Category: Web 2.0

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.

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.

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 🙂

Dead 2.0 has the stats, only 9% of Americans know what RSS is. Only 2% subscribe to a feed. I’d suggest though the actual subscription rate would be higher, it would be similar to the blog conundrum: that in the same way people read blogs without knowing they are reading blogs, I’d reckon that people are subscribing to sites without knowing they are using RSS.

Interesting also is what people are using to read the RSS they don’t know they are reading that are. As announced here, b5media now has feedburner stats. We’ve never had this sort of service before, and after a few days we’re finally getting some juicy stats.

What’s really interesting is what people are using: feed readers that don’t necessarily need a RSS feed to subscribe to (or more correctly via): classic example, early stats show Google Desktop and MyYahoo! in the top 4. What’s really interesting though is once you strip away our tech blogs it changes again: Firefox Live Bookmarks and Google Desktop come out in front. Compare to our tech blogs alone: Newsgator comes in a 3, myYahoo doesn’t get a look in.

I’m going to spend some more time looking at these stats, but all in all it’s fascinating to see the differences across different demographics…but it’s also important to remember that the kiddies reading celebrity blogs aren’t going to likely be as tech savy as, for example, the readers of a tech blog. KISS + give them easy ways of subscribing. That’ll do the trick.

So Flickr now allows you to geocode your pictures using Yahoo! maps via drag and drop…great, only that Yahoo! Maps is completely and utterly useless outside of the United States and Canada. This is as close as I could get to geocoding my shots from the Big Brother Live Eviction show:

Thinking that given the satellite photos stop at 1km out, I’d switch to maps only:

Completely and utterly useless. Sure, Yahoo! does some reasonable stuff with their home page for each country, for example I regularly visit Yahoo7 for TV guides as an example, but for all the cool Web 2.0, stuff Yahoo sucks unless you’re in the States or Canada. Now if only Google had bought Flickr we might be able to get a decent map and satellite/ map shot:

Google at 100m. It goes clearly to 50m as well.

Tags: Flickr