There is a fever of anticipation over the imminent release of a tablet-style computer from Apple – let’s call it the iSlate [Thursday Update - actually, let's call it the iPad - I stand by everything else in the post, though]. Nobody outside the company knows very much about how it works or its specifications, but [...]
January 18, 2010
In this online radio interview, internet visionary Jaron Lanier talks about the danger of Web 2.0 turning us into a collectivist digital mush. He’s got a new book out, so doing a lot of PAs lately. The problems, to paraphrase, are these: Collectivisation We’ve reached for the wisdom of crowds, and this silences individual voices. This blog [...]
June 24, 2008
Some bloggers do something called ‘live blogging’ from conferences, wherein they aim to note, more-or-less verbatim, the content of the sessions they are attending. I am far too busy with other weighty intellectual matters at conferences - Twitter messages about the speakers’ funny haircuts and who else is here from Twitter – so it takes [...]
January 18, 2008
Many thanks to comrade Mayfield for his excellent presentation to the collected officers of the Social Media Commissariat … sorry Club, this evening. To cut his talk short, he’d been thinking about the parallels between the birth of social media and the birth of print itself, as described in Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The printing press as [...]
December 6, 2006
The UK’s best-known website auditing firm, ABCe, will move to measuring unique users instead of page impressions as its mandatory measurement metric. Page impressions have come under fire as a metric for several reasons, not least the ability to fake results by splitting a story over several pages. This is good news for professional blogs: Because [...]
December 5, 2006
Mis-Information Week perpetuates the myth that Web 2.0 is all about AJAX. The standfirst to the article lays the groundwork, suggesting that this is purely about technologies, when surely approaches would be a better way to begin: To bring your site into the Web 2.0 world, you need to know about Ajax, ActiveX, RSS, and other [...]
December 5, 2006
…is Who 2.0. That’s according to an interview with Tim O’Reilly, the man who popularised Web 2.0. On Basque news site eitb24, he said that he thinks: …certain kinds of databases are going to become really big and really useful. We are just in the early stages, digital identity doesn’t really work yet. But that will, [...]
December 3, 2006
Nick Carr comments today about the competing definitions for Web 2.0 and the use of jargon, concluding that at the heart of the matter is … well, nothing. Writing about Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0? essay, he states: O’Reilly provided a series of observations and impressions, and, really, that’s the best way to approach any [...]
November 27, 2006
Public Relations in the Web 2.0 era? A new white paper has been produced by Squiz in association with Text 100 PR called Communications 2.0. It’s available here (registration required). The paper discusses what Web 2.0 is, how businesses might adopt some of the approaches it brings, how their PR will change as a result and [...]
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 25, 2006
Fred Wilson has published Comscore data on traffic to Pandora vs Last.fm. The results are very interesting. I had assumed that the two would be pretty much level-pegging. They both do very much the same thing, after all: provide a streaming radio station of new music based on your established tastes. The London-based Last.fm is [...]
November 23, 2006
I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Techmeme. It’s very useful for days when you haven’t got time to read through your RSS subscriptions (viz. most days) and just want a snapshot of what the techies in the blogosphere are talking about. On the other hand, it tends to focus very heavily on the [...]
January 25, 2010