2008

My second visit to SXSW is now over and it was great. Met a ton of great people and thanks to everyone for saying hi and appreciate all of the great feedback over the past week. Tomorrow we return to normal coverage and bid Austin and the birds adieu.

• Schwag Giveaway - Gary V's Sweat, Facebook Tshirts, Seesmic Stickers and More
• Hats Off To The Twitter Team
• Hey Far Away Haters, Here's Why I Enjoy SXSW
• Video Interview - Kyte.TV Explains The Difference With Seesmic, Qik and Flixwagon
• The (Apparently) Two Sides of Mark Zuckerberg
• Panel Recap: Good Analytics Can Get You Booty
• Startup Pricing Suggestions - Reduce And Raise
• Facebook Garage Live Blogging w/Mark Zuckerberg
• Kyte Pulls a Twitter
• Viddler Dinner Recap: Lots of Celebs and Kevin Rose / Gary V Are CN Fans!
• Stickam Demo Video
• The Ninja Accepts
• Web Awards Winners
• Exclusive: Bitstrips Demo Video - Launching Today
• Keynote: Mark Zuckerberg - Live Notes Plus Post-Keynote Crowd Reactions
• Contextual Web Session Recap
• The SXSW Bag, "We Waste Paper"

Tomorrow the CenterNetworks team will be making our way to Austin, Texas for the 2008 South-by-Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival. If you check our coverage from the 2007 event, you can see how much fun the event is. We will continue our top ranked, award-winning* coverage of this year's event and as always there is no charge for you to view the content.

There are several other resources worth checking out if you plan to attend or be a home gamer. Thanks to everyone for emailing in suggestions - keep 'em coming!

• SXSWhere - this site is maintained by NY-based Bricabox and houses all of the party locations.
• SXSW Videos - Viddler has created a mini-portal where they will house videos shot on scene at SXSW. Our videos will be housed there (and here) along with Internet celebs iJustine, WineLibraryTV
• Twitter list - this is the list of people who you can follow for south tweeters.
• SXSW baby - unofficial resource
• http://sched.org/ - very nice calendar tool with basically every party and panel

If you have other resources or will be blogging, live blogging, video blogging, Twittering or Powncing, leave your link in the comments and I will add it to the post. And drop me a line if you will be in town, love to meet CN readers and give out our awesome stickers. See you in Austin!

* awarded by Mothers of CenterNetworks, 2007

We review tons of products and services on CN, over 1,000 in the past year. Most are good to very good, but some just wow us when we check them out. I'd like to share three that have come across our radar in the last month that are game changers and should be very, very successful -- and two of them are NY-based, the other calls Boston home.

Part of what will lead to the success is the distribution deals each one has already signed. As Marc Andreessen has said many times, distribution is the key.

check out the products! »

Tonight I participated in a panel discussion about what's coming in 2008. It was hosted by Ember Media and overall I'd say it was one of the most enjoyable evenings I've had in a while. The conversation before, during and after the panel was great. It's always great to meet people in person who read CN.

The Ember Media team did an excellent job in coordination and organization as everything went off without a hitch. Clayton Banks, Ember Media CEO led off with a presentation about his picks for 2008. The truth is that 2008 might be the most exciting year on the Web yet. We may move further along overall this year than we have in the last 3-4 years combined.

The panel discussion followed with panelists: Jonah Bossewitch, Kay Madati and myself. Jonah works at Columbia University and Kay runs marketing for Community Connect which includes sites such as Black Planet which did half a billion pageviews in December 2007.

Some of the topics we discussed include: online advertising, supply/demand with regards to content, privacy, data portability, mobile, barcode technology with regards to advertising and the sematic Web.

Thanks to Clayton for including me and thanks to everyone for coming out.

Gigya is announcing the public launch of its "widget distribution network" today. This is great news considering that widget ads was one of my 2008 predictions. There's no reason that advertising widgets can't take over the ad market this year as long as they get the needed distribution. Gigya is trying to help that by allowing advertisers and brands to use their network to push out their widgets.

One of the reasons why I believe widgets are left behind is because they don't drive as many visitors to the brand web site. This is always a big push for brands - now they are slowly starting to realize that its about brand interaction - who cares where that interaction happens.

The key for growth and acceptance lies in two areas: payout/money and analytics. The more money that's paid out to the publishers obviously the higher acceptance there will be. But for advertisers and brands, the ability to report back to management about the effectiveness about the widgets will be key.

Kristen has some additional information taking a look at other widget ad players.

InfoSpace, (NASDAQ:INSP) makers of the Dogpile and WebFetch search engines, has announced its priorities for 2008. The full memo is below but it boils down to three things: reduce costs, increase traffic and expand the network. I always wonder why the items listed below weren't done last year, and the year before that, etc. Now they have determined that they need to increase traffic?

Naturally the first thought for "reducing costs" is a workforce reduction. There is no mention of this in the notes below. The company is also looking to increase the traffic to it's own search properties including Dogpile. I used Dogpile a bit back in say 1999, didn't even realize they were still around. The last bit is that they want to work on increasing the white label solutions the company provides. This could be their best option instead of attempting to compete with the likes of Google and smaller player Yahoo.

Here's the full list of InfoSpace’s strategic priorities:

• Realigning the Company’s operating structure: As part of the Company’s effort to balance its operating structure with the new needs of its business, InfoSpace expects to reduce costs by approximately $7 million to $9 million and as a result will have cash severance charges of approximately $7 million to $8 million reflected in the fourth quarter of 2007.
• Increasing traffic on InfoSpace’s owned and operated search engines: InfoSpace’s online search assets are differentiated by the Company’s metasearch technology and include its award-winning branded websites such as Dogpile.com, which recently ranked highest in customer satisfaction among search engines for the second consecutive year. Additionally, the Company has long-term agreements with both Google and Yahoo! to deliver their search results and text-based advertising listings to its network of metasearch properties and affiliates through 2011. Through significant product enhancements and new direct-to-consumer marketing efforts, the Company expects to increase traffic on its owned search sites.
• Expanding InfoSpace’s distribution network: InfoSpace currently benefits from a solid distribution network with over 100 private label partners, including 6 new deals signed in the fourth quarter. In 2008, the Company expects to further expand its distribution network by attracting new distribution partners and broadening its product set to include a new portal product and other value added offerings.

Last year I listed 23 people I would like to meet in 2007. I met a good bunch of them which was awesome, some for just a handshake, some for more lengthy conversations. I've decided to continue this list with another 23 people I'd like to meet in 2008. Some names are the same as I still am interested in a face-to-face discussion. I hope to meet a lot more CN readers this year, I enjoy the conversations with each and every one of you.

Here are the lists from 2007 and for 2008:

Ya'all know I love ya - I tried to pick a cross-section of people who could help create a better CN by meeting with them. I look forward to meeting everyone at the conferences and meetups in 2008.

It's that time of the year -- prediction time. Most of the blogger heavyweights have listed their predictions and I thought I'd share mine after being pinged by James Thomas. I have decided to offer some predictions that might be considered a bit non-traditional. With that said, here are some of my thoughts for 2008:

Time Wasters Will Be Replaced With Time Savers

What the F is up with time wasters lately? It seems every meetup or party I attend, someone pitches some sort of time waster. I think what we will see in 2008 is a resurgence of time savers, similar to the Web 1.0 boom in that apps will actually be useful for us and increase productivity. The net result will be more time offline actually socializing with our friends in real life.

More Startups Close Doors But More Open Overall

Starting a Web business will remain very inexpensive in 2008 and that will mean more will dive head first. We will see lots of failures but overall we will see growth in total. Entrepreneurs will utilize the Yahoo theory of throw 10 things at the wall and see which one of the ten sticks.

Widget Advertising Will Take Off

Advertisers have continued to push the traditional banner ad for nearly a decade. Widgets offer way more interactivity and presence on a blog or Web site and advertisers will realize that widgets are the future of advertising. The other added benefit of widgets is to the site/blog visitor they don't appear as advertisements and visitors might actually interact with the widget more than with any traditional advertising. It will be considered a way that companies can "join the conversation".

RSS Advertising Will Take Off

There are a couple of ad firms that currently support ads inside feeds (FeedBurner and Pheedo come to mind). As feeds continue their push to replace the traditional content, ad firms will realize the power of the feed and will begin to offer RSS solutions to capitalize on the potential revenue from the ads.

Bloggers Will Be Held Accountable For Their Actions

IndustryGirl touched on this in her prediction post. This past year we've started to see blogger reputations in various categories (no matter how large or small) taking hits for the practices employed by that blog. In 2008 we will see bloggers who treat their userbase poorly and act as bullies lose traffic and presence. I can only hope that those blogs who bully users and content providers are kicked to the curb. If anything can ruin blogging as a job for all of us and push people to "old media", it's the actions of a few bad apples.

RSS/Feed Metrics/Analytics Will Actually Mean Something

It's important to remember why we haven't seen any improvement in metrics and analytics in years, and it's simple - because it's all about the benjamins. I am very hopeful that we will see some real metrics for RSS feeds, as you know I believe the traditional subscriber metric is dead -- just as dead as the hit was in 1997. I'd be all over getting some panel discussions together about feed metrics and analytics so we can actually make some strides towards industry adoption of actual feed metrics. (and yes, we need an overhaul on Web metrics in general but I have beat that dead horse enough this year)

Apple Lives Large Early, Dives Late

Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) is living the highlife now with stock prices hovering at $200/share. Products are beautiful, talent is strong, tech bloggers and early adopters loving Apple. We have started to see a small ripple in the Apple armor with posts such as Dave Winer's about his hard dive fiasco. Negative reports will continue to increase in number throughout 2008 and another tech manufacturer will step up their game and begin to erode Apple's market share. Who will it be? I am not sure but I could see Sony playing a role. Apple will counter with lower prices.

Agree? Disagree? Leave your thoughts in the comments - I am very interested in feedback!