October 2004 Archives

The company that I have been working on for over a year and a half now was announced on our new blog. Here's an excerpt:

We are very pleased to announce a new company: Rojo Networks, Inc. Our mission is to make online content more accessible and useful for information consumers, and our free Internet service, Rojo, aims to do just that.

To find out more about the company and the service, please see more of the first post. I decided to co-found Rojo because I believe the Internet is passing through an inflection point--moving, as some might say, from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0. The first generation web was hard to write to--and expensive to publish to--so organizations were the primary producers of web pages. Personal web pages certainly existed, but the truth is that they were more of a novelty and were rarely updated. But now blogs, wikis, social networks, and more have made information and identity online much more user-centric, rather than just organization-centric.

While this emergent, prolific, and dispersed information environment has many great advantages and will surely disrupt traditional approaches to publishing, it certainly has a major drawback: clutter. With the benefits of the democratization of content, a market for intelligence, the freedom to create, and the equality of voice, comes more information chaos. Yet I look at this as an opportunity, in the same way the folks at Yahoo or Google realized that the chaos of the web itself needed to be addressed to make it truly useful.

I remember the first time I tried email (called Blitz Mail when I was a student at Dartmouth) and I remember where I was when I saw my first web browser (Mosaic.) I will now always remember when I saw my first feed aggregator. In case you haven't heard about feeds by now—RSS feeds, Atom feeds, XML, FOAF—they are a new way of publishing and subscribing to content, and I believe will join publishing by web page and publishing by email as a third major way that information publishers and information consumers do their digital dance. Publishers, bloggers, corporations, and the like are beginning to syndicate their information in freely available and standardized formats—feeds—so that software, aka feed readers, can read content from countless sources all in one environment. Correspondence has email, chat has IM, static content and brochures have web pages, and now dynamic, changing content like news and blogs have their own medium: feeds. To read feeds you used to need to download special software, just like you needed special software to use email. But as web sites like Hotmail emerged to offer users a free service through a web browser, Rojo is a free service available in the browser at www.rojo.com.

However, we think feed reading is just the tip of the iceberg. We are working on ways to help people search, discover, and share information with their friends and colleagues. This is just the beginning. I invite any and all R21 readers to read my blog not through HTML pages but through my feed, and in Rojo. Rojo is in an invite-only beta trial, but R21 readers simply have to email chris21 at rojo dot com and I will set you up with an account.

And if you want to come see me talk about "Publishing 2.0" and Rojo at the Web 2.0 conference tomorrow, please come to my workshop at 2:45pm. You can visit http://web2con.com/ to register. If you'd like a "friend of Chris" discount, just email John Battelle at jbat at battellemedia dot com.