THE GOGO OHS

I'm both a Salon premium subscriber and a Cory Doctorow fan, so was very pleasantly surprised that he's serializing his new novel (you know, like Charles Dickens...) Themepunks there. I put the first chapter on my Treo and read it while rocking my baby to sleep the other night. The second chapter came out today, and the first chapter has me excited to read more. Here's to Cory's eventual bathtub of money.

Seems like the novel-as-serial is getting some traction, or has hit some sort of memeplosion or something, since I just came accross a new blogified novel, hackoff.com -- a novel told serially through a blog. So far it's a bit contrived. We'll see. Or maybe we won't -- I don't think that one is going to make into the 'ol news aggergator.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 04:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tim Berners Lee predicted it, and it seems like it's finally starting to happen: "web 2.0" is ushering in the beginnings of the semantic web.  Your app needs to expose a grammar for other applications to talk with it, or you might as well be a client side application; even there, on the client, applications are starting to expose APIs (Google SideBar anyone?) in order to leverage new features and functionality beyond what the original product developer conceived of.

It just makes good business sense. First, it's a way to build credibility with the Mavens (a la Gladwell's "Tipping Point"); if you're lucky enough to attract a Maven to your web 2.0 property, a Maven would be looking for this kind of extensible platform (think flickr.com, upcoming.org, backpack.com, etc...). Second, it's a way to attract buzz: imagine someone building a craigslist mashup with your application -- what would that look like? Would that be buzzworthy? Third: if build your own app on top of your apis, then you'll be eating your own dog food, which is a really important aspect of building successful applications.

Posted by Joe Rosenblum at 03:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)