NewGround’s web site, including this blog, is created within a web-based application developed and hosted by a company named Squarespace. This service, in my mind, would best be described as a Web 2.0 Content Management System (CMS). From a business perspective, I believe the Squarespace service offering represents a great value proposition. For $20/month, we get a web development and hosting platform that allows us (non-HTML proficient people) to create, store update/refresh, manage and publish our website, including this blog, I mention this because today I noticed this post on their customer service blog describing the recent launch on the same Squarespace service (and servers) of a much larger and much more heavily trafficked website (of former US House Majority Leader Tom Delay). The contents of that post not only raised my esteem for the Squarespace platform capabilities, but also underscore what a great value proposition it is – for Delay a great website/managed traffic service for $100/month versus several thousand to create the same capability for yourself.
Archive for the ‘Blogs’ Category
Squarespace
Thursday, December 14th, 2006Blogging 2.0
Thursday, February 10th, 2005I believe Fred Wilson nails it in this post..
That was Blogging 1.0. We knew back then that the web was a great platform for personal expression. All three businesses still exist. Two of them exist inside of web portals and About.com apparently is going to get sold soon, apparently to the New York Times Company.
Blogging 1.0 paved the way for Blogging 2.0. I see four fundamental improvements that differentiate Blogging 1.0 from Blogging 2.0.
The first is the notion of the post as the central piece of content. About.com had some of this in its DNA, but Geocities and Tripod did not. Posts drive freshness, frequency, and syndication and make Blogging 2.0 much more exciting than Bloggin 1.0 was.
The second is related to the first. Permalinks have changed the game fundamentally. Linking to content was not really possible until permalinks came along. Now each piece of content is a persistent object that has a unique identifier. This is a huge deal and this concept did not exist in Blogging 1.0.
The third is RSS. Blogging 1.0 was a web experience. Blogging 2.0 is a everywhere experience. Content was a solid in Blogging 1.0 and its a fluid in Blogging 2.0.
The fourth is CPC and contextual ad networks. In Blogging 1.0, the only way to monetize the business was with banners. And brand advertisers were not thrilled with paying high CPMs to advertise on "amateur content". With the arrival of CPC and contextual ad networks, this is no longer the case. Wherever advertisers can get clicks, they’ll place their ads. The result is a huge increase in the potential revenues.
Business Related, for a Change!
Tuesday, November 9th, 2004Time to blog about something else besides politics. EuroTelcoblog opines that Internet and web publishing technologies are evolving in a manner that suggests a new Web-based investment research platform will surface to replace the obviously dysfunctional and outdated one provided by the investment banks.
"the message is pretty clear to me: eventually, and probably sooner than later, someone is going to pull together all these diverse angles on telecom/internet/media/hardware/applications/chips, incorporate some hard financial and technical analysis, and build a cross-sector investment research platform incorporating realtime tools (I mean blogging, IM, video conferencing and collaboration) rather than .pdfs and spam.
There is a business model here, and whether it’s the financial media who seize upon it (Reuters and Bloomberg have the infrastructure and a lot of data, but are trapped in a walled garden mentality and put their journalists in the same sector-coverage silos that the brokers do), or the brokers (I’m skeptical, because I think they tend to be dismissive of alternative points of view, risk-averse, organized in sector and region silos, and anyway are focused on trying to kill one another), or a newcomer (CNET or something that doesn’t currently exist), I feel certain that it is going to happen."
Makes sense to me. Furthermore, if true, it would seem to follow that almost any research-intensive business would be open to similar disruption. Wonder if Gardener, Forrester, Yankee, et al. have thought of that?