An accurate, if reductionistic and pessimistic post by Russell Beattie categorizing Web 2.0 startups. His list:

• scrape engines
• mashed ups
• web trapps
• social anything
• phile sharing
• content management saturation
• rss holes
• firefoxing

(Send TechCrunch post’s through that filter next time you read it…)

I say accurate, because as Russ points out, most of these startups are only playing at the edges of innovation.

I say reductionistic because it’s natural for the web as a platform to have multiple layers of use. He points to Amazon & Ebay as building successful platforms (I’d have to add SalesForce, delicious & Google), but I think Russ is missing that many of these initial attempts are the beginning of figuring out what it means to build on top of these platform-provided services.

Granted, they probably shouldn’t be businesses. But the fact is that they’re an important first step that will teach us a lot.

It’s interesting that the companies he mentions as providing a successful platforms have viable (and huge) real businesses they can leverage. How can you turn your business into a platform?

My pal John Paget is down in Oaxaca doing some promotional filming for Floresta a microlender and community development non-profit.

Here’s how Pag describes it:

During the last two days we filmed a number of microenterprise and community development projects in small mountain towns:

• a fruit and vegetable stand and chicken farm business
• a tomato greenhouse
• a water cistern system
• a water filter system
• family gardens
• pine needle basket weaving crafts
• agroforestry farms
• tree nursery
• soil conservation (aka “living barriers”)

I hadn’t investigated Floresta before reading his post. Looks like a very interesting organization:

Floresta was originally developed to meet the environmental, economic and spiritual needs of the rural people of the Dominican Republic. Currently there are over 2000 families who are benefiting from Floresta’s program in Haiti, Mexico and the Dominican Republic: receiving loans, training in sustainable agriculture and reforestation, assistance in community organizing, capacity building, and marketing assistance. (source)

I’m always skeptical when the “spiritual” is thrown in there. Who knows what that means…

But I’m curious to know more about how they choose their local partners and the effectiveness of their programs.

Thought that Isa might enjoy little nuggets of wisdom that strike me.

Saw this on an ad in the metro this morning

Never interrupt your enemy while they are making a mistake.
_{Napoleon Bonaparte}

Yesterday my wife and I found out that the beautiful baby we’re expecting is most likely going to be a little girl.

So here’s to our new Isa:

• Isa, I hope you’ll be strong and know yourself well
• I hope that social constructs about girl-hood (and guy-hood) won’t mean too much to you
• I hope that you’ll discover your passion & your calling
• I look forward to sharing my callings & passions—geekhood & sailing, creation & beauty, making the world a better place & appreciating it for what it is
• I’m really looking forward to meeting, holding, supporting and encouraging you in your life

A couple of interesting developments in the local search area today:

Yahoo buys Whereonearth

Whereonearth specializes in location-based Internet services, including a sophisticated database of geographical locations that will let users search for local goods and services without entering a zip code or post code.

CoStar is talking with Google & Yahoo

Commercial real estate’s largest data provider is working with Google to integrate its vast stores of building information with the Google Earth interactive satellite mapping service. CoStar Group is in discussions with the Mountain View-based online search company as well as in preliminary talks with Yahoo, its CEO said.

More indications that Tim O’Reilly’s right that we’re continuing to move from platform as competitive advantage to that provided by data

Lots of great plugins and mashups being built for gada.be

Thanks for the link, Chris!

Nope, but it is the combo of two great search tools…

Chris Pirillo has released a very cool tag meta search engine, http://gada.be/

What an excellent idea! Aggregating tag sources into categories then providing a search across all or a subset of them.

I doubt that I’ll be searching via a mobile phone (one of Chris’s target devices) but I have another search interface that I have incorporated into my daily life as via a shortcut in firefox—yubnub.

So I threw this set of commands onto yubnub to give me access to gada searches. (A couple of the descriptions are my mistakes; I’ve emailed Jonathan about them.)

I guess I could just use the gada set of commands in the location bar, but having them in yubnub allows me to use the meta-search tool that I already go to naturally.

Observation—both yubnub & gada highlight what del.icio.us is leading the way on: with some simple syntax defined and made public, the url turns into a key user interface.

http://www.churchmarketingsucks.com/

Last year, no team got further than 7 miles with their autonomous bots over DARPA’s desert course.

This year, at least four teams completed the 132 mile course successfully through gullies and bridges, over mountain passes and cattle guards:

1. Looks like the big winner is going to be Stanford’s Racing Team. They were the first team to cross the finish line, and it looks like they did it with a winning time of 9 hours & 55 minutes driving their Touareg-based bot
2. CMU’s Redteam Sandstorm (a veteran from last year, and the best performer then, if I’m not mistaken) is in at 9:59 driving a modified 1986 Humvee
3. CMU’s Redteam H1ghlander is in at 10:04 driving their 1999 H1 Hummer
4. Gray Insurance Company’s Gray Team made it in at 10:17 driving a 2005 Ford Escape Hybrid. (Curiously, it looks like the Challenge information has been removed from their corporate website. The pages that are referenced on the official race materials and throughout Google (1 & 2 .grayinsco.com/) are both returning 404 errors.)

As I’m writing this, Team Terramax is still out on the course, stalled out overnight after having gone 98 miles in their monster Oshkosh “defense truck.” Even if they finish, their elapsed time right now of over 23 hours shouldn’t change the standings unless the judges compensate for the overnight somehow.

There’s good coverage at the SF Chronicle the San Jose Mecury News, and the NY Times

If you’re looking for something more corporate about blogging guidelines, check these out:

• Ogilvy PR’s Executive Blogger’s Guide Lots of familiar territory gussied up with a brand and a design that would please any executive who has their secretary print out their email.

• Forrester’s report Blogging: Bubble Or Big Deal? A compendium of “blogging best practices” by Charlene Li who lists a sample corporate policy & sample code of blogging ethics in her discussion of her report