Mark Andreesen and the IMG tag

The evening of February 23, 1993 was mostly unremarkable around the internet. But on that evening, a brash young man by the name of Marc Andreessen sent an email that would drastically alter the course of history. In order to fully understand what happens there, one has to think of the internet prior to that day.

Before that message made its way through several mail servers, the internet was a mostly text-based medium. HTML, the source code for the web, may have linked to images but the idea of mixing images and text was not part of the internet experience. In fact, the idea of mixing anything just didn’t exist: a movie stayed a movie and was linked to independently but embedding it into a page was a concept that would not come to fruition until several years later.

Sound, images, moving images, text were all living in separate silos. Yes, they could be linked to but they mostly worked as dead ends as they could not move forward from there (think of a browser that would link images instead of having them embedded into the page and when you got to that image, your only available navigation would be to move back). And because they were mostly dead ends, they forced the web into a relatively hierarchical model. Text was free to cross-link but other media were not.

Andreesen’s stance was that they would implement the tag as proposed and were sending it to be discussed as part of a future implementation of the HTML standard (remember that, at that time, HTML was not yet a standard).

Netscape proprietary approach and forward motion

A few years later, Andreesen would continue on the same course with the company he co-founded, Netscape, pushing for new extensions to the HTML standard and then extending the browser even further. With every new browser introduction, Netscape would push out new features.

With much of the internet being widely open and standard-based, Netscape’s introduction of new things at a fast and furious rate rankled some of the early maintainers of the web. There was widespread worry that Netscape was “breaking” the web through its use of non-standard implementation. Among some of the things Netscape would introduce over this period would be things we cannot imagine not existing on the web.

For example, Netscape was the first to introduce web-cookies, which not only gave rise to the kind of tracking that most of the advertising industry relies on but also simplified and sped up the way in which pages could be customized or logins were remembered.

https, which is used to ensure that communication between your web browser and a remote server is encrypted so no one can break into it, was another such innovation, which gave rise to e-commerce and e-banking.

And then, there’s Javascript. In December 1995, Netscape announced Javascript as a programming language for the web that could run either on a server (but only on Netscape’s brand of web servers) or on the client. The world of programming was in a furor over the announcement, calling the language a horrible kludge and generally being unhappy that they had not been consulted to make the language more pure.

Every step of the way, developers started adopting Netscape’s innovation, giving rise to sites showing a “Best viewed with Netscape” icon. This, in turn, led the Netscape browser to be the most used web browser on the Internet, at some point being used for nearly every 8 or 9 out of 10 web page views on the internet.

Most of Netscape’s inclusions eventually made it into other browsers as they tried to capture market share from Netscape, and eventually, most of those innovation were standardized, ensuring their continuation moving forward. Netscape’s leadership and willingness to stand up to the rest of the industry in order to move forward may have eventually led to its death as a company but its impact is still felt daily.

Microsoft and AJAX

One of the companies that tried to mimic Netscape’s strategy was Microsoft. In order to make its web browser, Internet Explorer, more relevant to developers, Microsoft tried to introduce changes that were mostly proprietary to its web browser. Among those was a technology called ActiveX, which was Microsoft’s proprietary approach to plug-ins. Trying to differentiate its Office suite and Exchange server, Microsoft introduced the XMLHTTP ActiveX component, which allowed web applications to become much more interactive, in 1999.

Whether it was hatred of Microsoft or lack of awareness, the technology did not really get widespread adoption until Jesse James Garrett named the technology AJAX, for Asynchronous Javascript And XML.

The lesson in this is that to break a standard is not enough to get things moving forward. A way to brand that standard so it becomes easily understandable to a wider public goes a long way to garnering support for new technologies, whether they are standardized or not.

HTML5 needs a posse

Previous history points to progress on the web being largely made because people were willing to take a stand and move things forward, standards be damned. But it seems that few are willing to move things forward in a drastic way. To date, complete support for existing standards has been a challenge and it seems there is some level of calcification around breaking new ground.

The wonderful set of underlying technologies making the core of what we know as HTML5 may not be perfect but it’s the best thing we have so instead of crying about the poor implementation of this or that component, instead of asking why it’s missing certain pieces, let’s go out, as developers and stretch the limits of what is possible in a browser.

Break new ground and break old browser. Once you’ve done so, ask the others to implement the features you’re leveraging.

To implement in a standard-compliant way may be smart if you want to cater to the masses but if you want your app to be exceptional, you have to be willing to take the hits. Go ahead and break new ground by looking forward instead of staying to the shores of yesterday’s standard compliance.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Pushing beyond standardization. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Desktop and the Web as one

Much has been written already about how Microsoft is trying to be all things to all people by offering a single operating system for both tablets and computers. The company announced an operating system that marries a lot of the tablet experience as presented by the likes of the successful iPad, and the many other contenders for the crown currently on the market, with what has more traditionally been known as a windows PC.

Along the way, Microsoft has introduced Metro, a new way to interact with Windows that brings much of the tile-based experience they first unveiled with their Windows Phone 7 operating system. Like them or not, tiles are Microsoft’s attempt at getting a spot at the mobile table and they are now taking this mode of interaction from the phone to tablets and PCs. The Metro UI is probably the single largest change in the way Windows has looked since Microsoft unveiled Windows 1995, an operating system that was a significant user-interface departure from its predecessor.

Lost in the commentary has been the fact that tiles are programmable using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, three core technologies used by millions of developers around the world. With this, Microsoft is basically saying that the languages that power most of the user interfaces for the web should be the languages that power most of the user interfaces for Windows. This is both a radical departure from mainstream thinking (although Palm tried to go down that route with WebOS) and a return to the source for Microsoft.

Looking back, looking forward

In 1997, I had the privilege of being among the people selected as launch partners for Internet Explorer 4. As such, I was able to see the product evolve from idea to release, seeing along the way many false starts and ideas that did not make it into the product. One of the most intriguing idea at the time was that of replacing the UI shell with a web browser one, essentially allowing for HTML  widgets to run directly on a user’s desktop.

I was smitten by the feature and heartbroken when I learned that it would not ship for reason that went beyond the technical. Around the same time, Microsoft was in a major war with Netscape and rumors of an anti-trust lawsuit being launched against the company were swirling. At hand was the idea that Microsoft’s ability to tie the web experience to its near-monopoly on operating systems gave it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

While it is true that Microsoft had the leading position in the operating system, there was little evidence of the success that resulted from it tying other components to it: its web browser offering were poor and had made little headway in the marketplace, where the Netscape browser held a significant lead. So there was little evidence that just tying two products would help lift both. It wasn’t until Microsoft started matching features with other successful browser that their offering started gaining traction.

But none of this mattered in the fall of 1997 and the idea of integrating a user’s desktop with the web was either too ahead of its time or seen as too risky by the legal departments at Microsoft. The net result was that when Internet Explorer 4.0 came out, the feature to connect web and desktop had been reduced to a way to push content to the browser and potentially use it on screensaver, an offering that fell far short of the promise.

Moving forward almost 15 years, Microsoft is no longer seen as a threat on the technology market. The antitrust lawsuit has made the company tentative in its offering, often staying as far away from controversy as it can. The new darlings of the technology world have taken over most of the mindshare that was held by the Redmond giant and only a few faithful follow what the company is about. It is not a significant player in the mobile phone market at this time (this title is split between Apple, with its iPhone line, and Google, with its Android ecosystem) and many see the tablet market as one that is making the personal computer, the very arena where Microsoft is king, irrelevant.

So the house that Bill built had to do something dramatic to regain attention. It had to offer an operating system that would meet today’s users’ needs, an operating system that could compete, in terms of setting the agenda, with the much smaller iOS and OSX produced by Apple.

Along the way, I suspect that somewhere in Redmond, some of the people who had tied the web and the desktop in 1997 started talking about how this could be their time…

… and the result is the Metro UI:

OSX Xeroxing or not?

Many of the Apple zealots have pointed to the Metro UI and the fact that Microsoft can still run a more traditional Windows look in parallel as a showcase of why the company will “fail” in the market. They present this as a example of Microsoft being unable to make the tough decision of separate offerings for separate computing devices. They highlight that Apple is much smarter in its approach because it has decided to create two operating systems: OSX for traditional computers, iOS for everything else.

So I think it’s fair to assume that no one can say that Microsoft is looking to copy Apple here. I think it’s OK to point out that Apple fans have basically said that the idea of marrying a mobile experience with a PC experience is not terribly smart.

That being said, it’s also interesting that Microsoft and Apple seem to be sharing a view of the future. And that view seems to say that smaller, single purpose applications bought from an online store will take over your whole screen, scraping away any piece of the visible interface. For Apple, this is best manifested with the version of OSX they most recently released (Lion) which offers the experience I described above and tries to marry some of what the company has learned from iOS with what has traditionally been seen as their computer operating system.

So the idea of an App store is definitely something where Microsoft is following Apple; the idea of running apps in full screen with no vendor interface is also something where Apple had the lead; the idea of bringing tablet and phone-like behavior to an operating system is something Apple has claimed as its own.

So the only question remaining is really: should we have separate operating systems for separate devices or should we have a single operating system that can be used for multiple devices. For Microsoft, the answer is now the latter; for Apple, the answer to date has been that OSX is for computers and iOS is for everything else. My question to Cupertino might be about how long it will be before they decide that one OS is sufficient for both computers and all other devices.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Windows 8 is Microsoft’s bet on the future. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

The attacher: Microsoft

The primary view of the attacher is that it has a solid product and now tries to attach every new effort to that product, making it increasingly unwieldy as the product now has to support legacy and new approaches to servicing customers.

For example, for a long time, Microsoft’s insistance that everything be tied to Windows looked like it might be a winning strategy.  But, over time, the strategy started falling apart. Sure, Microsoft’s tying of the browser into its operating system made it relevant for the internet era, but eventually new players (Firefox, Chrome, Safari) emerged and, because it was so deeply embedded into the operating system, Internet Explorer had a longer update cycle, leaving it increasingly vulnerable and forcing it to loose marketshares.

In the same way, Microsoft’s insistance that its mobile offering be more like Windows left it with an incompatible user interface for mobile device. By the time the company decided that it would toss away the concept of toolbar and icons, it was already too late and Microsoft has ceded developers’ mindshare to Apple (with iOS) and Google (with Android).

Rare in startups

A precondition for a company to become an attacher is that they have something to attach to. In other words, they already have an existing product that has been successful and on top of which they are trying to bolt something incompatible. In a way, I would argue that this is also what Apple does with iTunes, a product that may have a new logo but does so much more than music that its moniker seems incorrect.

However, I would say that the attacher is, in the long run, a losing strategy. It shows that the company is unwilling to let go of past successes, which may now work as an anchor around their feet, leaving them with less room to grow and adapt.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Which company are you: the Attacher. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Strategic Position

Google lives on the web. Most of its application need a web layer in order to operate and, if it were to find itself in a position where the access to their application where to be compromised through the equivalent of a strategic man in the middle type of attack, their business would die off. So, if Microsoft, which currently still controls around 70 percent of the web browser market, were to decided to change their code to impact how Google applications function, Google would be in deep deep trouble.

Because Google realizes that the browser is sort of their achilles heel, they had to make a play into that space. The first thing they did was help the creation of an alternate offerings, by giving large subsidies to Microsoft competitors like Apple and the Mozilla foundation, largely dolled out as revenue for traffic generation through the search box. See, one of the thing not too many consumers are told about is that the search box in Safari or in Firefox are actually paid placements: Every time a user uses that box to perform a search, a little bit of revenue goes back to the browser creator. So that’s great because it allows those alternative browsers to develop and, as long as Google is people’s preferred choice anyways, no one is complaining.

Of course, there are certain issues with the arrangement: a lot of the people who have installed Safari or Firefox don’t like online ads and some developers were happy to provide tools allowing those users to remove ads from web pages. Google wasn’t too thrilled about that but it found the issue mostly OK as long as the arrangement didn’t hurt its advertising cash cow too much.

But over time, this model created a problem. The feature was tested by consumers who, having seen too much of their screen real estate polluted by ever larger ads, liked what they saw. And, as ads became smarter and started to target users individually, it spooked consumers. Being able to block certain ads became a product differentiator and started to cause some problems to Microsoft.

So, with IE8, Microsoft is starting to claim that it will help users and one of the trial baloons it has been floating is that the user may have more control over what ads they can see and possibly may be able to block some ads.

For Google, that’s not too happy a development: the idea of being able to provide free products is based on the fact that Google is really and advertising company with a side business in search. And if the advertising is blocked, then Google’s whole business model falls apart.

So now, Google needs to regain some level of control. For many years, it’s been going after bits and pieces of the Microsoft empire: a little bit of the office suite over here (Google Apps), a little bit of the enterprise space this way (Google Appliances), a little extra screen real estate (Google Widgets), an alternate application distribution network (Google Pack)… but the premise behind most of their offerings was that life was now in the “network cloud” (basically recalling Scott McNealy’s old “The Network is the Computer” concept with 2.0 flavor).

With Chrome, Google is now trying to bypass most of Windows. There’s still a few things that Windows will be allowed to do for now (connecting to the Internet, managing the communication layer) but it seems that this is the farthest Google has gone into addressing Microsoft head on. In the mid-1990s, Marc Andreesen, then at Netscape, said he wanted to relegate Windows to being just a set of basic libraries and, with this offering,  Google is trying very hard to do so though I am sure you’ll never hear them say so.

Will it work? I don’t know. At first glance, I’d say that their challenge will be to get the software installed on a lot of machine. For all their past efforts, it looks like it may take a while. Once they have gotten Google Chrome installed, the next thing will be to move up to a default setting. That will be another challenge.

What I suspect is that the company will soon offer a customizable version to cable and phone companies to ensure that they choose Chrome over Internet Explorer. And one thing I’m pretty sure about is that whatever happens, Google will ensure that ad blocking software will not work on Chrome.

Memory Management: Marketing or Truth?

One of the things that leaves me scratching my head is whether the memory management Google claims as an important piece of its offering is actually based more on marketing messages than reality. Buried in the developer’s menu is an item that supposedly offers a view into the memory and CPU usage of Google’s new browser. Yes, the browser feels fast so it’s clear that there are a number of improvements there but what is that costing in terms of memory. Here’s what the browser reports:

What you’re seeing here is the browser running two plain HTML pages and an instance of a richer web-based application (Google Reader, which, according to this, accounts for 40Mb of memory space used). Where I get a little puzzled is when I looked at what Microsoft reported through its task manager:

The same 5 processes appear (but since Windows only knows them as running as chrome, it can’t identifty which is which but the numbers are very different: Chrome reports an aggregate memory use of 96,300K while Windows reports an aggregate memory use of 121,544K or 25,244K more. To be very honest, I don’t know which number is correct but, with only 3 tabs open (and the tabs I have on here are the minimum I have open at any time), I don’t find it very reassuring to see this type of gap appear. Will it get worse as I add more tab? I don’t know but it’s something worth investigating.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Google unveils web-based OS. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Before I go any further in this, I want to have a huge disclaimer: I’m a pretty big fan of some Google products. One can see Google ads running on this site (I’m an AdSense user) and a portion of my traffic gets here thanks to Google’s search engine. i’m also a big user of the search engine, I have a Gmail account (although it is not my primary email system) and I use Google Maps and Google News often. I’ve played with the search API in the past and, for the most part, I’ve been happy with my overall Google experience. However, I worry that the company is heading in the wrong direction and I want to ensure they remain a viable player as they have re-ignited investments in the search space, which has benefited all users on the Internet. However, I fear that, if they are not careful, they could suffer a fate similar to that of Netscape, which popularized web browsing and ended up being gobbled up by AOL, where it is now a shadow of its former self.

That said, let’s look at some of the disturbing similarities.

Market Shares are no guarantee

In the early days of the commercial Internet (let’s say 1996), Netscape was a very successful company. It had beaten every Wall Street expectation and completed a stock offering that had captured the imagination of the general public. The Netscape management graced the covers of most magazines in America and the little browser that could (then in version 2.0) had captured an impressive 75+ percent of the market. Netscape had also introduced its own line of web servers, with a proprietary language called LiveWire, which allowed to create more dynamic applications. The company was also offering a web page development tool, and struck partnerships with many companies to integrate their audio and video components with the browser.

Microsoft had come out with Windows 95, which included a browser (Internet Explorer) which they had licensed from an outside source (NCSA, the place where Marc Andreesen had worked prior to Netscape and the browser was Mosaic, an early web browser Marc had been involved with). The world had mostly laughed at the pitiful version 1.0 offering from Redmond. It was simply a bad product, which did not get much redemption with version 2.0.

Microsoft on the Offensive

The folks at Netscape were feeling pretty smug. After all, they dominated the browser market, had managed to get a way to sell server products and comments about the upcoming irrelevance of Microsoft started making the rounds. But the giant was awake and the clouds over Redmond only covered a flurry of activity. By the time IE 3.0 was released, most people had written Microsoft off. If they couldn’t get as simple a piece of code as a browser to catch up, how could they have a chance to survive.

Netscape had come out with version 3.0 and it was good, if a little bloated from the everything but the kitchen sink approach they were taking. Netscape was now offering an Internet suite that included a browser, a mail client, a newsreader client, an IRC client, some groupware capabilities, etc, etc… There was no way Microsoft could catch up.

Netscape Navigator 4 came out and it was good. It was running Java applets, it could do DHTML, etc.. Basically people liked it and didn’t see a reason to switch…

But Microsoft released IE 4.0 and it was better than people expected. it matched the Netscape browser feature for feature and threw in a few things. One of the people in charge of that development was a guy by the name of Yusuf Medhi, who now happens to be the head of MSN.

While Microsoft had fired a major shot with that new browser, everyone expected that all that would change again when Netscape 5 would come out.

Netscape 5 never came out. In fact, Microsoft release IE 5.0 and started gaining market shares (stealing them from Netscape). Netscape seemed to be trapped in its own legacy and had problem getting a new product out. Microsoft release IE 5.5 and Netscape was working on a new rewrite of their product.

Finally, Netscape 6 came out, conveniently skipping a version. Was it the answer to Microsoft that all had hoped? Not quite and by that point it was too late.

Netscape never recovered and now lives as a shadow of its former self. Microsoft put out a 6.0 version of their browser, cleaning up some of the last parts of the markets they wanted and then went to sleep, in terms of browser, until the recent competitive threat of Firefox reared its head, eating up some of their hard earned market shares.

So what went wrong? The answer is complex but I believe that a mix of Hubris (we can beat Microsoft, we have a huge market share) combined with some sloppy releases, the development of a bit of a monoculture (we set the agenda, the industry will follow), an unwillingness to deal with massive competitive threats, a loss of focus on core assets, and a media world that loves to take down the companies they’ve built up all added up.

How does this apply to Google?

For starters, it is clear that massive market shares are no guarantee of success. Google currently holds around 60 percent of the search market, which is good but is also a reason for concern as it is more likely that this share will go down than it is that it will go up.

More worrisome, however, is the development of the Google monoculture. Much of what is going on at Google is happening with little involvement and input from the community. This is where Microsoft generally starts striking. Say what you want about the Redmond giant, they know how to listen and how to take brutal feedback and turn it into decent product. Microsoft is not known for great products but it is known for decent ones. Last week, Microsoft organized Search Champs, gathering a bunch of smart people from the industry in a room and having them talk to them. I was there and was surprised by how focused they are on winning this one. It is the kind of focus I have not seen come from them since the browser wars.

If it wants to survive, Google needs to do something similar. Throwing a product out to the world with the world beta on it is not a feedback loop. Sitting down with users, developers, thought leaders is. The feedback is not always good but it helps improve the product, which is how one wins this war. Furthermore, the goodwill generated by getting people invested in its products and their success allows a company to develop a strong following from a small group of dedicated users, who then serves as advocates in the marketplace. They can have an impact in changing opinion and not involving them can be dangerous.

Of those people, developers tend to be the more finicky. Alas, the success of many platforms on the Internet depends on developers. As developers go, so tend the marketplace because developers tend to be early adopters. Developers were the first people to switch from Yahoo to Altavista. They were the first group to switch from Altavista to Google. Where will they go next? Is it guaranteed that they will stay with Google (however, here is an interesting case, as developers tend to have a bias against Microsoft. The corollary of this is that Microsoft has to offer something that is radically better in order to make gains in the developer world). A good way for Google to mend some of the rift with the development community would be to support RSS along with ATOM as a syndication format. At the current time, Google is the only major search engine without native RSS support.

Another area to watch out for is the loss of focus. Could someone at Google please explain to me how the Google pack, Google WiFi, Google IM or the Google web accelerator fit Google’s mission (to organize the world’s information). How does owning a radio advertising business (something they acquired recently) fit in that model? It seems that Google is trying to do a lot of things in a lot of areas. I’m sure they’re all interesting things but what does that do to the core search assets on which the business was build (or is it that search is just a side business and Google’s mission is really about advertising?) There has been much discussion in the search world about the relevancy of results in the Google search engine suffering from some level of degradation. As always, expectations are high and any decrease (or lack of improvement) in the quality of the search index will be seen as a loss of focus.

Following the Netscape sloppy release, Google also has to worry about better testing before putting products out. Its recent stumbles with the release of Google NewsReader and Google Analytics showed the world products that were not fully ready for market release. The market acceptance for the word beta goes only so far and Google may suffer some reputational damage if it continues along a curve or release first and fix it later (this, however, is not necessarily a standalone cause for failure, as we’ve learned from the release of many Microsoft products that needed their own round of stabilization)

Last but not least is the burning glare of the media world and of Wall Street. As can be seen now that lofty (and, one could add, unrealistic) expectations could not be met, punishment (in the form of a declining stock price) is coming. Similarly, the press is getting more critical. This is part of a normal cycle: a company is hyped up and then taken down. These are just fads (ask your friends at Yahoo!, who have managed to go through the whole cycle and are starting to go back through a build-up phase now).

And, as a postcript, take the advice of pundits like myself with a grain of salt. There are lessons to be learned but I can’t guarantee that these are the right ones to learn. However, what is certain is that Google needs to remain a viable player in search if for no other reason than to keep companies like Microsoft honest. As we’ve seen in the browser wars, once a company wins, it tends to slow down on the innovation front and search is still so young a field that it needs major progress on the innovation front.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Googling Netscape. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Grouping the metrics

In order to figure out weighting, I first started to think about how to group different metrics. For this purpose, I looked at things like the base value (which would give us a baseline as to how much a business is worth based solely on revenue and revenue growth), inventory (looking at things like traffic, reach, and output, because they all give us some data points as to the growth of monetizable assets in the future), consumer involvement (looking at info like links, subscribtions, and comments to define the value of customers), and growth potential (including some more fuzzy measure of potential growth and the advantages of the integration value).

My reasoning for grouping things in this way was that it might make it easier to figure out weighting across those large catch-all categories (and, if there is any discussion at all, I am sure that people will debate the percentage assumption against those categories). I, in no mean, try to represent those as the be-all-end-all approach to valuating a business. They are, at this time, the metrics that give me the best comparative view of a business, when I try to assess its value. However, not being much of a metrics guy to start with (my main reason for doing this series is to provoke debate among people smarter than me so there can be some consensus on metrics in this new web 1+n.x world), I hope that others will step in and show me the error of my ways along with providing some interesting information that will get all of us closer to something useful.

Base Value

The base value, as I see it, is defined by revenue and revenue growth based on historical data. The reason I would consider this to be the base value is that it is a reflection of the business as it exists today and can provide a baseline as to where the business would be headed if growth suddenly slowed or investment in the business stopped. It does not provide any information as to how to accelerate the growth of the business and does not provide more than a view into the present cash value of a business.

However, for young companies, such value does not provide much information. Start-ups, by nature, have a lower revenue and profit line than established companies because they need to recover some of their initial cost and may still be in high growth and research and development phases. As a result, to solely base one’s view of a business on its current ability to generate cash is short-sighted when it comes to start-ups.

Another question when developing the base value is how to factor in risks to the revenue base. For example, if the business relies primarily on advertising from an external network as its basis for revenue (many people have talked about businesses looking to AdSense as the primary source of revenue), one has to wonder what would happen if the dynamics of that relationship were to change.

As a whole, however, because of its overall importance in assessing the present financial value of a business, I would assume that the base value should represent about 20 to 30 percent of the overall value of a business. Initially, the value would be in the 20 percent range because potentials are higher than the current revenue line but, as the business matures, and potentials decrease, it would edge up towards 30 percent.

Inventory

Inventory would be the next potential grouping of different metrics. In it, I would include traffic (and traffic growth), as well as visitors, site counts, reach, and output. Let’s go into more details on each of those.

Traffic is important because the number of page views is something that is monetizable. However, in a web 2.0 space, pageviews are not the only traffic metric one should track. For example, RSS subscriber counts is another useful value (and controversy has already swirled around ads in RSS feeds). However, I would argue that there is one value in the inventory count that is of utmost importance: access to an API. The reason I would venture this is the most important inventory metric is that APIs, once implemented, are harder to unhook from. As such, they represent a harder type of value since they solidy a site’s reach within a particular market segment.

I believe that reach is actually going to be seen as one of the more important values in terms of inventory. The reason is that reach gives us an idea of the potential growth opportunity in a market. If a company has a high reach in an individual market, its potentials are more limited. Witness, for example, a company like Netscape, which once had a reach of 80% (ie. 80% of all internet users were using it. ) Tactically, this kind of position is one where they should have been on the defensive, the reason being that there was more potential of a drop in their reach than an expansion of it. Microsoft is now finding itself in the same position on a number of fronts: Windows, Office, Internet Explorer are all playing in a world where they will not reach a higher percentage of the market. As a result, they are forced to play defensively. One could argue that web 2.0 companies, with their reach APIs and more powerful front ends (thanks to technologies like AJAX) are representing the threat Microsoft saw coming from the Internet in the mid-90s. And one could argue that, this time, the position they’re in (ie. largest player) is endangering their future if they don’t make a radical change (because they can’t grow from the position they’re in).

Going beyond the reach, which provides some information on past growth and potentials moving forward, one has to look at output from the company. For example, in the case of a company like Ebay (arguably a web 2.x company already), the inventory is number of auctions submitted. Similarly, in the case of Craig’s List, it would be number of new ads posted, or in the case of a blog, the number of posts created. One has to be careful about ouput, however, and should measure the cost of output in order to figure out whether the output is good or not. In the case of web 1+n.x companies, output is a very good thing as it is generally created by outside parties for free. That free product is one that those companies then monetize. However, one has to be careful and evaluate if output is outpacing the company’s ability to monetize it because, if an imbalance were to start existing, the value of the output could potentially decrease.

All and all, because inventory has a measurable value and, in general, is the very thing that a company will monetize, I would guess its weight, when figuring out the value of a company would probably sit in the 10–15 percent range.

Consumer involvement

Consumer involvement, which was known in the past as stickyness, is another major group of metrics. This section would include links, subscriptions (both to RSS or API feeds and, if offered to any paid type of service), and any type of interaction a user may have with a system. For example, if you trying to get some interaction information on consumers of a blog, one could look at numbers of comments posted. Alternately, if you’re looking at a search engine, one could look at number of searches performed. Or, if you’re looking at a company which offers an API, you could look at the number of times that API has been integrated in other products and the number of times it is accessed.

I would venture to say that this metric is one of the most important ones when assessing the value of a business. The reason I would value it higher than the ones I mentioned earlier is that this is where one can see whether a business has a potential or not. The interaction with customers (either directly or via APIs) provides so much useful information that a company not looking at this metric is probably off track in terms of evaluating itself (and, generally considering the hype around new businesses, such company could fool itself into extinction as it fails to see major issues arising out of the increase or decrease in consumer involvement.)

Because it represent the value of the existing cutomer base and provides some input as to the trends surrounding that customer base, I would throw a weight of 30–35% of an overall valuation going to factors relating to consumer involvement.

Growth potentials

However, metrics in and off themselves, are pretty useless as a point in time number. As a result, one has to assume the growth potential when evaluating a business. The growth potential can be associated in a number of ways but, when it comes to web 1+n.x properties, it comes down more on the side of potential based on a number of subcomponents. In the interest of provoking more controversy, I would venture that there is a formula to calculate potential and that it is as follows:

Potential = traffic growth rate * reputation vector * brand equity vector * (integration vector (squared)) — ( Risks vector / percentage of risk that can be mitigated)

In the growth rate area, I would put an aggregate growth rate that averages out growth rates over a period of time (6 months to a year if you are computing a monthly growth rate.) The reputation vector and brand equity vector would be values based on reputational and brand equity trends, which I talked about in a previous entry. You will notice that I consider the integration vector to be of such high importance, when defining potential that I’ve decided to square its value. I will talk about integration vectors in a future entry but, put short, the integration vector is the magic glue that makes acquiring or merging a company very valuable because integrating it with another company will derive greater value for the combined entity. It is that issue generally known as synergy but trying to put a value on it would have the potential of making for better, more successful acquisitions and mergers. Last, but not least, is the rist side of the equation. Because risks have a huge impact on potentials, it is important to measure them in order to get an idea as to their potential impact. However, because some of the risks can be mitigated, it is important to capture this figure in order to assess the importance of different risks.

Ultimately, growth potentials represent the largest part of any equation when trying to value a company. Few companies are bought without an expectation of potential and this is why, in my weighting, I would assume potential to represent a substantial (30–40%) part of the equation when trying to measure a company’s value.

Conclusion: Wait, that’s more than 100 percent

If you do the math, it appears the different weight are ending up representing more than 100%. The reason is that those are ranges. However, the truth is that, in any business dealing, there is also an amount of faith and luck that comes in. For example, I sat in a meeting once where an individual was given an option to buy in whole a company which is now very successful on the Internet for around a million dollars. Looking back, it might have been worth that much at the time but I doubt that it would be worth what it is worth now (several billion dollars) had that deal being consumated. Over time, the management of that company was smart enough to mine opportunities and put people in place that helped them realize huge growth. Had that company been in the hand of more conservative (and by conservative, I mean adverse to risk) investors, it would probably not have flourished in the same way.

Having gone through a few days thinking about metrics, it is clear that there are a number of opportunities for people smarter than me to figure out some solid metrics in assessing the value of new companies. Metrics, however, should not be the sole guide when assessing a company.

Many people have asked me why I bothered to look at such boring subject (and why I’ve been blogging so incessantly about numbers lately). My main reasoning is that one of the failures in Web 1.0 (the bubble we lived through in the 90s), lack of accountability and/or expectation management lead to very inflated numbers that eventually left a lot of investors with very poor investment. Having lived (and survived) that bubble, I want people to start thinking more critically about Web 2.0 companies and, hopefully, we can all learn about the mistakes of the past and avoid over-hyping new companies into extinction… because for every bubble, there is eventually a big pop, and no one really enjoys that part.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Metrics — Weighting the Metrics. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Certain software companies have been suffering from the advance of modularity in software design. The main one, to date, has been Microsoft with its Windows software platform. In the mid-nineties, Microsoft decided to integrate a number of Internet components tightly with its operating systems offering. The two most critical ones of those components have been a web server (IIS) and a web browser (Internet Explorer). Leaving aside discussions relating to the antitrust issues this kind of integration has raised, the integration of those tools with the operating system have left openings for alternative approaches that were more modular.

On the server end, IIS has been the subject of many attacks by hackers. Because it is hooked deeply into the operating system, an attack against the web server can have an impact that goes much further that the web front-end. In most cases, the attacks succeeded not only in taking machines down but also turning them into zombie armies that could then turn around and attack other servers. In 2001, the Code Red virus successfully infected hundreds of thousands of machines in less than 24 hours. Subsequent viruses built on this approach and have been responsible for some of the largest attacks against Internet systems to date. The news that the system had built in back-doors only furthered the issue, presenting an opening for other software developers.

The open source movement exploited this by presenting an alternative with Linux and Apache. The Linux operating system, which is modular by design, can be fined tuned and services can be included or not depending on how one wants to shape their system. A web server like Apache can be included in the OS but doesn’t have to be. Because of this modular approach, Apache (which runs on a number of different operating systems) has gained the high ground in terms of marketshare. The Apache project focused on delivering modular components, which represent a tool-set for most web-based application.

The same is true on the desktop end. While Microsoft decided to tightly integrate its web browser with the operating system, making it easier to create lock-in for that platform, the approach backfired when hackers developed viruses and trojans that exploited flaws in the browser software to get to the operating system. It was only a matter of time before users started getting annoyed by the number of attacks and looking at alternative. They found one in the Mozilla foundation, a group of open source developers who created a modular Internet product suite. Because the Mozilla products were built in a modular fashion, the first attack was responded to in less than a week. This quick turnaround in fixing the bug was due to the way the code is implemented: because it is modular, it was much easier to fix and because it does not communicate deeply with the operating system, it represents less of a risk than Internet Explorer and has been recommended by security experts like CERT.

While the browser and web server represent applications that are bundled with an operating system, some people are looking to go much further by modularizing the operating system itself. When broken down to its smaller components, an operating system can almost become device-independent, providing interactions between different components to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its part. Future operating systems will be able to evolve across multiple devices, whether they are computers, mobile phones, televisions, or other devices we have not imagined yet.

This kind of distributed system already exists but in a limited fashion. Some organizations have used Linux to create supercomputers by connecting multiple small machines. The power given to those allows to greatly reduce the overall cost of building very large machines. Similarly, one of the largest web-based application, Google, uses tens of thousands of machines which interact with each other as a single system.

The lesson in this approach is that a modular approach always wins over an integrated one because it reduces costs and increases scalability, thus ensuring greater flexibility. While one can never predict changing markets and future developments, a modular approach is always more flexible and easier to evolve over time.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Modular by Design — Software. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

If you’ve subscribed to the main feed but want a more detailed approach (ie. you’re only interested in my entries on a particular subject), I’ve got good news for you. Feeds are now available for each independent section. I’ve created a new page detailing all the syndication feeds now available on TNL.net. Part of the logic for the new approach is that, if I create a new category in the blog, you will be able to subscribe just that category. This approach allows you to pick and choose which subjects you are interested in.

Another new thing is that TNL.net now support CDF, an outdated Microsoft format that can be used to receive offline information in Internet Explorer. This is only of interest to people using Internet explorer to read stuff offline but I figured that it was a good thing to support since I supported pretty much any other syndication formats out there (at least every one that is used by aggregators).

The new approach will allow me to add new feeds based on new formats when those appear. It’s a much more flexible approach and allows me to move forward with some other plans for TNL.net.

Last but not least, you will notice that the RSS 1.0 and 2.0 feeds are now styled. This is largely an attempt to make the information even easier to read. An interesting discovery during this experiment is that the delta between RSS 1.0 and 2.0 is so great that it is impossible to make the two feeds look exactly alike.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title RSS changes for the blog. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

IM

: One of the conditions for the AOL/Time Warner merger was that AOL open its instant messaging platform to other parties. By agreeing to interoperability between the AOL IM client and MSN messenger one, AOL will now be able to point to its “openness” while maintaining a relatively tight control over the progress of that tool. I am sure the two companies are interested in working together and somehow doubt that they will be very interested in opening the world to other competitors.

At the current time, IM has taken the consumer world by storm and is starting to make headway in the enterprise. Because of its presence concept (you can see whether the people on your buddy list are online right now or not), it will eventually become a critical tool in the enterprise, moving some data traffic from the phone and email to this new platform. Already today, enterprises that have implemented IM solutions are seeing large amounts of traffic on those networks as employees send the shorter requests via this tool. Enhancements in the collaboration aspect of those tools make them perfect to be used for setting up online discussions and document sharing. I suspect that, because AOL is forbidden from adding new features to its IM platform until it has shown to be more open, we will see the company point to Microsoft and get a free pass in terms of adding new features. This will be good for AOL because it will allow to enhance its enterprise offerings. It will also be good for Microsoft, as it will probably be able to increase its footprint into that space.

Long term, I would expect most of the development of this eventually ending on Microsoft’s lap, with AOL doing an asset transfer of its software division to Microsoft.

Digital Media

: Part of the deal includes a non-exclusive agreement for AOL to use the Microsoft Windows Media 9 software suite. Once again, this is good for both companies and bad for every single one of their competitors.

AOL will benefit from the lower cost of software acquisition moving forward. As it looks to move more into fee-based digital media services (with words that it could offer TV shows, music, movies, etc… from its vast assets collection) the company will make more substantial investments into those kinds of technologies. Since this is a partnership, I suspect the products will be heavily discounted.

Microsoft wins in that, if AOL, with its fairly large customer base, start offering more services running on Windows Media 9, it will make it easier for Microsoft to go after other media player and present its installed player footprint as a competitive advantage. The story will go as follows: use Windows Media 9 server and you will not have to worry about your customers having to download extra software. Of course, Windows Media servers will continue to run on the Windows operating system, which should increase sales in that market and protect Microsoft to some extent from the Linux onslaught.

Another important part of this portion of the agreement is that it will allow the two companies to set standards for digital rights management. DRM is basically covering how to ensure that copyrights and purchase rights are assessed on digital media. What this means is that a DRM system basically encodes a piece of digital media (whether it is a movie, music track or piece of software) to include information about what you purchased and how you are allowed to use it. For example, the Apple Music store currently sells music tracks that you are allowed to use on only three computers. Because AOL is one of the largest producer in the world of such media, and Microsoft regards this software area as a very lucrative market in the future, the partnership will give both players a substantial amount of power in shaping the future of digital media.

AOL wins in that it gets someone to do the heavy lifting on the software side to tighten up control of digital media. Microsoft wins in that it gets a better understanding of what large media companies will want and builds a solution it can then resell to other companies. Once again, this is also a good argument for furthering the number of implementations of windows servers as I suspect that Microsoft will strongly recommend media companies use their platform to handle this.

Browsers

: By now, the browser wars are, at best, a distant memory. While a few holdouts do not use Internet Explorer and considerable development and innovation is still happening by makers of non-IE browsers, the market for alternative browsers is relatively small. At last count, IE was controlling over 85% of the global market. The only bright spot in that market was a browser named Mozilla, an open source project for which Netscape, a subsidiary of AOL, was the largest contributor. Because of the bad blood between America Online and Microsoft, there were a lot of rumors about AOL implementing Mozilla as the core browser in its flagship client (it has already done so on the Macintosh computer). With the announcement that AOL will get a seven year royalties free license for Internet Explorer, it seems pretty apparent that support for Mozilla from the AOL camp will probably wane. The long term outlook for the Netscape unit does not look very bright, even if the AOL chairman said that they were not closing the unit for now.

Politics

: This announcement also shows some interesting development in internal politics within the two companies.

In the mid-90s, Microsoft was starting to move more into the general media space. With this agreement, Microsoft signals the completion of a shift back to its software roots. It is probably a realization that there is still a lot of growth in that arena and that it doesn’t make sense from their standpoint to try to get into the media world by acquiring and/or building media assets.

On the AOL/Time-Warner front, this announcement shows a clear power shift in who controls the company. The power is now in Time-Warner hands, with any concept of competing with Microsoft on the software end now a distant memory. Time-Warner understands media and figures that it is better to rely on an outside party to deal with the software side of the business than to try to develop things themselves.

I am sure I’m missing a few things but I expect this story to continue unfolding and having repercussions across the whole Internet space.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title AOL-Microsoft Settlement: The Future. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

We have shared ideas on how to handle digital media

. What exactly does that mean? I wish someone else elaborated on that point as it isn’t clear. Does it mean that they will collaborate on development of joint services? Does it mean they will collaborate in the development of joint product?

Whatever happens is a bit worrisome as we now have the two largest players on the American Internet essentially joining forces. Microsoft has a commanding lead in the desktop OS and the web browser market. AOL hold most of the remainder of the browser market (yes, a few people out there use browsers like Mozilla, myself included), and has a similarly large lead in the IM and access market. The two of them joining forces leave cold beads of sweaty fear running down my back.

Obvious losers in today’s announcement are Yahoo, which will have to fight an uphill battle in terms of making their messaging client remain a viable option in a market where AIM and MSN messenger will inter-operate, Real Networks, which will have to figure out how to makes its media player more competitive in the marketplace (part of the agreement between Microsoft and AOL includes the right for AOL to use the Windows Media 9 software suite).

Surprisingly, few of the press reports seem to cover the point about Windows Media 9. This is pretty significant as it could play a major role in shaping the future of digital media. At the current time, Microsoft is in a three way battle with Real Networks and Apple (which makes quicktime) for future supremacy over next generation online audio and video. Offering their media suite to AOL gives them tremendous leverage as it could increase their marketshares by several millions. Consider yesterday’s announcement that AOL was dropping Real from its partner lineup, it looks like Real will have to eventually transform itself to the point where letting go of its own technology might make sense. At that point, only two players will be left, with Microsoft becoming the dominant player in the arena, and Apple picking up the remainder of the market. Smaller formats, like Ogg Vorbis, will remain the province of aficionados but won’t gain much in the way of marketshares. The worrisome part about all this is that DRM restrictions on both end might get worse and worse as time goes on. I have already complained about Apple not disclosing what DRM setup it was offering and it seems that they are already tightening the vise. I somehow doubt that a new alliance between Microsoft and AOL will be more magnanimous.

However, it’s not all bad news. PC Magazine reports that AOL does not intent to close Netscape, which might be good, though it is not clear why they are doing so.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Microsoft and AOL: Friends again. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

One thing I would question, however, is the viability of the study. The problem comes from some of the basic assessment. First is the problem of assuming that Microsoft and Red Hat are on par in terms of development team sizes. This is simply a fallacy, no matter in which OS camp you sit.

The second is in looking at the bug lists and what was included and excluded. What would be nice is actually seeing the rank of bugs. Microsoft seems to rank most of its bugs as critical. Red Hat patches everything, from bugs in Linux to bugs in applications running on top of Linux. The Redhat errata page for 7.3 lists fixes to MySQL, Python, Lynx, OpenSSL, etc… In order for a true side by side comparison, one would need to add IIS, Internet Explorer, Microsoft SQL server, etc… to the list of bugs listed in the Microsoft errata. When doing that side by side comparison, it still seems that Microsoft holds the leading position in buggy software.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title Buggy Linux, Buggy Windows. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

All these developments are happening among browsers which have a combined market share equivalent to one fourth to one fifth of the one engine enjoyed by IE, the leader (in browser market share) offered by Microsoft. However, they point to an interesting scenario about how new features go from being enjoyed by a small but vocal minority to a wider audience. Tabbed browsing was one of the big innovations that Opera introduced in the marketplace but it wasn’t until Mozilla’s implementation that it started getting noticed. Once developers got used to it, they realized that it was difficult to use browsers that did not offer it and “demanded” that the feature be available in any new browser.

This is an area where an open source project like Mozilla can be considered to have contributed to the mainstream. While Mozilla’s market share remains tiny in comparison to that of Internet Explorer, its impact on web browser development is growing. On one side, it is helping improve the way web pages are developed (due to its strong support for web standards), and on the other, the joint effort of thousands of people are helping develop features that match or improve on what is offered by other browsers.

Since the popularity spurt of tabbed browsing, there hasn’t been any major development coming from the Microsoft end (most of the focus has been in fixing a number of annoying security bugs in their browser) but I would expect the feature to show up in future versions, as IE is now the only browser not to sport the feature.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title How new features appear. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

As many of you already know, the game station is a small box that attaches to your TV and on which you can play video games. However, the firepower of new generation boxes now on the market is now equivalent or higher than that of most computers. The main logic behind this was that gamers wanted a more realistic experience and crunching 3D representation in an ever-changing environment required more and more processing power.

Playstation 2 opens the gate

Last year, Sony introduced the Sony Playstation 2, a new gaming system that included a built-in DVD player and a 3D graphic engine that made computer video card look ridiculously outdated. At that time, Sony admitted that their goal was to go beyond games and control the digital living room. Recent partnerships with Macromedia, AOL, and Real Networks seem to show that Sony has established a clear roadmap as to how it would get into the online market. And with a growing installed base of (8 million so far, and an expected 34 million by 2004), Sony could become a major online player.

Microsoft unveils the Xbox

Having survived the browser wars with Netscape (Internet Explorer now controls 80% of the market), Microsoft is starting to worry. If one could download music and exchange videos via a gaming station, as well as play video games, where would the home PC go? And where would that leave Microsoft’s ambitious .net strategy?

As a result, Microsoft had to play in that field and to do so, it went to game developers. After much discussion, the result is here for everyone to test: it’s called the Xbox, and is essentially a PC packaged as a gaming station. If you read the documentation, the Xbox becomes more difficult to classify as simply a gaming box. For starters, there is a DVD player, which was added just to match Sony’s Playstation 2 DVD player. But Microsoft goes further by building a Dolby decoder within the system as well as adding parental controls to the box.

The second thing they added to the box is the ability to put in a CD, play it, and burn it onto the built-in hard drive (through what they call a music manager). All of a sudden, the Xbox becomes a music stereo box.

Going further is the matter of the Ethernet port and the mysterious broadband network touted by Microsoft. Early inside reports point to the first broadband gaming network that might go beyond gaming. At the current time, there are rumors of a network that would also allow for Internet browsing, email, and instant messaging, as well as gaming.

The messaging portion is an interesting one since it would include and optional plug-in for the box called the communicator, a headphones and microphone device people would use to communicate either via IM, or while playing online games. The unit includes a wireless headset with microphone, which could easily be used to make phone calls if Microsoft uses some of the technology it is currently building into the Microsoft Messenger. Long term, the Xbox could become another entry point into MSN, and into the web as a whole.

Moving forward: the Playstation 3

Sony, however, is not resting on its laurels. Now that Microsoft is entering its turf, the company is seeing its dominance on the digital living room being challenged.

With the PS3, originally slated for mid 2003 but possibly being released earlier, Sony plans to integrate offerings from its music and movie divisions into the system.

Considering the fact that the company already offers a suite of MP3 players, it is easy to see that the company will build that functionality into the next box.

Rumors are that the company will build a large hard drive within the box, which would make it a perfect storage area for an MP3 collection.

But going beyond music, the company is also looking at packaging a digital TV recorder within the unit, turning it into a device that would compete with Tivo and Replay in the market for customized television.

Also built into the box would be a TV tuner, and rumors has it that the system would also include a satellite TV decoder. In order to counter the online capabilities of the Xbox, Sony will release an online pack for the PS2 but will build that functionality directly into the PS3 box.

The unit would be offered in two different version: a light version, which would focus on gaming and be sold for around $250-$300 and a more expensive full featured convergence version which would retail for $400-$500.

Games Only: The Game Cube

Meanwhile, Nintendo believes that games and only games is what consumers want out of their boxes. As a result, the GameCube is a smaller, less pricey gaming box. However, this does not mean that it is offering less performance. It’s just that it’s a different take on the world. As far as Nintendo seems to see the world, gamers will want to pay no more than $200 for a gaming box but may be willing to pay extra for new features.

In a concession to Microsoft and Sony, the box will soon sport two different modem adapters: a 56k module for people who use a phone line and a faster broadband module for people who have a network at home. Rumor has it that Nintendo is preparing a membership network with services like online video game, full Internet access, and the distribution of music data. Since the GameBoy advance can interface with the GameCube, it seems that Nintendo is working on a hardware strategy that will make the gamecube a connecting station into the home, while the GameBoy will become a roaming device that can get updates from that box.

Convergence is here

Based on those recent developments, it seems pretty clear that hybrid boxes are now starting to pop up and that we will soon see more applications (initially in the gaming world but eventually in other areas) become the norm. I would strongly recommend that TNL.net readers who are involved in developing online consumer applications pay attention to the gaming space as it is the next arena for which we might have to format our outputs. Based on early showing, I would say that Playstation 2 will keep its predominant position for the next year or so but may be getting some competition from the new underdog in this arena: Microsoft.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title The Convergence Game. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

RSSup is an ASP script that allows webmaster who already generate an RSS .91 feed for their site to dynamically create an RSS 1.0 feed. Using the Microsoft XML parser (supplied with IE 5) on the server side, you can now move to RSS 1.0 without having to worry about recoding your channel.

Minimum Requirements

I haven’t tested these scripts on multiple platforms but here’s the environment I used to create them:

• NT 4.0 with service pack 6
• IIS 4.0
• Internet Explorer 5.5 (this is important because Microsoft replaced the XML engine on which this script relies)
• A well formatted RSS .91 file

What files are in RSSup.zip?

Recently, I’ve started doing some manipulations or RSS file for different presentations. Included in this zip file are three files to do so:

• rssup.asp Creates the 1.0 channel
• rssupvars.asp Variables you have to change
• Readme.html Basic documentation

Installation

Installing those files is relatively easy.

• Download the source code
• Open rssupvars.asp and edit it. For your reference, here are the different variables:
  • myRSSfile is the location of your RSS file.
  • myRSSurl is the root directory for your server. In my case, it would be http://www.tnl.net
  • myRSStitle is the name of your channel. In my case, it would be TNL.net newsletter
  • myRSSlink is the name of a directory on the server you want to point to. For example, if your feed is not for the main page, you can put the subdirectory here. In my case, that would be http://www.tnl.net/weblog/
  • myRSSdescription is a description of what your channel is about. This allows directories to get more data on what the channel is. In my case it would be something along the line of "a newsletter about Internet technology"
  • myRSSlogo is the location of an image logo for your channel. Please specify the full path to the URL like http://www.foo.com/images/foologo.gif for example
• Put the files on your site and that’s it. You’re up and running with a new 1.0 channel at http://www.yoursite.com/rssup.asp

How much does it cost?

RSSup is free. If you want to use it on your server, a link back to TNL.net or Paypal donation would be very appreciated.

Copyright and final comments

I’ve created those files for my personal use and am happy to share them with you. However, I do not make any guarantee as to their impact on your server. They seem to work fine on mine. If you use them, I’d appreciate a link back to TNL.net. I’ve moved my site off the Microsoft platform in late 2002 so I do not plan to update or continue supporting those scripts. Use them at your own risk.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title RSS .91 to 1.0 using ASP. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

RSSmanip is a set of scripts that allows webmaster who already generate an RSS feed for their site to dynamically create HTML, HDML, and WML documents based on their RSS feed. Using the Microsoft XML parser (supplied with IE 5) on the server side, you can now enable your site for wireless usage by using those scripts.

Minimum Requirements

I haven’t tested these scripts on multiple platforms but here’s the environment I used to create them:

• - NT 4.0 with service pack 6
• - IIS 4.0
• - Internet Explorer 5.5 (this is important because Microsoft replaced the XML engine on which this script relies)
• - A well formatted RSS file

What files are in RSSmanip.zip?

Recently, I’ve started doing some manipulations or RSS file for different presentations. Included in this zip file are three files to do so:

• html.asp Creates an HTML output of your RSS file
• hdml.asp Creates an HDML output of your RSS file (for more on HDML, check out http://www.phone.com)
• wml.asp Creates a WML output of your RSS file (for more on WML, check out http://www.wapforum.org)

Installation

Installing those files is relatively easy.

• Download the source code here.
• Open each of them in your favorite text editor and edit the following lines: mylogo = "./presentation/images/TNLwlogo.bmp" myRSSfile = "/newsletter/channel.xml" mylogo is the location of your logo file. For HDML, that file has to be a .bmp file and for WML, it has to be a .wbmp file. Editors for each are available on the web.myRSSfile is the location of your RSS file beyond the root.
• Open up the IIS console, go to your server properties, click on HTTP headers, click on File Types and add the following: .bmp image/bmp .hdml text/x-hdml .wbmp image/vnd.wap.wbmp .wml text/vnd.wap.wml
• Save the settings and reboot your server.
• Put the files on your site and that’s it. You’re up and running.

• Optional:

  If you want to redirect WML and HDML browser automatically to the appropriate files, use the following script: acceptHeader = Request.ServerVariables("HTTP_ACCEPT") If Instr(acceptHeader, "hdml") 0 Then Response.Redirect "/hdml.asp" Elseif Instr(acceptHeader, "wml") 0 Then Response.Redirect "/wml.asp" End If where /hdml.asp and /wml.asp are the locations or those files (in my example, they’re in the root directory of the server.

Other Version

An earlier version of these scripts allows you to generate code from a RSS 0.91 feed. It is also available for download.

How much does it cost?

RSSmanip is free! If you want to use it, I’d like to receive a link back to TNL.net from you or receive a donation from you.

Final comments

I’ve created those files for my personal use and am happy to share them with you. However, I do not make any guarantee as to their impact on your server. They seem to work fine on mine when I used them. If you use them, I’d appreciate a link back to TNL.net. Since I moved TNL.net to a Linux platform in late 2002, I am no longer supporting these scripts.

Tristan Louis is the founder and CEO of Keepskor and writes the influential tnl.net weblog, where this was initially posted under the title RSS Manipulation in ASP. You can follow him on twitter here or receive his weekly newsletter by subscribing here.