Here’s Yahoo’s description of Hack Days: “Yahoo! Hack Days started back in 2005, when a team of engineers designed an event to see what sort of interesting and innovative applications people would build using Yahoo! tools and technologies over a 24-hour period. At the end of the day, they presented working hacks to roomful of colleagues and peers. Since then, “hack” has become an integral part of culture at Yahoo!. ”

The sessions run through the night and you can nap at the conference center. They say there will be lots of “geek food” – let’s just hope they don’t bring any Twitter cupcakes – we all know how those ended up for me :)

I am hoping we will learn why we should use Yahoo tools and developer platforms over their Google counterparts.

Michael Grynbaum from the NY Times has a great story today about the progress that’s been made with the MTA in opening up the schedule data. Complaints against two web developers have been dropped. Grynbaum discusses how a variety of cities across the U.S. share their schedule and transit data with the public. Up north, Toronto held a “transit camp” in 2007 to help create a better TTC website.

At the end of the column, there’s a comment from Internet law expert Jonathan Zittrain who noted, “I love that the subversive act of the 21st century in the subway is not graffiti, but mapping out the stations so you can know where to exit the car. Twenty years ago they would have been tagging the cars. In both cases, the city is upset.”

NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has talked about his ideas for Media2020, a program that is supposed to make NYC more competitive in media and to create more entrepreneurial growth. Bloomberg’s ads for his supposed transit plan appear all over the Web and on TV — embracing the developer and entrepreneurial communities would make for a much stronger transit system.

Let’s hope that all transit systems across the world embrace technology to make travel easier. Maybe then we will see more cool visualizations of transit usage,  more apps like Exit Strategy,  and more mashups that track trains and their travels. I’d also love to see a transit camp here in NYC as long as the MTA participates as well. In my travels as a rail fan, it’s amazing to learn how much knowledge rail fans hold that could make the system better for passengers – imagine bringing together those who know  the system best, the best developers and entrepreneurs and the government to create the next generation of transit here in NYC.

Today there are a variety of services that make it easier to archive content around a term or product. A new offering from Portland-based Iterasi launching today is hoping to do the job even better. The service is named Positive Press and is setup to capture, archive and report on any content across the Web. The core of the product is Iterasi’s archiving service which saves actual web pages from the time of the save including all contents. I spoke with CEO Pete Grillo who showed me that you can even archive full RSS feeds and the archive is of the webpages that the stories are from not just the plain RSS content.

Positive Press can also archive Twitter messages in the full Twitter style and the messages are retained for all time. It’s very simple to use – just enter a search term and any time that term is used on twitter, Positive Press will archive it. Apparently Twitter only saves 30-days of messages.

The service is perfect for brands and agencies that need to monitor remarks across the web. The service also offers a reports feature which can send on-demand and scheduled reports via email that include the content generated by the archive feature over a specific time period.

As a side note, no matter what tool you use for monitoring, if you have a product or service you must monitor all press so you can respond if needed. If you are working with an agency they better be providing you with reports – if not, find a new agency.

The Positive Press service starts at $99/month. Iterasi’s free service will remain and will be rebranded as Iterasi Personal. Check out additional views on Positive Press from Josh Lowensohn of CNET and Charles Hamilton of WWD.

Here’s an overview of how the service works:

In my new role I see a lot of websites that are clunkers. Many of the sites haven’t been touched in a decade, are broken, are out-of-date, missing any current functionality or aren’t indexed in Google. How many dollars of revenue are these businesses losing out on because their website is a clunker?

I am not even talking about any sort of social networking or social media optimization. Just simple updates so that the sites are usable and, more importantly, findable. By investing in creating better small business websites, the local economy will benefit which in turn will provide more jobs and strengthen local businesses for the long term. Some of the concept overlaps with Robert Scoble’s 2010 web concept.

With that I’d like to introduce the concept of the “Cash for Clunkers Website Edition”. I’ve posted my initial thoughts on the concept and program in my Information Week column. Have a look at the concept and let me know your thoughts!

Doodle and MyDoodle will remain free while the Doodle Premium will cost $28/year. Basically Doodle Premium allows the user to customize the look and feel of the site. It’s a way to personalize the events that Doodle users create and send to their participants. The price seems a bit on the high side as $9 or $14 feels about right but I am sure the Doodle team researched the right price. Pricing is always the hardest part of any business, whether web-based or brick-and-mortar.

The company also notes that Premium Doodle is ad-free and customers can also request personal information from their event participants, such as postal address, e-mail address, and phone number.

From the overview, "Using three years of daily Web traffic data, and new models adapted from financial mathematics, this talk examines large-scale variation in Web traffic. These data show that Web traffic is highly heteroskedastic, with smaller sites having orders of magnitude more variation in the relative number of visitors they receive. These consistent patterns allow us to provide reasonable estimates of how likely it is Google will still be the most visited US site a year from now".

Dr. Hindman talks about rank volatility, items that are missing from traffic, the audience distribution curves for newspapers and news/media websites, and how big media plays musical chairs and how those chairs might affect staffing levels in the future. He also looks at whether the Web and online media can help save newspapers.

It’s 45 minutes long and while Hitwise data is not perfect, the analysis is worth the time.

Twitter, for instance, is the perfect example of the prototypical Web 2.0 startup that has captured the hearts and minds of the Web 2.0 "community" but hasn’t captured any real money (outside of venture capital).

When confronted with questions about the financial viability of their hottest startups, Web 2.0 proponents usually have a similar response: Rome wasn’t built in a day. When Google launched, we’re reminded, it didn’t know how exactly how it was going to make money. For young Web 2.0 startups that are growing rapidly, we’re often told that growth and "critical mass" are more important than revenue models and profitability.

As we recently learned that Digg was still losing money on revenue numbers that look quite paltry, it occurred to me that Digg and some of Web 2.0’s other hot young startups really aren’t hot young startups anymore.

Facebook was launched in February 2004. Digg was launched in November 2004. Twitter was launched in July 2006. Facebook is almost five years old, Digg is just over four years old and Twitter is two and a half years old.

They all share a common trait: none has developed into a self-sustaining business whose financial future seems assured.

But Rome wasn’t built in a day, right?

When Google launched to the public in 1998, AdWords wasn’t a part of the "business plan." Yet in 2001 – the third year of its existence – Google was already turning a profit. In an August 2001 BBC article, it was reported Google had been in the black for the past two quarters and that the company wasn’t making a little bit of cash – it was making a lot of it.

Eric Schmidt’s words: "We are quite profitable. We are not talking about 1%."

And what of other brands created during Bubble 1.0 that went on to grow into large enterprises? eBay was profitable almost right from the start.

According to an old press release, Yahoo reported a negligible profit in Q4 of 2005 – before it went public. Yahoo was officially incorporated as a business on March 1, 1995.

In short, three of the most prominent creations of the first .com boom were able to generate revenue and profits much faster than their Web 2.0 counterparts.

This is quite curious for two primary reasons.

The Myth of the Lean, Mean Startup

One of Web 2.0’s biggest myths: it’s far easier and far cheaper to get a startup off the ground today than it was a decade ago.

Citing the wide range of mature, open-source technologies and the abundance of talent available today, Web 2.0 proponents have told us that taking an idea from concept to reality, getting it launched and growing it can be a cheap affair.

If that’s the case, one would logically assume that today’s Web 2.0 startups would have developed into lean, mean revenue-generating machines. Instead, we see the exact opposite.

Facebook has over 600 employees and has raised over $400 million in capital (and is reportedly still looking for another big capital infusion). Digg has over 70 employees and has raised $40 million in capital. Twitter has somewhere around 25 employees and has raised $20 million in capital.

In other words, Facebook is a bloated company that spends money like it’s going out of style. Digg is a bloated company that is losing money on a marginal amount of revenue. Twitter is, relatively-speaking, the leanest of the bunch and ironically, the only company in this trio that could realistically implement a successful paid subscription model. Yet founder Biz Stone believes a business model could be a "distraction" at this stage of the game. Given Twitter’s recent security mishap, perhaps he’s right.

The reality is that while it’s true that open-source technologies and a large pool of development talent make building certain kinds of Internet "products" cheaper today, building a product and building a business around a product are two very different things.

Instead of following the lean-and-mean philosophy that Web 2.0 proponents promote, Web 2.0’s biggest stars have opted to put revenue models on the back burner. Instead, they’ve raised large amounts of capital at exorbitant valuations under the guise of supporting "growth" and achieving "critical mass." They figured that the revenue and profits would come eventually but clearly that was putting the cart before the horse.

This approach was fueled not only by the overabundance of easy venture capital money that needed to be invested and the promise of YouTube-sized acquisitions but by a stark truth: scaling services like Facebook and Twitter is not cheap.

Facebook’s $100 million debt financing for the sole purpose of leasing servers highlights very well the fact that offering free, advertising-supported services to millions upon millions of people is not a lean and- mean undertaking. The popularity of "open platforms", in which services need to allocate even greater resources to support applications that third-party developers have created, only exacerbates the situation.

In short, the model exhibited by the poster children of Web 2.0 does not reflect reality. Not only have the people who run Web 2.0’s most popular services largely bought into the model of VC bloat, the very nature of their services does not permit them to follow a lean-and-mean approach as traction is obtained.

The AdSense Economy

If you started an advertising-supported online content destination in the late 1990s, life was a lot tougher than it is today in many ways.

Back then, the nascent Internet advertising market was starting to grow rapidly and while there were huge opportunities for those entrepreneurs who were able to navigate it successfully, the market’s immaturity posed a lot of challenges.

That market is much easier to navigate today and Web 2.0 has been the beneficiary of what I like to call "The AdSense Economy." Thanks to AdSense, you can build an Internet product, launch it and "monetize" immediately by slapping up some ads courtesy of the friendly folks at Google.

In his article, "What is Web 2.0?", Tim O’Reilly lists AdSense as Web 2.0’s equivalent to Doubleclick.

And for good reason. AdSense (and programs like it) have been the initial primary source of revenue for many of the Web 2.0 "startups" that have launched (many of which you’ve never heard of, many of which you’ve already forgotten and many which have already disappeared into obscurity).

In theory, programs like AdSense give Web 2.0 upstarts a key advantage over their Web 1.0 counterparts: they permit low-effort monetization. If you launch a new service and manage to attract 10,000 visitors in the first month, you can monetize that traffic with almost no effort beyond adding a few lines of code to your website. Google, ad networks and other online ad companies do all the heavy lifting finding and dealing with advertisers.

Yet being able to monetize doesn’t mean being able to monetize effectively and profitably. The truth is that programs like AdSense are quite underwhelming and any service with real scale is not going to achieve anywhere near the same kinds of results with AdSense that it would with a dedicated ad sales staff (either internal or outsourced).

Sure, you’ve seen photos of AdSense webmasters holding up a $100,000+ check from Google and there are individuals and companies who make lots of money with AdSense. But they’re the exception, not the rule, and most of them are running services that are conducive to success (read: not "social media" services that tend to suffer from severe ad blindness).

But taking a step back, this isn’t about AdSense specifically. It’s about the mature online advertising market.

Many seemed to have believed the fact that this market was more mature than it was back in the late 1990s would be beneficial to Web 2.0 companies. After all, the online advertising market today is much more efficient and consists of a much bigger pie. Young Web 2.0 startups looking to tap into this should have an easier time, right?

Wrong. Market maturity is a double-edged sword because today’s mature online advertising market is:

More sophisticated. Ad buyers know a lot more about what they’re doing today than they did 10 years ago. This can make it more difficult for young startups to sell directly to brands and ad agencies because, even though a lot of money still gets thrown around and wasted, by in large, brands and ad agencies have a much better grasp of the digital space.

More competitive. Brands and ad agencies have a lot of options. In growing markets with lots of competition and few barriers to entry, a common characteristic is that the strong get stronger. Even though the online advertising pie is growing, major companies like Google and top properties and networks that register with comScore and Nielsen inevitably take a larger chunk of that pie because they represent the best avenue for efficient allocation of online ad spend in a cluttered online world.

Growing slower. Inevitably, nascent markets eventually mature and as they mature, growth slows. While the growth of online advertising (and the potential for future growth) is still quite significant, this market isn’t a plane that’s still sitting on the runway. What does this mean? It means that even if online advertising spend holds up relatively well during a deep recession, naturally slowing growth that’s inevitable in a maturing market could make the situation feel worse than the numbers might otherwise indicate.

Today’s economic downturn is far different (and far more severe) than the downturn in 2001 and that previous downturn, while painful for many, was actually not as problematic for the online advertising market as it should have been. The reason: the market was still so young and growing so much that the natural momentum it had for growth offset the macroeconomic climate. Today, a more mature online advertising market coupled with a more severe downturn will not be beneficial for Web 2.0 companies that are under the illusion that online advertising is recession-resistant.

All told, The AdSense Economy is not been as beneficial to the bottom line of Web 2.0 startups as many had argued it would be.

Conclusion

As we head into 2009 facing one of the toughest economic environments in decades knowing that the fun and games are over, it’s time to face the reality: the Web 2.0 we have today is not the Web 2.0 we envisioned a few short years ago.

The most popular Web 2.0 creations have not been cheap to grow and operate. They’re still struggling to find revenue models that will serve as the foundations of self-sustaining businesses and even those startups that generate significant revenue in absolute terms (namely Facebook) cannot justify the valuations they’ve been given. And profitability is still largely a pipe dream.

While it’s possible that Web 2.0 stars like Facebook, Digg and Twitter will turn things around, it’s quite clear that these companies are not like many of their hot Web 1.0 counterparts, which, despite having to battle challenges of their own, were able to develop viable revenue models and turn a profit relatively early on.

Given all this, for Web 2.0 proponents who continue to make the same asinine argument, "Don’t treat Web 2.0 like Web 1.0!", it’s 2009 and I concede defeat. Web 2.0 is not like Web 1.0. It’s in a special (ed) class of its own.

Yesterday on the Fox show, "The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet", expert Lesley Spencer Pyle explained how people at home could make money using the Internet. One of the ways Pyle noted was that you could become a Web designer and create brochure sites for businesses for at least $500 a piece. Pyle noted, "you would think you need some great skills to do that (web design), but there are tools to do it for you".

She named SnapPages as her tool of choice. We covered SnapPages (including a video interview with the founder) back in September. SnapPages seems like a well developed tool that might be good for creating your own website. The real issue here is that design is just one portion of creating an effective online presence. I hear stories from small businesses all the time who have left the online space because they felt that it wasn’t worth the investment. It’s these type of "fly by night" designers (or developers, marketers, etc.) that will slowly erode the industry as a whole and make it harder for talented professionals to get work.

Here’s the clip of Pyle explaining how to become a Web designer in 2 minutes or less:

(no comments about the video quality!)

Someone asked on Twitter: How many will be around at the end of 2009?

Check out other Sightix reviews on Alt Search Engines and Webware. Here’s Ari explaining how Sightix works when trying to find models like Bar Rafaeli:

There’s no Google, no Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace. Friendster is there, but it’s Friendster Asia. There are a good number of hosting companies. As much as I love TripAdvisor, nothing they do is Web 2.0. Microsoft, Salesforce and IBM have large booths, Amazon has a tiny booth for AWS. There are several companies which seem to be looking for developers. I saw Present.ly, Mzing, Twing in the main expo hall which could be some of the only companies that could even be remotely considered Web 2.0.

There is a "long tail pavillion" which means $3k for a tiny, no space to move table. A variety of startups are in that area – if you make it over to the event, those tables are on the far right of the expo hall. Let’s not even talk about the lack of NY-based companies in the main expo hall.

I’ve attended over 100 events at the Javits Center over the last decade and the companies in the expo could have been from 1998, 2001 or now. As I spoke with over 50 people, most echoed my comments. Most of us assume that the cost for a booth much have been too high for startups to afford. But this is the first tech expo I’ve seen in a long time that had no Yahoo or Google presence.

Here are some of the photos and check out the full set on Flickr – the videos will be posted later today.

The Wall Street sky is falling. but what does that mean to tech companies, and particularly to startups?

The last five or six years have been all about community, "social media" and other related types of communications. That era has ended and the next phase of the Web will be about *real* productivity. That means products that make you more efficient, and more effective. It means software that saves you money or makes you money. And yes, we are really going to have to start paying for the good stuff.

One theme that has been emerging is being referred to as "web meets world". It’s an idea that has been discussed by Brad Burnham from Union Square Ventures, and also the folks at the Web 2.0 Summit. The concept is that the web needs to actually help you do things in the real world, and not just meet other folks on the web. I think this is all true but it is really just a fancy abstraction for helping people do things that matter, and things that they will pay for. As an example, Union Square just invested in Meetup — a terrific investment. Meetup makes real money charging people for helping connect them to other people. They are providing real value and so people pay real money.

I find this "web meets world" concept particularly interesting because of a controversial piece I wrote back in April called "Free Is Killing Us, Blame The VCs." The core of my thesis in that piece is not that free is inherently bad, but that too much free was distorting the value of the market because the free is only supported by VC money and not real value being delivered to users.

As a result, I opined, it was way too hard to start a small business and to grow it because you need to "get to scale" since everything is expected to be free and monetized by advertising, which requires lots of users. Perhaps the idea people found most objectionable was when I said the following:

In today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very hard to charge when your competition is free.

People really objected to the idea that "in most online business categories, it is inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to grow it." And of course there is room for debate here. But what is not debatable is that by and large, tech startups engaged in offering totally free services ( I am not talking about freemium here) are not making money, and they are not getting acquired. Its fine not to get acquired, but you can’t do that very long if you’re not making money. And now that "free" VC capital is drying up, sustaining such businesses will be really tough.

Interestingly, at the time, Brad, among many others, took me to task for having a dated view of the online world, and for not understanding how it really works.

But in my view, Brad’s stated new thesis is exactly in line with my writing at the time. "web meets world" really might be better phrased "web meets money." There will be fewer and fewer companies getting funded by offering services that help online folks interact with other online folks, because cool as it is, people won’t pay for it, and the bottom is going to fall out. Brad and Union Square’s new investment thesis is the canary in the coalmine for that strategy.

Brad’s rebuttal to my April piece talks a lot about new business models that are going to emerge that I am just missing. But five months later, I see no evidence of it, and "web meets world" to me, suggests that in their heart of hearts, they don’t either.

In fact, I think companies like 37 Signals have had it right all along. They preach charging people for services, and staying small, and adding real productive value. Scale is irrelevant in this model because the software ads value to the individual without the network effect. In this model, scale is a benefit, not a requirement. I am not saying there will not be successful advertising based companies, but I am saying they will have to solve really serious issues like improving the value equation of online banner ads, in order to be successful.

As I see it, this is a fantastic shift in the marketplace, because it means if you have a company that adds real value, you are less likely to get thrown off course by a flood of capital creating unsustainable competition. I am very happy the venture markets are making this shift.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

The big turnoff for me on Lefora is that they allow you to repost entire full feeds from blogs and create a community around another site’s content. Presenter Vincent Lauria displayed how within 1 minute you can take Engadget’s full feed, and create threads for each piece of content. This type of scraping needs to be stopped. Outside of the fact that Lefora doesn’t care about content creators, the app functioned well.

One of the assumptions that are floating around the social media space is that organizations have to use social media to reach out to their users. That is incorrect. Social media can also be a great internal communication tool as well. Truth be told, there may be some brands out there that just do not attract or warrant conversations. I don’t know who these brands are but I’m sure there are a few out there.

Essentially there are 2 ways to test if your company should engage in external social media:

• Check if there are already communities/discussions about your brand/product out there. If yes, then you should engage in external social media to tap into those communities. You will also want to foster the continued growth of those communities.
• If you scour the internet and determine that nobody is talking about your brand/product then you can try to create/foster these conversations and communities yourself. If you find that people still do not respond or want to engage with you then external social media is probably not right for your organization.

What about social media for internal communication?

• Your organization can still create a corporate twitter account for employees to follow company growth or progress.
• Your organization can still create a blog to talk about company issues, policies, ideas, etc. Your organization also can create a corporate wiki to share tools, strategies and information.
• Your organization can use linkedin to prospect new employees or search for sales leads.

These are just a few simple ways that your organization can use social media internally. Bottom line is that there is no excuse for not getting involved in social media. If you truly feel that none of your users out there want to talk to you and that you can’t create communities, then use social media internally. Don’t you think it’s about time?

Jacob Morgan is a social media consultant and runs a team of technical SEOs in San Francisco. follow him on twitter.

Shel misses a few key points:

• One of the biggest reasons companies aren’t using Web 2.0 tools externally is because legal teams hold installation and execution back due to fear of litigation or revealing private company secrets to the public
• Large companies aren’t embracing these tools yet because the platforms they have selected aren’t setup to handle Web 2.0 tools yet – it’s easy to assume (as Shel does) that every corporation is ready-to-go with things like tagging, bookmarking, wikis and rss feeds for other employee blogs
• IT employee knowledge is not always current with what’s available externally
• Many times partner agencies appear to have knowledge in these new areas but oversell and underdeliver
• Shel also misses the most important reason that companies are moving to these new social tools inside the corporate walls – money. The more productive employees are, the cheaper they are. Many of these tools can help corporations move forward without the expensive, bulky portal-style software packages they have been using for a decade.

Will large corporations move to Web 2.0 and social networking tools inside the enterprise? Absolutely because they will eventually be seen as a way to increase performance and reduce expenses.