Category Archive: Web 2.0
Subcategories: No categories
MyStickies.com and the Read/Write web.
While trawling the web like I always do I found this interesting service called MyStickies. Think of it as sticky notes for the web, you can quite literally drag on a little scrap of virtual paper, and make notes and comments to your hearts content. Once you have an account these notes become persistent and will appear again on your next visit (provided you are logged in via the browser extension). I like the idea a lot, but what seems even groovier is what lies in the future of the site:
“MyStickies currently is planning ……. sharing tags’ notes and individual notes with friends, rich text notes (bold, italics, and links) and some form of public notes.”
Wow! Public Notes! Now there’s a cool application, proper read/write web don’t you think? Keep an eye on these guys.
Technorati Tags: MyStickies, Read Write Web, Web2.0
Do tech bloggers GET blogging?
A while ago I was asking a good friend of mine whether he was reading my blog. He had a surprising response and it went something like this:
“Nah, I check it out occasionally, but you just always link to other people’s stuff that link to other people. I can find that sort of information on my own.”
I was kind of taken aback and had a quick retort along the lines of: “excuse me I don’t just link to other people, I comment!”. And I left it at that.
However I have slowly come to release that 80% of what I do IS that, linking to someone else’s ideas and just adding my spin on the subject. Very little original ideas ever really emanate from me and I think it is shame. The same is true with the bulk of the new crop of tech blogs out there. The downside of it is that people don’t really take us all that seriously, sure at our little “dinner table” as Kent Newsome explains the conversation is lively and engaging, but for everyone else it just sounds like a bunch of intellectuals having a tag figting match.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with wagon-training, I love the stimulation it provides and I love to test my own thoughts using this blog and others as a sounding-board, but how are we showing ourselves to the world outside of the blogosphere? Do we add value to the lives of others outside or little circle of tech geekness?
Sure a blog on knitting, or horse riding will generally contain tons of information, good original content and would appeal to a large scope of people including those that don’t get the whole blogging phenomenon. But do a test and do a cross section of the popular tech blogs out there, put on your user cap and you will realise that it seems like we are perpetuating the same ideas over and over again, SSDD.
Speaking to a South African web developer the other day I asked him what his takes is on Web 2.0, he replied:
“What’s that? I don’t have time to keep up with all that blogging crap, I work during the day.”
Scary? Yeah, and scary because its our fault. We need to educate, we need to SHARE! We need to stop bouncing around the intellectual beachball over the heads of the uninitiated.
Comments?
Why can't we just …. get along?
I love this new fangled internet thing. I love what we call web 2.0, I love the interconnectedness, the sharing, the cross-pollination of ideas the “developers partying with users” (as per Dave Winer) and the trust.
I was shocked and sickened by the somewhat nasty post directed at Scoble, read his response here.
Sure I read the Scobleizer, and personally I don’t care if Scoble runs Firefox and uses Scobleizer products or Microsoft tools, however I don’t believe it does anybody any good to start flinging insults around the blogosphere: “Scoble cannot tell his ass from his face”, thats just not cool.
Kent Newsome says: “Because the little blogospats that are popping up all over the blogosphere sound more like my kids fighting over a Polly Pocket than anything resembling reasoned conversation.“. And he is right, and it is directly undermining our efforts at heaving a meaningful debate in what we have called the blogosphere.
I read a lot of blogs everyday, including Scobleizer, when I am done I have a number of choices:
- Ignore what I have just read
- Take note and add it to my understanding of the world
- Comment and add to the conversation
However to start insulting someone unprovoked on a personal level is just not acceptable and counter-productive.
Without commenting on Scoble’s technical skill, let me just pose this question: Does it even matter?
Zoli Erdos makes a good point:”Technology’s primary role is to advance the lives of all of us, and guess what, that means mostly for non-technologists. We need the ‘hardcore’ technologists who create it, the non-techie users (the rest of the world, which happens to be the majority), and the in-betweeners, who explain it, help us select and use it.”
Surely everyone gets to have a say, the blogosphere is a big place, if you don’t like it just don’t read it, I don’t like half the stuff on TV, so I change the channel, I don’t start a mudslinging fight with the producers of the shows.
Come on guys, can’t we just get along? It will be better for all of us, in the long run.
Oh and am I the only one to think that Microsoft has as much a place in this world as the Open Source community, is there really a good or a bad (and a ugly)? Is it not more about what adds value to you the user personally? C’mon guys we need to get along, the worlds needs to change, lets call it the Technological Revolution 2.0 , mkay? 
A second look at Edgeio
I spend a couple of hours looking through Edgeio, but first an apology to Keith Teare. Turns out that Keith is in fact the founder of Edgeio, although Michael Arrington is his partner.
On to the review:
When you hit the Edgeio home page first you are greeted with a pleasing modern design with all the ubiquitous Web 2.0 elements like rounded corners and bright colors, so nothing wrong there.
Scrolling down will show you some tagged based categories which you can dive into immediately and just start clicking, or you can do a tag search in the search bar right on top.
Down the right of the screen you can filter by location, and refine with their fancy tag filter widget. Down the right you can also see the most popular items and the most popular blogs.
For the record, I am not too fond of the location filter widget, while very shiny and nice I found it somewhat hard to use.
The main purpose of the site is obviously to draw in people looking for a good deal on new and used goods, and for that purpose I don’t see anything wrong with the service and it does actually seem a lot slicker than anything else out there at the moment.
Within the actual tags the listings are displayed with the claimed weblogs having preference over unclaimed ones (claim by registering and putting a tracking link on your blog, or using an XML-RPC if your blog supports it) with a possible payed listing preferential treatment in future. Another big difference is that if you have claimed your weblog people can contact you directly from the site without having to fish around for contact details on your blog.
So overall I am pretty impressed with the concept and it is a great mashup of new and old concepts and a sterling example of web 2.0 innovation. However there are potential pitfalls, at the moment you can only have a listing if you have a RSS enabled blog AND if you understand the tagging system (Posts destined for listing on Edgieo must be tagged with the word, “listing”), trust me I tried to explain it to some non-tech colleagues the other day and they really couldn’t grasp the concepts. For this reason they will really need to go more in-depth in their “getting started” sections, and I strongly suggest maybe some graphical step-by-steps to explain the whole process with maybe even a video or two. Apart from the basic “listing” tag a complicated tagging structure is available to define price and location for the item, great for a geek like me, but can my mother use it? Also remember that by default services like Blogger do not ping any servers by default, so perhaps this needs to made abundantly clear? A sold or completed listing can be flagged us such from within your edgeio profile page if you are registered.
I do hope that their will be enough interest in the blogging community to support the system, I can’t remember ever seeing a for sale item on a blog. And I am a little worried about items not intended for use appearing on the system, as its not a registration-only system, and what about spam listings? Teare has commented that a human element is in place, in the form of moderators and a user reporting system. In my experience its best to avoid spam than to try and control it.
Overall I like edgeio I think it is a gutsy, early market entry and I could certainly use something like it from time to time, not on this blog, but somewhere else more appropriate. Here is hoping that it hasn’t appeared a little bit before its time.
Edgeio is buzzworthy
So I read about edgeio a while ago on TechCrunch, but I never really took much notice till this morning when I spotted a wierd line in a review done of the service on the Geek News Central RSS feed.
See screengrab below:
At first I wondered whether it is some sort of a tracking system for kudos or rewards handed to certain bloggers but as it turns out it is actually how you claim your blog for the edgeio system.
I am waiting to hopefully receive a login to find out how it exactly works, but I guess the final part of the claim process is to paste the word “edgeio-key” followed by a random hash into your blog somewhere.
Lets take a step back. For those that don’t know edgeio is a new spin on the EBay model with a bit of Web 2.0 in the mix. Instead of splitting your EBay live and your blogging live you can now bring your digital identity together by posting your for sale items on your blog and then tag the item as “listing”, after which the service will pick up your item and make it available for sale.
A sidebar listing your items for sale, and those of others if you have none or few listings, is available and it is claimed that some sort of earning model may be available from it at a later stage.
Edgeio is the pet project of Michael Arrington so I guess they can’t be in better hands, its early days but some are already condemning it while others call it “a hope for distributed community”. Either way, good luck to them, and can somebody please send me my evaluation code already?!
In the meantime, when you claim your blog, remember that even if you hide that ID code in a DIV its still going to pop up in your RSS feed and freak out people like me, why not just politely tell your readers what it is about?
Technorati Tags: Web2.0, TechCrunch, Arrington, Edgeio