Everybody in IT wants to build the next big thing but in reality it’s almost impossible. Especially for small firms that don’t have plethora of resources.

If you are a web entrepreneur, you know that driving traffic to your website is very vital to its survival. But how do you generate traffic?

The most effective way (in my opinion) is to encourage users to contribute content to your website and then to do some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to enhance the visibility of this content. Thus driving more users to your website by exposing the content to search engines.

But isn’t that the same “egg and chicken” story? we need users to get content and we need content to get users….

Getting the content

Jim Young and I have been always thinking about ways to collaborate by integrating Data and services between Jambo and TagMyCity. We decided to focus our efforts on creating the next small thing and then integrate with other websites to form the next big thing.

This picture got much bigger when I met with Christopher St. John

Christopher had a much bigger goal… his goal was to create a standard license to govern and facilitate information sharing via RSS and Microformats.

The idea is great because it will allow people to utilize shared content by using a simple technology (RSS + Microformats) and by following a standard public license.

We don’t have a clear vision on how this license should be, but we are inviting everybody to participate by editing the wiki.

In the upcoming weeks, Ximda will roll out a new website called DealBurnr.com. The website is a web 2.0 approach to bargain shopping.

We took Digg.com concept of story voting and applied it to deal hunting.

Users can submit deals to dealburnr where people can vote on these deals with either Hot or Cold. The hottest deals rise on top of the queue.

dealburnr is built using Ruby On Rails and utilizes a lot of web 2.0 nifty functionalities such as tags, RSS, social networking and AJAX.

I’ve been reading lately The Long Tail book (by Chris Anderson) during my free time. The book talks about how the digital era is changing the sales patterns of hits and non hits songs (media productions in general).

The author explains the invalidity of the retail store 80/20 rule with 20% of the products responsible for 80% of the revenue. And how online stores such as amazon are making more money by selling more of non hits songs.

The Long Tail of web 2.0

I’ve been seeing the same Long Tail pattern in web 2.0 applications. People are no longer using one mainstream website such as Friendster. Instead, they are scattered throughout the internet using a plethora of niche applications such as LinkedIn, 43things, ma.gnolia, etc.

I totally agree with the author’s theory that the mass culture is fading, and being replaced by a series of niches. And thats why I think big hits websites are going to loose their traffic gradually to non-hit/niche websites.

I think Yahoo, Google and amazon were the first to realize the “Long Tail” effect on the web.

Yahoo for example has been actively acquiring small startups such as del.icio.us, flikr, upcoming, etc. to create their series of niches.

Google on the other hand has been very successful opening their APIs to developers while encouraging them to create their own niches.

amazon who has probably the biggest experience leveraging the long tail to their advantage has been opening their webservices to allow anybody to sell amazon products on their websites or blogs.

The book made me feel better about the way I approach web entrepreneurship. Especially that I’ve been criticized for stretching myself very thin by constantly creating more projects such as ThingICanDo, TagMyCity, Ximda Consulting .. and more coming soon ;)

My philosophy was always similar to “The Long Tail”… Create a series of niches rather than creating a one big hit.

Any thoughts?? ….

We just added new functionalities to Tag My City to allow better social networking throughout our website.

Here is a summary of the new features:

• Provide friendship support. Users now can add each others as friends
• Support an internal message system to allow users to contact each others.
• Allow users to bookmark TMC places and events using popular social bookmarks such as del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, digg, etc
• Show the number of people who call a certain place their favorite.

We are sill working on adding more features and supporting more cities.

If you like to recomend a feature, please send me an email to kinan[at]ximda.com

The podcast Callie and I did couple weeks ago with Giovanni Gallucci is available now

part 1
and
part 2

The podcast was initially supposed to cover Tag My City But we end up rambling around more topics such as ThingsICanDo.com, Ximda, web2.0 and Dallas on Rails

You can listen to these podcasts at QuesoCompuesto.com (part 1
& part 2)

Callie and I are meeting today with Giovanni from TheAgencyBlog to do a PodCast about Tag My City website.

Please feel free to come and share your opinions with us.

click here for meeting info.

I was thinking yesterday that web 2.0 has created a new type of entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs mostly have deep tech knowledge and a little business experience.

I get asked a lot about my business models for Tag My City and Things I Can Do and I can’t help noticing that traditional entrepreneurs miss the point of web 2.0 applications.

Web 2.0 was created by people who wanted to solve problems first rather than getting rich fast. They focussed on the end-user rather than the VC firm.

YouTube and del.icio.us are few examples of great applications that created without clear business models.

Open Source software has made it possible to build ideas without any VC help. I personally think that investment money comes at an expensive price ….. freedom :)

Please share your thoughts..