Here’s the slide deck for a talk I gave on Web 2.0 for the Greater Boston Chapter of the ACM, a non-profit educational and scientific society of computer professionals in the Boston area.

Web 2.0 – Leveraging the Network (2.74 MB pdf)

In the talk I spoke about how Web 2.0 companies distinguish themselves by leveraging the network of which they are a part. Brittanica, for example, has had a web site for quite some time and were slow to leverage the network in any particular way. Wikipedia, on the other hand, exists only because they used the available network to improve their contents communally. And Wikipedia, of course, is a much, much more popular site.

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 Talk – Leveraging the Network

Here’s part 1 of a list of trends I saw gaining momentum in 2005 that I see growing even more important in 2006. Part 2: Synchronization and Local Store

This started out as a list of technological trends, with RSS, Ajax, and Ruby on Rails being the headlines, as all three had huge years in terms of implementation and being squacked about. But these things, while interesting, aren’t really trends in the way that people are using the Web. Instead, they’re trends in building. Nothing illustrates the disparity between technology and usage more than the what Yahoo had to say in their October whitepaper: RSS-Crossing into the Mainstream. They claim that while over 1/4 of all Web users consume RSS in one way or another, only 4% know it.

So, in the spirit of usage I offer the following trends, focused on the way that those in the curve use the Web. Those ahead of the curve are probably on to whatever will get mainstream next year…

Continue Reading: Trends to Watch in 2006

Thomas Vander Wal is one happy man. Wouldn’t you be if you had been written up by Daniel Pink in the New York Times? Vander Wal, as many of you know, coined the term “Folksonomy”. He used it to describe what was happening on two up-and-coming web sites: Flickr and Del.icio.us. Now those two sites […]

Continue Reading: Folksonomy Has a Big Year

New, easy-to-use applications make it seem like “Less is More”. But is Less really More? I don’t think so. The new wave of applications are great because they’re networked, not because many of them just happen to have less features. Human needs rarely change. We need to be watered, fed, exercised, sheltered, talked-to, challenged, appreciated, […]

Continue Reading: Living in a Networked World: Is Less More?

Ryan Carson is excited about his Web 2.0 workshop in the UK that he’s holding on February 8, 2006. Judging from the lineup, it looks like it will be a great show. He’s got the Tags guy, the Rails guy, the Flickr guy, the Feedburner guy, the Mint guy, the Dropsend guy, and the Yahoo guy. He definitely found the right group of folks to share their experiences.

Also, Doug Martin sends word that his new product is ready for tire kicking. It’s called LookLater, and is a bookmarking tool. He’s currently trying to get the word out, so I’m helping him along a bit. Looks interesting.

Pieter Overbeeke wants folks to check out OPMLManager.com, a tool to help you maintain your OPML file. I’m not quite there yet, but you early adopters might find something useful.

Finally, Alex Bard says that his company, Goowy, is growing fast. They provide traditional web services including web mail, contacts, calendar, games, widgets and more. Looks like another player in the Web-based Office space…

BTW: I don’t normally advertise for free. And since I’m getting more and more requests it’s getting hard to keep up. If you are interested in advertising for pennies in the burgeoning Bokardosphere, let me know. I’ve got some ideas about that…

So Google Base launched today. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s been called an eBay and Craigslist killer among other things. Whether or not you believe that Google Base will have that effect, the anxiety it produces comes from the “item type” feature, which I find fascinating. Item types are simply content genres, or […]

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It’s easy to assume that Web 2.0 is a technological revolution, with acronyms like RSS, APIs, Ajax, and XML floating around. However, I think though technology has a central role to play, the real revolution isn’t technological, it’s people-based. Web 2.0 is a social revolution. A common view is that technology drastically changes the way […]

Continue Reading: A Social Revolution by Modeling Human Behavior

The following bit emerged out of the What’s in a Tag session at the Web 2.0 Conference. One of the great features of tagging is seen when tags are aggregated. Then, we can see trends in what people are tagging: valuable bookmarks on Del.icio.us, cool pictures on Flickr, for example. These trends are trends of […]

Continue Reading: Web2Con: Popularity Decay in Tagging

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

I now have veritable proof that Web 2.0 as a term is working to describe the changing web. How do I know? People told me so. Last night I led a talk for the Macromedia Boston Users Group called “Web 2.0 Interfaces, the Future of Design”. I used Keynote for the first time, and I […]

Continue Reading: Talking about Web 2.0 with Designers