The month of lists has begun, so I decided to rank the business ideas from the last year that could or should be a big deal in the next year. Most of these ideas and companies have actually been around longer than 12 months, but they either reached a certain critical mass or captured my imagination in a new way recently.

1) Scrobbling
All my listening behavior are belong to Last.fm. They figured out how to not only capture what I listen to but also to incentivize me to keep my behavior data with them. Since my listening data is open for other services to use, I am willingly giving Last.fm the power to broker that data with other providers on behalf. That’s a very strong position to be in.

2) Meta ad networks
Feedburner and Right Media figured out that ad networks can be networked into meta networks. Right Media went the extra step and opened up their APIs so that someone can build a white label ad exchange of their own using the Right Media tools. All you need are advertisers and publishers, and you’ve suddenly got a media market of your own. I can’t help but wonder if these guys have stepped into the big leagues with the next really important revenue model.

3) Pay-as-you-go storage, computing, whatever
Amazon impresses me on so many levels even if they don’t know exactly what they’re doing. They are making it happen just by doing smart things with the resources already in their arsenal. Similarly, Flickr understands that the APIs you use to build your web site are the same APIs you want to open up as a service, and it’s paying off handsomely for them. The formula here is one part optimizing resources and two parts confidence that your business won’t crash if you share your core assets with other people. Stir constantly.

4) People-powered knowledge
I really like the Yahoo! Answers experience. I also really like the concept behind MechanicalTurk where knowledge can be distributed as a service. Machines are at their best, in my opinion, when they make humans capable of doing things they couldn’t otherwise do, not least of which is making the universe of human knowledge more accessible.

5) Widget-mania
It wasn’t until I heard about the big revenues GlitterMaker was earning that I realized just how powerful this idea has become the last year or so. Beck’s customizable CD cover reinforced the idea that everything is a tattoo or a tattooable thing if you look at it that way…and many people do. If only I could run AdSense on my forehead.

Here’s a fun experiment in crowdsourcing. I’ve been getting overwhelmed by all the startup news coming out of the many sources tracking the interesting ideas and new companies hunting for Internet gold. Many of these companies are really smart. Many are just, well, gold diggers.

And with so many ways to track new and interesting companies, I’ve lost the ability to identify the difference between companies that are actually attacking a problem that matters and companies that are combining buzzwords in hopes of getting funding or getting acquired or both.

There must be a way to harness the collective insight of people who are close to these companies or the ideas they embody to shed light on what’s what. Maybe there’s a way to do that using Pligg.

While shaking my head in a moment of disappointment and a little bit of jealousy at all the new dotcom millionaires/billionaires, the word “flipbait” crossed my mind. I looked to see if the domain was available, and sure enough it was. So, I grabbed the domain, installed Pligg and there it is.

It should be obvious, but the idea is to let people post news of new Internet startups and let the community decide if something is important or not. If I’m not the only one thinking about this, then I can imagine it becoming a really useful resource for gaining insight into the barage of headlines filling up my feed reader each day.

And if it doesn’t work, I’ll share whatever insight I can glean into why the concept fails. There will hopefully at least be some lessons in this experiment for publishers looking to leverage crowdsourcing in their media mix.

I had some fun putting together a screencast recently to showcase an internal Yahoo! technology that my team is working on. I downloaded Camtasia, wrote a short script and then produced what turned out to be somewhat high quality video production with surprisingly little effort.

All you have to do is turn on the Camtasia recorder and then click around on your screen while you talk. It records everything and then outputs a prefab web page with the embedded flash video. The time I spent building it probably broke down like this:

5% - downloading software and setting up a quiet space in a conference room.
5% - learning Camtasia.
30% - preparing. I mean writing the script and practicing.
50% - recording. admittedly, I ran through the script over and over again to get a few stutters and ums and uhs out of the monologue.
5% - output and posting the page
5% - telling people about it

I think it took less than 3 hours in total, but I got lost in the process a bit, so it could have been much quicker. The most interesting thing to note about the process here is how little time was spent dealing with production issues and how much time was spent on content.

Camtasia is actually advanced enough for you to do more sophisticated editing if you wish. But it served my need just perfectly. I wanted to show people what was happening on my screen, and I wanted to post that as a video on a web page. They perfectly isolated all the functionality I needed to do that with as little user interface overhead as possible.

Jon Udell has been pushing this concept as a really important educational device for a while now and has demonstrated some interesting ways to apply it. It’s not just the ease with which a person can do high quality productions that he finds powerful. It’s the inherent sharability of the output. When people start to see that sharing video can be about more than entertainment and exhibitionism, then they may turn to screencasts to share what they know with the world. The format is particularly well suited for demonstrations and how-to types of educational video.

It’s just so simple, there’s no reason not to try it.

It wasn’t until someone much more tapped into pop culture than I am told me that the Yahoo! Answers product was cool that I considered it to be true. I didn’t get it at first. I wondered, “What’s the incentive to contribute? Maybe it works for kids. And when was the last time Yahoo! launched a cool product of its own anyway?”

Photo: Mr. Mark (reclining buddy)

I still don’t understand the incentive to answer questions, but despite that I’m amazed at the responses to the questions people post.

First, I love some of the philosophical dialog in the system. Deepak Chopra appeared in Answers with a question, and the answers were fantastic:

Q: “What do you think the role of individual transformation is in manifesting world peace?”
A: “…The question to me is not the role of individual transformation in manifesting world peace; but can mankind agree upon what the symbol of peace represents and if so, how might this further or progress all mankind’s evolution of the psychobiotic self.”

Second, it’s very social in a new kind of way. It’s like walking through a festival where you jump into a conversation with totally random people without any awkward formalitites. You ask a question, hear what people have to say and move on having a new perspective to take with you.

I asked one question about the need for our educational system to teach personal responsibility in the online world, and the responses were primarily from what appeared to be teens. I have no connection to the universe that is teenage but with this question I suddenly found myself in a very brief but relevant dialog with the people who are affected by the question.

Third, and I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise, you can get better information from people in this world than you can from your limited scope of offline friends.

Photo: _Faith

I was watching Prince perform on American Idol and kept asking myself, “What is it with this guy? Why is Prince such a big deal?” I started asking friends the same question, even people who are big Prince fans, and I couldn’t get a good answer. So, I posted a question on Answers. I figured that if someone could tell me why Prince matters then maybe it was actually useful in addition to being cool.

Sure enough, I got a couple of funny answers within a few minutes, but within about half an hour somebody convinced me that Prince was worth caring about:

“Prince is able to play multitude of instruments and genres. He mastered the piano at seven, and 6 instruments by 12. He is the youngest to ever produce his own albums at the age of 19. He takes risks and help define the sounds of the 80’s. He was the first black artist to appear on MTV. Not Michael Jackson.”

But there are a few things I’d love to see Answers do better. It’s so random and dense that I need some kind of UI for surfacing stuff that might matter to me. I like that when I post a question it tries to point me to similar questions that have already been answered.

I also want to have some kind of natural incentive for answering other people’s questions. Points won’t do it. Maybe I don’t get it still, but I don’t have any desire to add my knowledge into the pool, yet.

Lastly, I’d love to see the back end opened up as a service…completely. Community sites of all types including publishers should be able to skin the service for their users which would then contribute more data to the wider knowledge pool. I can imagine a site like PCWorld.com using Answers to help their users help each other answer laptop fix-it types of questions or maybe storage device shopping advice.

Obviously, my comments have to be taken with a grain of salt since I share the same employer as the Answers team. But the purpose in writing this was less about promotion and more about exploring social incentives online with a new real world example. There’s more to learn from Answers, I’m sure, but there’s lots to be emulated, as well.