TechScape

Blogging's taking over the world, right? Read a lot of media coverage, and you might think that every man, woman and stick insect in the Western world has a blog on the go, if not several. But that's not true. Is your mum blogging? Your grandad? Your technophobe best mate? Quite possibly not.Six Apart wants to change that. The company is already powering a good chunk of the blogosphere, seeing as it owns the LiveJournal, TypePad and Movable Type blogging platforms. And now it's beta-launched Vox, a blogging platform that throws in MySpace-esque social networking elements.

You have a virtual 'neighbourhood' of friends and family, and can restrict your posts to be read by some or all of them, or the wider Vox community. It also ties in neatly with the likes of Flickr and YouTube so you can import your own or other people's content.

"Join our happy hivemind," invites the homepage of Cambrian House.
"We're growing a collective to help decide the fate of sticky ideas.
Resistance is - oh, you know."This is open-source software,
Jim, but not as we know it. It's got a sense of humour, for a start. Cambrian House is the company behind 'crowdsourcing'. In a nutshell, this involves soliciting cool software ideas, getting its community to vote on which are the best, then getting a collective of developers to actually build them, before sharing out any profits.

So far, Cambrian House has launched two market tests, with another to follow that's the coolest Web 2.0 idea Tech Digest has heard in a long time. More of that later. I talked to the company's MD Michael J. Sikorsky to find out more.
"We share the rewards, but also share the risk," says Sikorsky. "If a project does well,
people will be phenomenally overpaid, but if it doesn't do well,
they'll be phenomenally underpaid!"

Relationships, eh? When they start, it's about establishing a connection and getting on well. But at some point, they always become more about money. Which is an only slightly contrived way of introducing Weblo, a new virtual world where the networking is more financial than social.Members can buy and sell property and virtual domain names, as well as become the online publicity manager for a celebrity of their choice. All this based on real-world assets too, from buildings to celebs, while the domain names are the sames as ones owned out on the 'real' Web.

Confused? Founder Rocky Mirza says the service is already a roaring success, having launched last week. I asked him what Weblo is aiming to do, why he thinks it'll be a success, and whether there are legal issues around creating and selling virtual versions of real-world places and celebrities.

When researching my post last week on mobile social networking, I canvassed several industry bigwigs to get their views on how well the likes of MySpace and Bebo would translate to mobile. Helpfully, Gmail chose to file the response from Angel Gambino, VP of commercial strategy and digital media at MTV Networks UK & Ireland, in the spam folder. It's not as if she mentioned viagra or offered to transfer a huge sum of money from a deposed dicator into my account either.Anyway, her answers are interesting, so I wanted to put them up. MTV recently launched its own user-generated service, MTV Flux, so the company has a direct interest in the evolution of social networking, including its transition to mobile. Read on to see what Angel had to say.

How well will sites like MySpace, Bebo etc transfer to mobile?

Social networking is primarily about communicating, so social networking translates well to mobile. Communication is still the primary use of mobile handsets. Mobile is also a highly personal screen, so the personalisation and self-expression common to many social networking sites is a natural fit with mobile as well. Whether these brands can maintain their current growth or can translate their growth trajectory in mobile is an entirely different matter.

The simplicity of Bebo is a great driver of its success. However, people who use Bebo are very young. Our research indicates that audiences of their demographic prefer free services. Bebo is free for now, but unless they are effective at working with mobile network operators and aggregators to create better bundled lower tariff services this demographic may not be as attracted to Bebo on mobile as it may be viewed as too expensive.

idiomag is the point where the Web 2.0 and print publishing worlds collide. It describes itself as "a virtual magazine personalised to your interests", which you might think was just a website. Instead, it really is a virtual magazine, complete with proper page-turning, adverts and a sticky bit on the front where the free CD fell off. Oh alright, maybe not that last one.Anyway, the big deal about idio is that you personalise it to your specific interests, telling it what subjects you're interested in, ensuring that when you load up the digital mag, it's just got articles that, in theory, you want to read. It's currently in its beta stage, focusing on digital design and music."It really came out of my personal experience," says founder Edward Barrow. "I'd find I wanted to buy four or five different magazines, but only wanted a few parts from each of those. So why should I buy them all?"

There’s been a lot of talk about the coming together of Web 2.0 and mobile. But a lot of it’s just that: talk. It seems logical that people will want to do similar things on their mobiles that they will on Web 2.0 services, albeit with extra elements of location and/or search thrown in to take advantage of the mobile phone.

But in a less high-profile corner of Nokia, the Emerging Business Unit, they’ve already created one application that’s attacking this convergance head-on. It’s called WidSets, and its nearest parallel is the Dashboard widgets on Mac computers, in that it pulls down information from websites to your phone, via RSS feeds, into the WidSets Java application.

You can pull down news stories, blog posts, Flickr photo streams, emails and weather forecasts, to name a few examples. Okay, so it might just be a slick RSS reader with a graphical user interface, but it’s easy enough to use that it could appeal beyond the tech-head community. I talked to Nokia’s Kaj Haggman to find out more.

Web 2.0 isn't just about groovy startups, y'know. The firms who rode the internet boom the first time around are coming out with their own attempts to keep pace with the user-generated content phenomenon.Services like Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo 360 combine blogging, social networking, and tight integration with these companies' other web tools. Mecca Ibrahim is in charge of Yahoo 360 in Europe, overseeing its launch in Germany, France and the UK, with Spain and Italy planned for next year.

"It's very hard to say whether it's more of a social networking product, a blogging product, or just a place to collect things that are important to you," she says. "We do see it as a central place within Yahoo where people can publish what's important to them, and share it with their friends and the wider community if they want to do that."

While at CES last week, I caught up with Mark Heinrich, chief technology officer and co-founder of Phanfare. It's an online photo and video sharing service that stands out through its use of a subscription model, charging $54.95 a year.

"We have the audacity to charge our customers money!" he told me. "That's why we call them customers, and not users. And because there's no advertising, we don't turn your private photo albums into some kind of billboard for adverts or print-ordering services."

Phanfare started in January 2005, and now has over 5,000 users, 80% of which pay the annual subscription fee (as opposed to the monthly or lifetime options that are available). And Heinrich has strong views on the prospects - or lack of - for Phanfare's free competition.

It was a busy week at CES for Yahoo, which made a bunch of announcements. Among them was news of a new mobile search service called oneSearch, which is currently part of Yahoo's beta Go for Mobile 2.0 application, but will be introduced to its mobile web and SMS services by the end of January.

"Today's mobile search is horribly terribly broken," says Ojas Rege, senior director of mobile products at Yahoo, who I caught up with at the show.

"What happens so often is that companies take things that work on the PC and bring them to the mobile phone. So what works on a PC, when I enter a search term and want a bunch of links back to do research, doesn't work on a mobile phone. Those links break, or take me to sites that don't work very well, which take 10 seconds to reach."

Yell has launched a new mobile application and mobile internet site, in an effort to ramp up its presence on mobile in the face of competition from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

The application provides full access to Yell's listings, while also keeping track of regular requests, providing an auto-suggest function, and letting users 'click to call' businesses. It also provides zoomable maps, and lets users save info to their Contacts, or send it to friends via SMS.

This afternoon, Yell held an online webchat to give more info on the new service. "This is our first serious push into mobile," said Martin Wilson, head of mobile marketing at Yell.com.

I missed this last week, but thought it was worth slipping in now. The Internet Advertising Bureau has signed up its first mobile advertising agency, 4th Screen Advertising, and says it's going to expand its activities more into mobile in 2007 and beyond.

The IAB and 4th Screen will collaborate on research-based projects in the coming year, and presumably the IAB is hoping to sign up more mobile agencies too. I wonder what this means (if anything) for established mobile marketing trade bodies and organisations.

"We are dedicated to keeping our members and UK advertisers up to date with all the latest industry research as well as insights into consumer behaviour and attitudes," says Guy Phillipson, CEO of the IAB. "So extending our remit into the mobile advertising arena would be the most logical step."

Well, it's not strictly a startup. Viadeo started life in France, as a social networking service for businesses, but it's only recently opened a dedicated UK office to drive membership over here.

The obvious comparisons are with LinkedIn and Xing, although as UK country manager Peter Cunningham told me, Viadeo thinks there's more to its service than a pure address book and recruiting tool. It's certainly grown fast.

"It started off as a private online business tool for 200 French companies, and just mushroomed from there," he says. "Since they made it public and open two years ago, it's grown to over one million members, with 50 staff working to run it."

Seeing as one of the main subjects for Techscape is Web 2.0 going mobile, we were bound to prick up our ears at LaNetro Zed's announcement that, yes, it's taking Web 2.0 mobile.

The company runs the Club Zed mobile subscription service here in the UK, which has traditionally involved users paying £3 a week for unlimited games, ringtone and wallpaper downloads. However, LaNetro Zed has now introduced user generated content, social networking and communication features into the mix.

I caught up with president and CEO Javier Perez Dolset to find out more. "We're trying to fully integrate the mobile device as a new machine to have full access to the internet, and everything Web 2.0 can offer," he says.