The Week In Rojo - October 3rd, 2005

The sold-out Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco is creating a buzz reminiscent of the go-go late 1990s. The scent of money is in the air too. Kottke reports Dave Winer sold weblogs.com, a key part of the blogging infrastructure, to Web giant Verisign for $2 million. AOL scooped up Weblogs, Inc., a network of more than 80 blogs, for $25 million. PaidContent.org isn't missing a minute.

Internet stock queen Mary Meeker (remember her?) was at Web 2.0 and says we're at a "boom-let" stage now (after boom and bust). More speculation about whether Web 2.0 is a bubble or boom here.

Richard MacManus has blow-by-blow coverage of the conference at Read/Write Web, including John Battelle's conversation with Yahoo CEO Terry Semel. TechCrunch has word of all the juicy corporate presentations by companies like Bunchball, Zvents, KnowNow and Orb. Particularly interesting was the Attention Trust open board meeting and talk about the Attention Trust Recorder extension (ATX) for Firefox which can track what sites you’ve been to, and how long you’ve stayed.

So what does Web 2.0 mean exactly? Om Malik's Broadband Blog tried to define it and from a look at the list on Read/Write Web, so did everyone else.The CEO of Socialtext, Ross Mayfield put it more succintly for Wired News: "Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people."

More Web 2.0 apps: The super-stealth 24 Hour Laundry project from Marc Andreessen (think Netscape) has finally launched Ning, a do-it-yourself toolkit for creating social-software applications. The idea here is that anyone can create social software apps like Flickr, Craigslist, and even Zagat-type guides. TechCrunch gave it a breathless writeup. Meanwhile, 37 Signals released Whiteboard, a write-revise tool for online editing that broadcasts changes as an RSS feed.

Even Web 2.0 couldn't drown out Google mania this week as the rumors and announcements continued to pour in: Google and Apple may partner on music, Google Calendar could be very close to launch, free Google WiFi could soon cover San Francisco… but there's a catch, and Google and Sun teamed up to replace MS Office and Windows. This last item turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, and not the Google Ajax Office suite many were hoping for. Another Google disappointment: Google Earth shows Taiwan as part of mainland China. Oops. 

Finally, count on MetaFilter for this week’s important cultural contribution to the blogosphere: a link to Sesame Street’s theme song—in Klingon. 

via : rojo.com