Despite the recent news that even newspaper prose is search engine optimized, I’m sticking with my own obtuse title today.
Sometimes the web moves so quickly it’s hard to keep up with the explosion of ideas both big and small. I recommend reading the following for a snapshot of the web as we know it (this week) and where it might be heading.
Isn’t it semantic? – An Interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee by Brian Runciman
Q: “Looking back on 15 years or so of development of the Web is there anything you would do differently given the chance”
A: “I would have skipped on the double slash – there’s no need for it. Also I would have put the domain name in the reverse order – in order of size so, for example, the BCS address would read: http:uk/org/bcs/members. This would mean the BCS could have one server for the whole site or have one specific to members and the URL wouldn’t have to be different.”
The Conversational Middle: Maturing of the Blogosphere by Mary Hodder
“On Saturday at Kinnernet, the last session I attended before leaving was led by an Israeli guy named Uri Baruchin who asserted that something had changed in the blogosphere, and we were starting to have a problem because a meme (my word, not his, and it’s what I called it as I disagreed in the session) would not spread so fast in the blogosphere now that A-list bloggers were waning in link counts (a popularity scale because it uses a single digital social gesture, the link, and does not weigh at all the many other conversational gestures of a blog over time — that would require multiple digital social gestures and a much more complex “algorithm” than just counting links)…”
Firefox 4 Kids by Dietrich Ayala
“Today I gave a presentation to 120 4th graders, as a participant in Career Day at Lowell Elementary School in Long Beach, California. I covered some general intarweb topics, places I had worked, and then talked about Mozilla, Firefox and open-source software…”
Upgrade your users, not just your product by Kathy Sierra
“Learning is a drug. To the brain, learning new things is inherently pleasurable. So if markets are conversations, why not use the conversation to help someone learn? A lot of the marketing-folks-with-a-clue have begun talking about the need for brands (or whatever comes after brands) to offer something more meaningful to users. Just yesterday Hugh talked about the marketing-spirituality thing, and Evelyn blogged on purpose-driven marketing.”
Predictions for a Web 2.0 social experience by Ben Hunt
” The next killer app isn’t an app. It will be a new networking platform that builds on today’s world-wide web and makes possible new generations of more powerful and useful applications. My vision is of a next-generation web that is just as simple and flexible as web 1.0, but more interconnected and powerful. At its core, it will incorporate a universe of connections that reflects the real-life links between people, organisations, services, products, web sites, and other entities. ”
What’s Missing: a Web 2.0 Critique by Stowe Boyd
“I have been barraged by new Web 2.0 apps over the past several months, several new companies a week: and sometimes more. They, at times, start to blur together, and I have a hard time differentiating one from the other: witness the score I got recently on this test conflating Star Wars characters from Web 2.0 companies…”
