Xeni Jardin’s Wired article Web 2.0 Cracks Start to Show is a good read. I read it yesterday, and found it to be a fair apprisal of the Web 2.0 situation, except for one line by Nick Carr, whose recent The Amorality of Web 2.0 has been kicking up some serious dust.

Carr’s line, which Xeni quoted, was “A lot of participatory media is mediocre”.

I’m not going to write more about it here, other than to say that I’ve heard Nick Carr speak, and he’s obviously a swell, even-tempered person.

But if you want to know my opinion of that quote go check out Boing Boing.

Why is getting acquired all of a sudden a bad thing? That seems to be the new battle cry. Lots of folks are interested in the money side of Web 2.0. Charlie Wood, a great chap who I met at the Web 2.0 Conference, has created a blog to follow it all called, what else, […]

Continue Reading: Bubble 2.0 and Flock

In thinking about how the most successful sites model human behavior (my current meme), Amazon kept coming to mind. Amazon is amazing at modelling how we talk about books. Notice that I’m not just talking about buying books, I’m talking about how we talk about books. In other words, they don’t just make it easy […]

Continue Reading: How Does Amazon Scale Behavior Modelling?

Just reading this Wired piece about Memeorandum. They’re on the third or fourth wave of interest. I was on the second, behind MacManus and Scoble, who were on the first wave. I’m glad to see this excellent site get the credit it deserves!

An interesting line from the founder of Memeorandum, Gabe Rivera:

“If you read blogs, you know that there is this conversation and that some articles are the talk of the day, and other posts have important things to say about those,” Rivera said. “If you built graphs in your mind of what the talk looks like, I think it looks like what I’ve done. I get the sense (Memeorandum) is just a natural representation of what is already going on.”.

This is exactly what I’m talking about when I talk about modeling human behavior. It’s also exactly what I was talking about when I wrote my response yesterday to Alex Barnett: How Google Models How We Value Content.

Memeorandum models how we value content just like Google does. A more focused approach, that’s all.

I originally gushed about the service here: Tech.Memeorandum’s Filtering Illustrates Web 2.0’s Most Important Skill

There is a great I.B.M. commercial that was popular a year or two ago. In it a bunch of programmers and designers are eagerly surrounding a computer monitor that reports on a web application they just released. The team is happy, jovial, like all teams are during a much-anticipated launch. They get even more happy […]

Continue Reading: Scalability a Growing Problem in Web 2.0

Alex Barnett, whose blog I am enjoying more and more lately, asks a very important, but seemingly trivial, question to a recent post. In that recent post: A Social Revolution by Modeling Human Behavior, I said that Google models the way that we (humans) value content. Alex questions this by asking if I meant instead […]

Continue Reading: How Google Models How We Value Content

Bokardo has joined the Web 2.0 Workgroup, a “network of premium weblogs that write content exclusively about the new generation of the Web. Combined, these sites reach a large readership of influential technology and media professionals.” I’m excited to join, as the premise is that if you like one of the blogs within the workgroup, […]

Continue Reading: Joining the Web 2.0 Workgroup

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

I’m sitting in Hagan River’s session on web applications and something is explicitly clear: developers all over are using Ajax. Last week when I was at Web2Con everyone was using Ajax there, but that was expected because it was all about brand-new, first-time apps.

At UI10, the attendees aren’t working on start-ups. Most are working in entrenched applications for universities, Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and other places that don’t need to be cutting edge. They just need stuff to solidly work. Usable applications are a must.

That’s why I’m surprised that so many people are talking about and using Ajax. In most cases when a new technology comes along, it takes years to get into the mainstream applications. Ajax, it seems, doesn’t fit that model.

The following bit is from the Deconstructing Web Applications session at the User Interface 10 Conference. Hagan Rivers, the principle designer for Netscape browser versions 1,2,3 and one of the designers of 4, is talking about the different structures of web applications. She has talked about 3 major structures so far: Interview-based Apps Interview-based apps […]

Continue Reading: UIConf: Web Application Types: Interview, Hub & Spoke, Hybrid