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Is the Web a platform, or is it just something you should use to build a platform? That’s not a Zen koan, it’s an attempt to categorize one of the discussions going on in Web 2.0-land. You might think it’s an easy one to solve, since Tim O’Reilly — one of the guys who came up with the term — says that the idea of Web 2.0 involves “the Web as platform.” In other words, the Web is an integral part of a service like Google Maps or Flickr.

Others seem to disagree, as Fred Wilson notes in a recent post. Jeremy Zawodny seems to feel that the Web is what you use to build a platform. And how do you build one? Greg Linden says Web 2.0 consists so far of “mashups” that simply throw together something like Google Maps with classified listings, his point being that if that’s all there is to your service, you are likely to get overtaken. Don Park says all the fuss over Web 2.0 is like “a party inside MacGyver’s shoebox.”

In a way, Don Park and Greg Linden have a point — if this new revolution (or evolution) is just about cool Ajax sites and neat mashups using Google Maps and [fill in the blank], it’s hard to see it having any lasting effect. What makes things like Flickr.com different? Not the platform, and not the Ajax, but the interaction — the community. And finding ways to enhance it, like RSS and open APIs and so on.

Fred points to a perceptive essay by Paul Graham, and says the main point is “the Web is a platform and you must build on top of it and you must be open and you must not try to lock people in. If you do, you are eventually going to regret it.” Words to live by.

Anyone who spends any time with blogs and the Web winds up with hundreds of RSS feeds and sites they want to check — and yet there are always more, not to mention regular news sites. How best to filter all that? Sure, we could all just go to tech.memeorandum.com and leave it at that, but if you’re like me you just wind up subscribing to even more feeds and it compounds the problem.

Readers like Bloglines.com, NetNewsWire and NewsGator.com help, but even they can’t do it all. My colleague Mark Evans mentions Inform.com, which had a rather ignominious launch awhile back but seems to have ironed most of the bugs out. I like the ability to sort through news based on themes (they call it a “discovery path”), and to track those through other sources, but the interface seems a little on the complicated side, and I wonder if that will hold it back.

I’ve come across a couple of other attempts at solving the problem, and both are kind of interesting: Gritwire.com uses a desktop-style Flash interface and has some nice elements to it (although I’ve just started playing around with it — I think I came across it in Steve Rubel’s links one day) and Common Times goes at it a different way: it looks like a newspaper, but the articles are arranged based on a kind of del.icio.us-style social bookmarking process. It makes good use of Ajax and tags too. If you’ve tried either one, or know of any others along the same lines, drop me a note.

I don’t want to jump on the Skype-skepticism train that’s been going around, but Russell Shaw over at ZDNet — who writes a blog about VOIP — points to a story from TheStreet.com that suggests the eBay-Skype marriage could be less rosy than either company hoped it would be (or should be, for $4.1-billion). According to the story by Jonathan Berr, a group of eBay’s power sellers say they don’t have any real interest in using Skype to contact or be contacted by prospective buyers.

The group of about 900 sellers, who are members of the Professional eBay Sellers Alliance, don’t see the VOIP service as a compelling feature, according to the group’s executive director. “Skype doesn’t give me a capability that I already don’t have,” Jonathan Garriss told TheStreet. “It’s not something that is going to change the way that the eBay sellers in our group are going to run the business.” That might come as a bit of a shock to eBay CEO Meg Whitman, who has been selling the benefits of the merger of Internet telephony and eBay’s auction service. It might also come as a shock to some of those who have been defending the massive acquisition based on the idea that sellers will adopt Skype.

Russell points out that PESA isn’t just a group of malcontents, but one that “collectively accounts for a cumulative annual total of more than 70 million eBay transactions and $1 billion in transaction volume.”

Update:

Andy Abramson has some info about another Skype problem: the “Borg-like eBayization” of the company, which could be draining away some of the management style that accounted for the company’s early success. This is a phenomenon that my friend and fellow tech-blogger Mark Evans has also mentioned.

What is it with telecom executives lately — did they all get together at a meeting and decide that they were going to take over the Internet? It’s starting to feel that way. First it was Ed Whitacre, CEO of what used to be SBC Communications (now AT&T); he said in an interview with BusinessWeek that companies like Google, Microsoft and Vonage would have to pay up to use his network: “What they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that… why should they be allowed to use my pipes?”

Now we have similar comments from Bill Smith, chief technology officer for BellSouth, who told the Washington Post that his company should be able to make some websites work faster than others, in return for payments from companies such as Yahoo. In other words, your GTalk might not work quite as fast as MSN’s VOIP service because Microsoft decided to pay BellSouth whatever they were asking to prioritize their packets. “If I go to the airport, I can buy a coach standby ticket or a first-class ticket,” Smith said. “In the shipping business, I can get two-day air or six-day ground.”

Good Morning Silicon Valley has a good headline on their post about Smith’s proposal: “Interesting approach, Bill; why don’t you try it on your phone network first?” How would BellSouth’s phone customers feel if they knew someone else was paying more so that their phone call was getting through faster or was better quality? More to the point, how would the government feel? Carl Howe of Blackfriars has it right when he says BellSouth has joined the “Internet payola club.”

As TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington was one of the first to report, Yahoo is integrating RSS feeds into its new Ajax-powered Yahoo Mail (which is based in large part on Oddpost, the webmail company Yahoo acquired last year) and into its My Yahoo news and email alerts. There’s no question that this is a good thing — the more traction RSS gets, the better it will work. And as Richard MacManus of Read/Write Web points out, the fact that Yahoo is doing it across its various offerings is a way of “bringing RSS to the masses.”

But is it a good way? Maybe so. Some people sure seem to like the idea, including Charlene Li of Forrester Research, who says it’s just what she’s been waiting for. Even the often grumpy Dave Winer says that Yahoo has “hit a home run.” Michael Parekh seems to like the move as well, although Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion says it still has a few kinks that need to be worked out. Scott Gatz really likes it a lot, but then he works for Yahoo.

I must admit that I’m a little non-plussed by all the cheering (as is Paul Kedrosky)– and it’s not just because I didn’t get an invite to Yahoo’s beta test. Yes, it’s good to have RSS spread far and wide, but it’s not like Yahoo just drank the Kool-Aid on that subject — RSS feeds have been available as part of My Yahoo for at least a year or so, and all the company has really done is incorporate what Oddpost had into its new email service. It doesn’t even have any really cool features as far as I can see. Or maybe it’s just that I don’t feel any particular need to have RSS incorporated into my email — I’d rather use a standlone Web-based reader like Bloglines.com or netvibes.com.

Update:

Russell Beattie is a little over-excited about the whole thing — “insanely excited” is how he puts it — but I must admit he has a point when he says the most interesting thing about the announcement is the part that no one paid much attention to (including me), which is RSS alerts via SMS. News alerts from any blog or RSS feed to your phone, in other words. Now that has potential — and not just for RSS feed spam.

Online-classified service Craigslist.com is extremely popular, with close to 9 million unique visitors in September according to some estimates. So how much is it worth? (figuring out how much various Web services are worth seems to have become a new sport).

Based on Om Malik’s rough rule of thumb from recent deals for companies such as MySpace.com and Weblogs Inc., which he said produced an average value of $38 (U.S.) per unique monthly visitor, Craigslist would be worth about $330-million (by way of comparison, that’s about 16.5 times the company’s revenue, which is higher than the range that Jason Calacanis thinks is reasonable for an online property, but a lot less than the almost 70 times revenue eBay agreed to pay for Skype, based on the $4.1-billion price tag).

The value of Craigslist might be about to go down, however, as the online classified game heats up. There’s Google Base, for example, which admittedly is rather confusing to use and therefore perhaps less of a threat (or more, depending on who you believe). And then there’s a little company whose name begins with “Micro” and ends in “soft.” The behemoth from Redmond is rumoured to be launching a new online-classified style service codenamed “Fremont,” according to various sources, including TechCrunch.

Plenty has been written — both pro and con — about using Google as a source of medical information. People with rare diseases or those who have been ignored by the medical system have found it useful as a way of dealing with their symptoms and of finding others with the same disease. Doctors, meanwhile, find that they get bombarded by inane questions from hypochondriacs who use the Web to convince themselves they have some life-threatening disorder, and others warn that people who turn to the internet for help can often wind up with inaccurate information.

Venture capitalist and polymath Paul Kedrosky, however, points us to another emerging phenomenon — doctors and other health-care professionals using Google to help make a difficult diagnosis. He links to a letter from the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, in which the author describes how a medical researcher typed a list of symptoms and descriptions from a biopsy report — on a child with a skin ailment — into Google and arrived at the correct diagnosis, which was then confirmed by DNA testing. It’s true that the Web is filled with a lot of mis-information, hoaxes and hype — but the right answer is often in there too somewhere.

Personal video recorder company TiVo Inc. said Monday that it plans to roll out a new feature that will allow users to choose certain commercials, based on keywords, and then have them inserted into TV shows that they have recorded with their TiVo (Dave Zatz has a description of how this would work, taken from a patent application by TiVo).

That might sound a little odd considering one of the main benefits of having a TiVo is that you can fast-forward through the commercials, but it’s obvious that the PVR company is trying to find new revenue sources and is willing to consider just about anything. This new feature sounds a lot like an attempt to create a kind of Google AdWords model, but with TV instead of the Internet.

Is that even possible? Carl Howe, a former Forrester Research consultant, says he thinks it is “a brilliant idea,” — the Googlization of TiVo, he calls it (he goes even further to say that he sees Google buying TiVo because of the information it will be able to collect based on its new advertising model). Others disagree.

Om Malik, for example, notes that paying users of TiVo — who are already paying for something that others can get for virtually nothing through the PVR offered by their cable company — might be less than enamoured with the new service. AdWords works for Google because its main service is not only free, but is so useful that people don’t mind having ads served to them, not to mention the fact that the act of searching is more closely aligned with targeted ads than, say, the act of watching CSI:Miami.

Stephen Baker of BusinessWeek is also skeptical, as is Cynthia Brumfield from IPDemocracy. And I would have to say I am too — TiVo’s move seems more like a Hail Mary pass by a struggling company than anything else.

Thomas Hawk, a Flickr fan who writes a technology blog at thomashawk.com, recently linked to an interesting post by Norwegian engineer and blogger Eirik Solheim, who compared Flickr — the former Vancouver-based photo site that is now part of the Yahoo empire — with Webshots, a photo site that is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

A chart mapping the traffic patterns from both sites (courtesy of Alexa.com) is quite instructive, in that Webshots has been going steadily downward in terms of “daily reach” while Flickr has been going steadily upwards. Flickr is about to pass Webshots, and the site hasn’t even been in existence for two years.

As both Thomas and Eirik note, this is likely because Flickr is a much better example of a “Web 2.0” service. In other words, it does a better job of taking advantage of the interactive Web. It is easy to use, it has a simple interface with not a lot of cluttered advertising, and it emphasizes community through the use of tags, groups, comments, contacts and so on — not to mention RSS feeds for everything and an open API. A lesson to be learned, and not just for photo sites.

Update:

Narendra Rocherolle, one of the founders of Webshots, has taken issue with the Web 2.0-style comparison between that company and Flickr for a number of reasons, including the fact that he says Photobucket is also growing just as quickly as Flickr and is not a Web 2.0 company. Leaving aside the “what is Web 2.0” question, I would argue that Photobucket is growing because it also encourages sharing (or distributing), just in a different way than Flickr — and both do so in ways that Webshots doesn’t. That is the important point, I think.

Update 2:

A story from Associated Press makes a similar point about Mapquest, although you have to read between the lines. Mapquest is the most popular map site, but is facing increasing competition from Google — in part because of features such as satellite images (which Mapquest used to have, but got rid of because it didn’t think they were useful) but also because it doesn’t have an open API. That means if you want to do “mash-ups” like beerhunter.ca you have to use Google, and I would argue that is a crucial difference — not just in useability, but in the way the two companies are structured — and that in turn ultimately affects how attractive the service is.

Wired magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson — also the author of a book on the so-called “long-tail” phenomenon — has an interesting post on his blog, in which he notes that he spends most of his time reading the 150 blogs he subscribes to, and only reads something in a mainstream media outlet if a blog he is reading links to one. “If there’s something relevant to my interests in the Wall Street Journal, the daily NYT or some other news site, I assume one of the blogs I read will point me to it,” he says.

That could cause a sort of echo-chamber type of problem, of course (what if those other blog writers don’t read any mainstream media outlets either?). In any case, Chris says he reads blogs because they add something to the regular news or idea flow, in one of three ways: they add value with “a unique perspective or analysis,” they add it with unique information, or they add value by “providing a unique filter/lens on content available elsewhere,” (which sounds a little like number one).

As he points out, this is not just a smart strategy for blogs, “it’s a smart strategy for any content creator in an era where the tools of production and distribution are fully democratized and the marketplace is flooded with commodity competition.” I couldn’t agree more. And that applies in spades to newspapers and magazines, media formats that have been dying a slow death for the past 20 years, long before the Internet became a phenomenon. All the Web has done is to make the process more obvious, and speed up the rate of decay.

The reason Chris likes blogs is because they filter the news in all sorts of interesting ways, giving you dozens of different viewpoints — like having a newspaper edited by a whole pile of different people, instead of just one or two. And it gives it to you in “micro-chunks,” as VC Fred Wilson calls them. That’s appealing in all kinds of ways — ways that a newspaper isn’t.