internet during 1996 and 1997. What is our Twitter strategy? How do we manage our brand on the Twitter? How do we make money on Twitter? However, today the answers are different. And as with the Internet, the big break came when e-business was seen as the killer app of the Internet and big business started to take to it. With Twitter, it’s probably the social effect that was a turning point, but we still don’t know if something more powerful might supercede it.

And to the critics that ask what does Twitter want to be when it grows-up, the answer is whatever it wants to be. In 1996, I said that the Internet had five multiple identities: it’s a network, a medium, a market, a transaction platform and an applications development platform. And further, organizations had to master all of them in order to realize the synergistic effect of the combined benefits. The same applies to Twitter today. Twitter is all of the above, plus perhaps a bit more.

There is no doubt in my mind that the greatest and most useful applications and Twitter-aha moments are not going to come from Twitter. We should stop expecting anything more from Twitter than to run the Twitter infrastructure. Period.

Look at some of the most basic apps underlying Twitter. The more you gravitate towards them, the further away you are from Twitter. You start to forget it’s Twitter, because Twitter is doing its job.

1) Real-time search is already in the hands of a dozen choices, e.g. twazzup, Bit.ly search, OneRiot, Topsy
2) App directories are blossoming, e.g. WeFollow, twtBiz
3) Twitter desktops are flourishing, e.g. TweeDeck, Seesmic
4) Twitter browsing experiences are improving, e.g. TweetLinx, Tweetree
5) New apps that weren’t possible before, e.g. twtBizCard, Twendz

So, Twitter should remain as a utility, but a damn important one. They are the hydro’s and the telco’s when telco’s used to be cash cows.

And how does Twitter make money? They can start charging for their API’s to those that are building the best apps which use this data. Doing so will weed out the stupid apps that aren’t useful or valuable. The trick is when to start doing that. Too early, and it will stifle innovation. And done broadly, it will paint the good with the bad. I’m an advocate of a certain Twitter app maturity scale of sort. Those apps that are maturing and providing value to their end-users should be taxed by Twitter. Those are still emerging and carving their niches should be given a longer reign to continue on that path.

Twitter is the tail that stopped wagging the dog. Now, it’s the dog itself.

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Technorati Tags: Business Models, Social Media, Twitter

For Eqentia, this bodes well, as I picked-up on 2 key trends from the report that are squarely validating our approach to the market. First, the aspect that favours starting with lightweight data models. Second, using the social element for sharing and evolving these taxonomies.

We strongly believe that these two approaches are key catalysts for popularizing and expanding the reach of the Semantic Web, and we will soon unveil more details around these features.

Technorati Tags: Linked Data, Semantic Web, Taxonomies

About two months ago, I started a Toronto Semantic Web Meetup group, and today we have 43 members. Our first meeting will focus on networking and a bit of “Semantics 101”, presented by Greg Boutin, Founding Partner of Growthroute Ventures. Greg blogs at Semantics Incorporated and is a regular Member of the monthly Semantic Web Gang podcast. The meeting is being held on Wednesday May 27th at 6PM at the offices of Xtreme Labs on 67 Yonge Street, 16th floor. That’s the top floor of that building, and we have access to the terrace which offers a view of Lake Ontario (and the traffic on the QEW).

This meetup is also part of other global meetups. Marco Neuman who runs the NY and San Francisco Semantic Web meetups as well as the excellent Wiki that supports all these groups has been a great champion and catalyst for this community. He’s also running the “Meetup of Meetups” in San Jose next month during the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference.

Echoing Fabien Tiburce’s (another Semantic Web Toronto supporter who started the LinkedIn group on same topic) post a few days ago, “Evangelists, The Semantic Web Needs You”, this is a call to action to all Greater Toronto Area users, developers, evangelists, early adopters, entrepreneurs, hackers and venture capitalists who are interested in the emerging Semantic Web and its potential evolution.

We’d like to hear from you. Even better, we’d like to meet you! Join us next Wednesday.

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Technorati Tags: Greater Toronto Area, Meetup, New York, Semantic Web