Content Matters

There’s a lot of experimentation going on right now, applying a “social spin” to new and existing technologies to generate new uses.  Frank Gruber has an interesting post on a new company, Waxxi, which is launching an interactive podcasting capability. 

The basic concept is that Waxxi will host a scheduled interactive podcasting event, where participants can call in and participate.  The audio portion will be augmented by an IM stream as well.

Waxxi’s first interactive podcast will occur May 20, 2006 at 10:30 am PST / 1:30 EST.  The podcast will feature Robert Scoble (Microsoft’s best known blogger) and consultant Shel Israel, co-authors of the business blogging book Naked Conversations.  You can register for the podcast at the Waxxi site.

As Michael Arrington points out, there could be a few hiccups in this podcast, depending upon the number of participants and the level and methods of moderation.

That being said, this could be an interesting vehicle for content providers and conference companies.  Today’s webinars tend to be uni-directional – just a talking head clicking through PowerPoint slides.  If you can leverage your community of users to create an interactive dialog, that could be very compelling.  And, since the end results are captured as a podcast, you can develop a collection of interesting audio content for your users.

Dave Winer has launched a new application called Share Your OPML.
The OPML file is the file that stores the RSS feeds that you read. 

Share Your OPML is sort of like a Last.fm for RSS feeds.  The goal is to compile a database of what people are reading, as well as the patterns within the individual taxonomies, then use pattern matching to suggest other feeds.  Like Last.fm, you can easily see other users who have similar interests to yours - just click on the "Subscriptions Like Mine" link.

There's also a top 100 ranking (right now, TechCrunch is #1 by a fairly wide margin).  Share Your OPML is built under a Creative Commons license, so you can expect others to build onto the framework with new functionality.

To participate, just upload your OPML file.  Most RSS feedreaders have a menu item that lets you export your OPML file with a single click.  So, take a minute, upload your file and discover some new and interesting feeds.

From the team at Digg and via Steve Rubel, you can preview a look at Google Health here.

Notice the refine results options, focused on health-related topics in their taxonomy.

Steve Goldstein has an interesting post today on the AlacraBlog: You Are What You Publish.
In it, he postulates how students, being early adopters of tools like MySpace and FaceBook, will soon utilize other social networking apps such as wetpaint, jotspot or Socialtext. 
These students, as they move into the workforce will drive increasing usage of community-based social sofware in the workplace.
I echo Steve's conclusion that if you're looking for ways to spur viral adoption of these tools, the education market is a good place to focus. 
Meanwhile, if you have kids today, take a few minutes to learn more about what they're doing on these social software sites.  It might just help you understand where your own business will be headed in the next few years.

According to USA Today's Kevin Maney, Google may be set to announce a new service, Google Health, next Wednesday at the annual Google Press Day.

Google Health would be a vertical search engine covering the healthcare industry.  It would make a lot of sense.  After Finance (and sex, of course), health information is among the most frequently searched for information on the web.

Vertical search is certainly a concept whose time has come.  While users can try to use tagging and technology to try to filter and organize results, searching a predefined set of sites is a clean way to ensure you get the results you need.  For information such as health care data, limiting the sites to those from "trusted sources" can be even more critical.

It will be interesting to see how Google Health compares to editorially-driven sites focused on aggregating health care.  Sites such as WebMD, Healthline and other publishers are compelling and offer community as well as information.  It will be interesting to see how Google develops an appealing solution for consumer healthcare information.

The Times and many other outlets had interesting articles this morning on Net Neutrality aka efforts to thwart AT&T and other carriers and ISPs from trying to change the Internet playing field.
But, none say it better than Fred Wilson in his post today: A VC: I Am Pro Choice.
It's scary to think that the same Congress who thought the solution to all of our energy dependency woes was a $100 voter payoff will now be assessing a complex issue such as this.  Hopefully, Google, Microsoft, and all the other companies who have their livelihood at risk will weigh in and shut this ridiculous effort down.

In the meantime, take a minute and contact your Senators and Representatives and tell them to support Byron Dorgan and Olympia Snowe's net neutrality bill.

Tagging technology provider Nstein announced today that they had raised an additional $10M ($Cdn) in debt financing.

While this will, no doubt, provide another year or two of life support for Nstein, for me it reaffirms my disappointment that the semantic tagging sector still has yet to take hold.  Nstein announced revenues of $9M Canadian, with a net loss of ($6.7M) Cdn and an EBITDA loss of ($3.1M) Cdn.  Reviewing Nstein's press releases for the past 6 months, only one was related to a sale; the others were simply marketing hype or biz dev deals with no customer involved. 

More than five years after they burst onto the scene, the major players in the tagging and text analytics market have been unable to gain a strong foothold.  Together, Inxight, ClearForest and Nstein have revenues of less than $30M and none are near profitable.  And these three are among the survivors.  Numerous other companies including Lexiquest, WhizBang! Labs and Lingomotors went belly up or were acquired at bargain basement prices.

Despite all the hype, the past five years have shown these technologies remain niche tools with their primary success in the publishing market (semi-automating manual tagging) and federal government (intelligence).  Early adopters in the pharmaceutical, manufacturing and other markets have found the technology too complex with too limited an ROI.

I believe there is still an opportunity for this technology to take hold.  However, none of the companies has the size nor stature to make it happen.  While some larger players have gotten involved in this space (IBM, SAS, SPSS and others), they view unstructured data as tangential and their sales force will not focus on it.  I think the necessary step towards success would be a roll-up of the remaining big three (Inxight, ClearForest and, perhaps, Nstein or Attensity).  A $30M company with focused management could establish a presence in one or two key markets.  Instead, today each Company ends up chasing too few sales opportunities and takes on projects which they are ill-suited for, just because it's too hard to say no to revenue at their current size.

Semantic tagging and text analytics still holds much promise.  Hopefully, these companies will make the needed strategic decisions before they all run out of cash.