One of the big advantages to living in the city/valley, and working at SOMA is that you get to mingle with all the other people who are working on new web stuff, or are writing about it. Almost every night there’s a different party or event. On Thursday, I attended two: an AOL launch of their new fantasy football site, and the monthly Mashable event. Here’s my name tag from the Mashable party:

The Mashable party was far better attended, and it even had better bouncers.

Hope everyone (all 7 of you) enjoys the new blog theme. It was designed by Marc, the most talented web designer I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Here’s his explanation of the design. Any differences between his design and my actual blog are all my fault, obviously.

If you are as fascinated about the relationships between data as I am, here’s a great blog for you: Datawocky.

CNET Networks was bought by CBS today. It is all over the web, but here’s a straight story. One of the weird things about acquisitions like this,  is that they give rise to a bunch of stories like this one at Wired. Why do reporters even bother talking to anonymous employees? I can guarantee you that none of the employees interviewed have any idea what CBS’s plans for CNET are.

I never thought that I would ever say this, but Dan Farber is wrong and the New York Times and Henry Blodgett are right. Microsoft has wasted billions of dollars, and many years, trying to succeed on the web. Buying Yahoo won’t help them get better. Instead, as Blodget writes, they should swap their internet division for a stake in a combined web company, and concentrate on the enterprise market. Yahoo won’t fit into Microsoft, but a combined unit could be a competitor for Google.

UPDATE: Scavo thinks buying SAP would be a mistake. He’s probably right, but I still say it is a smaller mistake than buying Yahoo.

Google has announced a new local news option on Google News that allows you to type in a zip code or city name and get news from that locality. So, let’s compare the coverage! On TechCrunch, we have a restatement of the press release, accompanied by a prediction that Topix is all done. While on Between the Lines, Larry actually tries the new service, and find that it doesn’t work worth a damn. Which do you think will get more play? Sometimes, I have to ask why we even bother doing analysis?

I have a guest post up on Between the Lines about Facebook’s recent release of a JavaScript API. It’s entitled Facebook unleashes wave of new development with JavaScript client library. I think it’s pretty good, but let’s see what the talkbackers say.

UPDATE: The post is on TechMeme. Since this is probably going to be the only time my name appears there, I have grabbed a screenshot:

If you are a developer of web content sites, then you must read Data and the Future of the Web by Scott Karp and Database Gods Bitch About MapReduce by Rich Skrenta. Scott provides the vision of where you need to go, and Rich provides an explanation of the new tools that are going to get you there.

Right now, most publishers provide commodity data (i.e. the same news that you can read on 1,000 other sites) without adding any value to either their users or their advertisers. As Scott notes, Google is the king of extracting commodity data. That has given them the power to also extract most of the revenue. But, there is another kind of data, the personal data that is created by a community of users on sites like Digg and Twitter: “it’s the data that’s still in our heads, the data that we have not put in digital form.” As Scott sees it:

“The future of the web will be determined by companies that can overcome people challenges — to bring EVERYONE’S data online, and make it useful. “

This is the primary challenge content producers face! How to mine the data their users provide them, in order to produce a better content experience that, in turn, provides more value to their users, and advertisers. The ability to do this will be the key to building a great content business in the web 2.0 era. And, it’s why I feel so strongly that content sites must embrace social media.

If Scott shows us the goal, Rich shows us the technical means to get there. Right now, most content producers have a database driven content management system (CMS), combined with a traffic reporting tool like Google Analytics. While this is perfectly good for serving content, and measuring your traffic, this combination will not allow you to do the kind of data analysis that will be needed in the future. The data is going to grow exponentially, and only a system based on technologies like mapreduce, HDFS, and Hypertable will allow your data analysis infrastructure to grow with it (at a cost you can afford).

Gathering increased amounts of data, and building the infrastructure that allows you to analyze and act on that data is the future of large scale content on the web. The only other alternative is content at an individual scale targeted at a niche audience (i.e a blog). At that personal level, the author can truly understand and respond to their audience. At any higher level, you need more, and the most successful publishers will be the ones who have the necessary tools.

Here’s a flash poem by M.

I went to another SF PHP Meetup last night. As always, it was highly entertaining, and well worth staying in the city until 10 PM. I love the fact that we host these at CNET now. Big thanks to Tougeron for running these meetings. As you can see from Touge’s account, Terry was in full effect (that’s a good thing). Next time, Mager should come instead of watching VT getting their ass kicked.