The New New Internet Conference. Christopher Locke notes that his favourite line is “Gain a Deep, Non-Technical Understanding of Web 2.0”, personally I like “How to Apply Web 2.0 Techniques to Improve Life and Business”…yeh, like we really all want to adopt Web 2.0 in life and business, after all it would involve taking a pile of money and pissing it up against the wall, hoping that your urine turns to gold without actually having a plan as to how to actually turn the urine into gold, and without assessing whether the gold was actually needed in the marketplace anyway (a solution without a problem) 🙂

Tags: Web 2.0

Darren at Problogger points to The Seal Generator, a site that lets you make your own official seal. Sort of nifty idea, but it desperately needs a Web 2.0 makeover because theres no Ajax that updates the image as you make it, something you sort of come to expect in the days of Ajax enabled Web 2.0 tools and sites, and as you can see in the Web 2.0 business model seal I generated, getting the colours right involves a fair bit of leg work 🙂

Looks like the Browzar browser might be a bit dodgy, with Techcrunch and the Web 3.0 log reporting that it’s actually IE in disguise + it’s what they claim as “adware”, because the browser utitlises Overture for search results and it’s near on impossible to change away from Overture. And yet Overture is 100% owned by Yahoo!, isn’t it?

OK, so it’s arguably poor practice to force someone to use a particular web search site, but we’re not talking about some shady net outfit here, we’re talking about Yahoo!, so is Techcrunch and Web 3.0 log saying Yahoo! is bad by participating via providing it’s services on Browzar?

Tags: Browzar, Techcrunch

More at Techcrunch, but strangely addictive, if some what stupid.

Jason Calacanis reckons the Right isn’t participating Web 2.0, or more particularly the “social news trend”. This was my response in his comments:

I won’t bother commenting on some of the comments here that have become nothing more than lurid, pathetic attempts at political point scoring, but I will point to the commenter who said you should read Plato, he’s right (pardon the pun). You’ve generalized and there are plenty of people who regard themselves as being right of centre participating in social news sites, indeed it would be no different than me writing that all American’s are dumb F*cks based on the experience of having met a few in my time that were. Secondly, if you’re having problems in attracting a demographic outside of liberals at Netscape, you’ve already given your answer as to why this might be so: you’ve hired mostly liberals, and as they say birds of a feather, flock together. As for your comments on the right not embracing blogging, where the hell have you been for the last 5 years Jason, jeezus! nearly all the big political stories broken in the blogosphere in the States came from the right, not the left. Just because you may not read their blogs or listen to their podcasts doesn’t mean many others dont as well. Indeed, I can only hope that you haven’t caught that contagious bug that seems to spread amongst the top parts of the blogosphere, the one where you keep reading and listening to the same people over and over again so often, that you forget that there is another world past your feeds in blogines and the podcasts on your ipod.

Tags: Jason Calacanis

Weird article at The Street on AOL/ Weblogs Inc’s new blog strategy. Most of it is obviously factual, but all I can say is WTF!? to this quote (emphasis added by me):

AOL’s blog expansion comes as advertisers are becoming increasingly interested in reaching people who read and write the online journals because it lets them target their messages to audiences which are passionately interested in particular subjects. The blog audience of about 32 million remains a fairly small percentage of the overall Web users, which means that advertisers tend to buy ads on blog networks like AOL’s so they can reach the most people.

Since when is the sum total of all blog readers 32 million people? there is something like 1 billion people on the internet. Hundreds of millions of people read blogs, although they may not actually know they are reading them according to past surveys *the question of knowing what a blog is, even when they are reading blogs). So where in the world did 32 million come from? Is it a United States only figure, and if it is, since when was the US the be all and end all of the internet? Or is it merely a case of another lazy journalist?

Tags: The Street, AOL, Weblogs Inc

A new web browser from the people behind Freeserve in the UK: Browzar. Lots of buzz around the place that I won’t bother repeating, their main goal is to provide localised private web browsing by deleting/ not recording the web sites you visit using it. But that’s not why I find it interesting…nope, I like it because it’s small and quick. Quick you may well say? well it’s so small (about 270 odd kbs) it loads probably just about quicker than any program I’ve ever used in Windows. Click, its up straight away. Sure, it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of Firefox, but these guys have gone back to basics and it shows in the speed and small file size. Wouldn’t it be nice if all new programs could do more with less code?…food for thought.

So the folks at Flickr believe that the reason Flickr geotaging sucks is because the world is to big for Yahoo Maps to cover it all.

But lets compare apples with apples.

Both MSN and Google Maps provide close ups, satelitte shots and maps for the better part of the world. Yahoo! only does for the US and Canada. Want to participate in a beta test? No matter where you lived you could have participated in Google’s initial releases of gmail, earth, goffice, adsense and more. At MSN similar. Want to participate in a Yahoo! beta? you’d want to live in the US. YPN, Yahoo! email beta to name but a few were all US only.

Yahoo! hates the rest of the world. Sure, they might have some nice regional offshots, but for all the cool stuff they only think of American users. As a non-American web user my response…bite me, and you suck.

Stumbled across this site the other day: BlogTalkRadio. Fascinating concept, basically live podcasting with the ability to take call ins (upto 5 people on air at once, unlimited queue in for others).

The killer feature: the ability to do the show without the need to edit or record the audio yourself. It works by users (show hosts) calling in to a show specific phone number, from which they then run the show in conjunction with a control panel on the website. Shows are streamed live on the net and also archived for use as podcasts as well.

They’ve got a fairly decent FAQ but nothing I can see on testing call quality… that sort of thing, which I suppose would be my only concern (basically would Skype support the call in, in terms of quality?). Control panel access is only available to registered users, which is unfortunate because I would have liked to have been able to see what goes on behind the scenes before considering using it..even if it was a matter of an instruction guide and/ or screenshots.

As “radio” goes they don’t have a universal stream either, like say Webmaster Radio does, which is a feature I’d think they should add.

But aside from these little things, what a bloody good idea. I’m tempted to give it a go…or maybe someone else can and I can play guest caller 🙂 Definitely worth a look.

Tags: Blog Talk Radio, Podcasting

I’ve always had issues with Feedburner in the past, mainly on the basis that you’ve got to give up control of your feed to use the service. Here in lala land (TM) we’ve got our hands on the top notch, whole kit and kaboodle version of Feedburner, the one that you get to host on your own URL, although at the time of writing we seem to have URLs in two spots (but that’s another story). Obviously I’ve never had this full functionality before, and got to say it’s pretty cool…ok, probably more than pretty cool.

Just added an image and description to my feed. Cool.

Getting cool stats like this (for duncanriley.com), note that these stats seem to be going up daily for all our blogs, I think it takes maybe a week or so of updates to get to the true figure, but it’s still cool:

Lots of other coolness there as well, half of which I’m not exactly sure what it does so I’m hesitant to turn it on.

Lot’s of fun. Great service. I still think the verdict is still out though whether it actually makes any difference at all in terms of blog readership, but I’ll leave that argument to a later day 🙂