Web 2.0 – the combination of web-based applications, social networking and user-submitted content – is getting lots of people very excited, but as Xeni Jardin writes in Wired, Web 2.0 faces the same problem as Web 1.0: people.
Web 2.0 is very open, but all that openness has its downside: When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer.
These days, peed-in beer is everywhere.
I love this joke:
A radio station was running a competition – words that weren’t in the dictionary yet could still be used in a sentence that would make logical sense. The prize was a trip to Bali.
DJ: “96 FM here, what’s your name?”
Caller: “Hi, my name’s Dave.”
DJ: “Dave, what’s your word?”
Caller: “Goan… spelt G-O-A-N, pronounced ‘go-an’.”
DJ: “You are correct, Dave, ‘goan’ is not in the dictionary. Now, for a trip to Bali: What sentence can you use that word in that would make sense?”
Caller: “Goan f— yourself!”
The DJ cut the caller off and took other calls, all unsuccessful until:
DJ: “96 FM, what’s your name?”
Caller: “Hi, me name’s Jeff.”
DJ: “Jeff, what’s your word?”
Caller: “Smee, spelt S-M-E-E, pronounced ’smee’.”
DJ: “You are correct, Jeff, ’smee’ is not in the dictionary. Now, for a trip to Bali: What sentence can you use that word in that would make sense?”
Caller: “Smee again! Goan f— yourself!”
Pound shops are pretty depressing sights – they tend to appear in areas where proper shops have long disappeared – but there’s one in Glasgow that’s the exception. Firstly it’s in Sauchiehall Street, one of the main shopping streets in the city; secondly, it kills me.
The shop’s on a corner, which means it has around a dozen full-height windows. Each of these windows has its own slogan, written in yellow letters across a signal red sash. Each slogan is a variation on the theme of “we sell things and charge a pound for them” – and they’re a work of demented genius. Unsullied by punctuation and stern in tone, they start off as perfectly reasonable slogans and deteriorate as the signwriter’s (or shopkeeper’s) fury becomes apparent. They start with:
YES EVERYTHING IS A POUND
And then they get angrier, making it crystal clear that indeed, everything in the shop costs one pound, and they’re pretty pissed off with people questioning such a simple concept. The very best one is the last slogan, which reduces me to giggles every time I see it:
DO NOT ASK THE PRICE IT IS A POUND
I suspect I might be the only person who finds this funny. But I don’t care!
Anil Dash talks about Flickr, and points out that while ads appear next to his pics, he isn’t getting a share of that ad income.
…there certainly is a belief among mainstream big company publishers I’m listening to that “user generated content” (I HATE that term) is how they are going to build profitable businesses. Basically, they are looking at bloggers and photographers and others as cheap labor. Get the stuff for free, stick ads next to it, and make a ton of money. That basically explains a large percentage of the Silicon Valley startup’s business plans lately too.
Wow. The Inquirer reports that the inventor of the Blue LED reckons he’s found a way to make fuel cells run on water. If boffins can find a way to make the process work in real-world products, the computers of the future could be powered by plain old H2O.
Getting Things Done is the bible of the burgeoning Life Hacking movement, which is proving popular among web designers and other techy types. I was curious, so I bought the book.
I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve picked up a few things that I’ve found useful. In particular, the book suggests two key rules: the two-minute rule, and the “do/delegate/defer” rule. They’re both very simple (and sound like they’re stating the bleeding obvious): if you can deal with something in two minutes, do it. If you can’t do it in two minutes, take the do/delegate/defer rule: either do it now if you have the time to spare, delegate it if you’re not the right person for the job, or defer it for later (and pick a time when you’ll do it).
Obvious? Perhaps. Effective? Yup.
There’s lots more – making sure your to-do list covers actions rather than vague, amorphous concepts, sorting out your working environment, getting the most from PDAs and other handy gadgets – but those two rules are already helping me deal with information overload.
Right, my two minutes are up. Back to work :)
The critics are united: it’s rubbish.
I know. I’m shocked too.
“Doom is like some kid came over and is using your computer and won’t let you play.”
– Roger Ebert, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
I’m going to pitch a story about RSI in Japan, purely so I can use the headline “Ows of the rising sun”.
In a typical day, I need to look at stacks of stuff: a few hundred emails, a thousand-plus RSS headlines and God knows how many web pages. I use a bunch of excellent programs to try and manage all of that, and while they all work really well I’m drowning in data. The problem is that each program is very good at a specific thing, but the applications don’t talk to one another.
For example, I use Entourage to manage email. It scans for junk and trashes it, sorts mail into appropriate folders, colour-codes things according to the sender, and it enables me to store things in particular folders. NetNewsWire tracks my favourite feeds and enables me to flag things for later. Firefox is a damn good web browser. But that’s not enough.
What I really need is the ability to do the same thing in all three programs. For example, if I think an emailed press release is worth flagging for X magazine’s news section, I’ve got an Entourage folder for that. If it’s just reference, I’ve got a folder for that too. If it’s for a forthcoming feature for Y magazine, guess what? Yep, folder for that. But in NetNewsWire, which I use to manage even more information than Entourage, I’ve got a single option: I can flag items, but I can’t tag ‘em (unless there’s a feature in the program I’ve missed). The result is that I end up with a *huge* flagged items folder containing hundreds of things, some of which are appropriate for X mag, some for Y mag, some of which are for background research, and some of which are just funny. There’s no way that I can see to tag the flagged items so I only see the things I need for the project I’m actually doing. I’ve tried dragging individual posts to new folders – which seems logical enough – but all that does is add the entire RSS feed to your new folder. Ech.
Same with Firefox. Bookmarks are a pretty blunt instrument, and of course they don’t work if the site’s down or your net connection’s flaky. Saving pages is a pain in the backside, and while I know it’s possible to save stuff and add Spotlight comments for future searching it’s very time consuming to do that (and Spotlight’s turned off on the Mac Mini, because I can’t afford the performance hit).
What Entourage, NetNewsWire and Firefox have in common is two things: they can all display text and Web content, and they support folders (albeit in different ways: in Entourage it’s folders of mail, in NNW it’s folders of feeds). What I’d like to do is bring those programs together, to share a folder structure or tag system between mail, RSS and Web. That means when I’m doing Mag X’s news section, I can access all the material I need by clicking on the appropriate folder, irrespective of its source. As far as I can see, there isn’t a way of doing that with my current software.
Does anyone know better? Any recommendations appreciated.
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