Quick report from last Friday’s Fuel conference. It was a well-planned day which I thoroughly enjoyed, so well done to Ryan, Keir and the Carsonified team. It was also good to meet up again with a couple of fellow bloggers. Andrew from Imagination has written already about the attention to detail shown in the design [...]
November 27, 2006
One of the cornerstones of most definitions of Web 2.0 is the idea of the Wisdom of Crowds. In Tim O’Reilly’s seminal essay on the subject, he talks about the blogosphere being an example of this: If it were merely an amplifier, blogging would be uninteresting. But like Wikipedia, blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind [...]
November 20, 2006
“Story rankings play havoc with traditional journalistic tenets” apparently. In his Dow Jones MarketWatch ‘Ethics Watch’ column, Thomas Kostigen says that digg-style news-voting systems are messing with his mind, continually tempting him to write popular stories. It emerges, however, that actually it’s not digg that is directly responsible, that’s just a trendy hook for the story. [...]
November 6, 2006
The Guardian reckons Web 2.0 is ready for the mainstream with its Weekend section dominated by a 15-page feature entitled ‘A Bigger Bang’. John Lanchester’s article provides the keynote to the section, in a piece which is well-written and clever: a new wave of innovation on the internet, an innovation focused not so much on new [...]
September 27, 2006
The Inquirer, curmudgeon central at the best of times, isn’t entirely pleased about the arrival of the read/write web, social media or the whole ‘letting ordinary people onto the internet’ thing. Yesterday’s article – ‘Web 2.0 is for complete twonks’ – is a masterpiece of spite and elitism, which left me chuckling even as it [...]
September 13, 2006
USA Today takes a pop at internet techies citing the Wisdom of Crowds, suggesting that the recent digg and wikipedia controversies may show the idea is fallacious. David Freedman takes another swipe in ‘What’s Next: The Idiocy of Crowds‘ published at Inc.com, saying that on the internet, “the scum tends to rise to the top”. As [...]
August 26, 2006
My first attempts to understand digg, the news-voting site, were a bit of a shambles, to be honest. I tried to work out the order and content of the front page and ended up in a tangle of half-remembered Maths lessons. Owen Byrne, senior software engineer at the service, put me out of my misery [...]
August 23, 2006
This is a personal attempt to understand the digg front page. I am not a mathematician, nor a coder nor an Excel wiz (all of which will become obvious). Nonetheless, I wanted to understand digg better than I did and decided a tiny bit of analysis was in order. This was the state of play on [...]
August 19, 2006
Some very interesting debate recently about Metcalfe’s Law, network effects and its application to Web 2.0 communities. I picked up the trail at Silicon Beat here which led me to a post by Metcalfe himself here, and some clever comments in an earlier post by Fred Stutzman here. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a [...]
August 11, 2006
Being the Elvis of Web 2.0 is a busy job, it seems. I’ve been stalking Kevin Rose of digg for about six weeks, watching him sign a girl’s chest, hit the cover of BusinessWeek and attempt to fend off attempts to hire the service’s most loyal users. And basically, not getting to interview him. It’s [...]
August 1, 2006
The digg topic What motivates the top one percent of digg’s users? has stirred up a hornet’s nest. The top-rated answer right now is “The urge to fit into society by boosting a [sic] e-penis with 35% growth” by dshPls. I think you sort of know what he means. The suggestion is that only one percent [...]
June 18, 2008