In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a lot going on in the Web 2.0 development world these days. A few masochistic folks have even been trying to document a good part of it. I’m in awe of them:

• TechCrunch (Michael Arrington & Keith Teare)
  “TechCrunch is a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing every newly launched web 2.0 business, product and service.”
• eHub (Emily Chang)
  “eHub is a constantly updated list of web applications, services, resources, blogs or sites with a focus on next generation web (web 2.0), social software, blogging, Ajax, Ruby on Rails, location mapping, open source, folksonomy, design and digital media sharing.”

Seriously, these two sites are great for finding out what apps are on the bleeding edge of Web 2.0. I just hope the site creators don’t burn out, because they’re doing great work that’s really helpful if you have the jones for information overload.

:)

Add these two sites with tech.memeorandum, which I profiled in-depth the other day, and you’ve got yourself three fantastic aggregation services. That’s what its all about…

The explosive discussion about the definition of Web 2.0 raises more questions than it answers. That’s a good thing! We’re learning here. One facet of this discussion, however, that I would like to see more of is the value of Web 2.0 for developers. I assume more and more developers are hearing about Web 2.0 […]

Continue Reading: More Web 2.0 Questions

In this Era of Interfaces, we have many criss-crossing themes. Among them: Recommendation Systems are an end goal of Web 2.0 applications. This is done by collaborative filtering over user-supplied data. Examples of interfaces include Del.icio.us Popular, Movielens Movie Recommendations, and iTunes Music Store Top Songs. More semantic Data Formats. Joe Reger’s new tool highlights […]

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 as the Era of Interfaces, Redux

Tim O’Reilly writes an interesting post about the latest Yahoo story in the NYTimes, about Yahoo as an increasingly big player in new media, taking on a similar role of a network, but grounding their strategy on the web, of course. Yahoo is definitely different than the rest of the big Web 2.0 Companies. They’re […]

Continue Reading: Yahoo! and Open Sourcing Innovation

(via tech.memeorandum) Google is testing two new services that promise to change what we do on the web (again).

One is personalized search history. If you have a Gmail account, sign in and on your Google home page (http://www.google.com/ig) you can find your Google Search History in the top right nav bar, at this address (http://www.google.com/searchhistory/).

Personalized Search History is important for privacy issues. We’ll trust Google more if we know what information they’re keeping about us. Folks are are getting leary about what Google knows and what they would potentially use it for. This is a great way to increase transparency and alleviate public fear. And who knows, if they provide RSS feeds for this…someone will come up with some really cool way to aggregate it.

The second is a way to provide feedback about search results. They’re testing a new feature designed for giving feedback when you get spam in your search results. Presumably, over time Google would be able to offer a better search by gathering this sort of feedback from users.

Search Feedback is huge because it’s including users in the filtering (architecture of participation). In addition to giving page links weight, this would be a more community-involved way to refine search results. Just yesterday I wrote how I think filtering is incredibly important right now. I think this feature is the tip of the iceberg.

This is incredibly big news! I can’t wait to see where it goes from here…

Here’s a recommendation for a book recommendation system: What Should I Read Next?

On your first glance at the tech.memeorandum home page, you won’t see anything all that special. You’ll see some links to blog items down the left-hand side labeled “Top Items”, and some smaller links to the right labeled “New Item Finder”. It looks like a hundred other blog aggregators being released nowadays…no big deal, right? […]

Continue Reading: Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

Pubsub linkcount is confusing. I have no idea what it means. One day bokardo gets 3 inlinks and its ranked 1,691 (in the top 4% of something). The next day it gets zero links and drops down to 91,755. The day after that its gets 6 inlinks and rises to 14,617. It would seem that the rank is based on the activity of other sites somehow. Is this just counting the number of links on a given day and ranking by that day only?

Does anybody know what this means?

By now you’ve heard why Ajax is great for web-based applications:

• It is standards-based
• It is degradeable with unsupporting browsers
• It is relatively easy to implement
• The benefits of a one-screen interface (no disruptions for page refreshes)

The Side Benefit of Ajax

But there’s another side benefit, that I think might be as influential as any of the above. When you build an Ajax application, you need to break down your server calls into smaller chunks. You’re no longer requesting complete web pages when you hit your server, you’re requesting information via a simplified API that you create (something as simple as a PHP script, perhaps).

This is yet another step toward microcontent, or pieces of data that live on their own and are called together to form applications screens or web pages. If you weren’t planning on accessing your content in this way before you decided to use Ajax techniques, you will definitely have to if you move that way.

This seems to be an overall trend, however. First we gain granular access to our own content for our own needs, and then we provide public access to others after we see how useful it is.

Doc Searls has a nice writeup of Blog Search engines, including the new Google Blog Search, IceRocket, PubSub, Technorati, Blogpulse, and A9.

He answers the question: What’s the difference between a Wide Web Search and a Live Web Search?

The difference? Syndication. I wonder how long that distinction will last.