This is a draft of the first part of my chapter on the rise of blogging. The book is intended for general readers, not technorati, so bear that in mind. Too technical still? Not technical enough? Just so that the uninitiated can get through this chapter, blog is short for web log. That is, a record [...]
June 30, 2006
Thanks to Drew B for drawing my attention to a fantastic article about blogging in New York magazine. The gist of it is that while blogs can earn money for writers, it’s not very likely. There are a number of issues, but the key is the number of inbound links. A large site with a [...]
June 29, 2006
The signs of Web 2.0 are clear. Look for some aspect of community collaboration, of user-generated content, of the ability to customise the content, of a desktop-like application experience. But why exactly should we care? In the words of a BusinessWeek headline on June 5, 2006, why is that “Web 2.0 Has Corporate America Spinning� Users [...]
June 28, 2006
An amusing tirade against some of the worst failings of some of these Web 2.0 startups. On a related note, I just spoke with Roger Greene, the CEO of Ipswitch, who make the venerable and highly rated FTP client ws_ftp. He told me he thought it was fairly clear that a lot of these companies [...]
June 28, 2006
Marc Fawzi criticises digg for creating crowd-as-bull behaviour. When he published a story that reached digg’s front page, he got 33,000 hits to his site in the first 24 hours, becoming the number one site on Wordpress for 16 hours. The digg crowd acted like a mob, but not a smart one. Marc’s admiration for [...]
June 28, 2006
Paul Graham, one of the most level-headed and insightful commentators on this subject, analyses O’Reilly’s essay (post below) and ends up agreeing that the “2.0″ label is unfortunate since what we’re describing is not so revolutionary after all. It’s more of a question of learning from the mistakes of the past and putting much more [...]
June 28, 2006
Tim O’Reilly’s essay defining the features of Web 2.0 is quite candid about the roots of the term. They were going to do a conference about all this new stuff that was happening on the internet, and they needed a name for it. This original definition is a lot more embracing than many subsequent ones. [...]
June 27, 2006
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews over the last couple of weeks about web 2.0. One example of where the web is utterly rubbish is buying train tickets in the UK. Train tickets in the UK are utterly screwed in many ways. Basically, you have to try half a dozen different ways of communicating [...]
June 27, 2006
Just talked to David Cruickshank, who’s the creator of businessitonline. Nice set of web applications for running a small business (UK forms only at the moment) that is free for up to 2 users. Seems like a very nice bloke and I wish him a lot of luck. Link
June 27, 2006
The key to success – make your site as ugly as possible…Vitamin Features » The MySpace problem: When it comes to some of the web’s most popular sites – is their success because of or in spite of ‘ugly’ design?In his 2004 AIGA magazine piece It’s Good to Be Bad, David Volgler observed a troubling trend [...]
June 27, 2006
Marc Fawzi makes an interesting point about web 2.0 society Fact: trusted individuals are once again the source of news in a society (bloggers) Fact: word of mouth is once again how news spreads (viral marketing) Fact: people once again hunt and gather in a group (del.icio.us) Fact: people once again group things using words like [...]
June 27, 2006
Hmm.. hype or reality? Seems like the average startup fades from view disturbingly quickly…Basement.org: Reality Check 2.0: Does anybody out there use Rollyo? How about Newsvine? 30 Boxes? I’m not going to even bother asking if anyone has a Eurekster Swicki up (or what exactly a Swicki is for that matter). I think it’s really important to [...]
June 30, 2006