These del.icio.us tagrolls are just too fancy! My delicious-Tags sorted alphabetically:
Monthly Archive for November, 2005
Yesterday this weblog (»details of a global brain«) was featured on »The Main Quad« – a private blog that is “promoting viewpoints and topics that are international, multicultural, multi and interdisciplinary, and all over the political spectrum” (with a focus on academic blogs). I am pleased that I appear to be the first non-native English speaking blogger in their directory and I appreciate the kind words of editor Jennifer Chernick.
I recently switched to a new mobile phone with SymbianOS. Nothing spectacular. It was cheap as I was extending my contract. It is a Nokia 3230. The user interface really has serious issues (which I think is amazing for a multi-million dollar company like Nokia that does not sell phones only by their external look).
I am not so much into mobile phones and I am not willing to spend lot’s of money to be an early adopter. I am more “early mainstream” in this.
I was looking for a free solution to post pictures online in a second. I was not satisfied with PicoBlogger or LifeBlog and I also did not want to use pricy MMS messages for submitting large images.
Now I found SplashBlog. This service seems to be straight forward and free for a limited amount of images. So from now on you might find some images from me on my SplashBlog site.
Update: I found something better: the fastest way to get photos online with a Symbian phone ist ShoZu. Once you have a Flickr account it’s just a click and it will be uploaded to Flickr in the background. Nice.
Tim Bruysten forgot his »Apple Mighty Mouse« after his presentation on Web Monday meet-up. I took it with me to hand it back to him later. I am using it now. And I have to say: I don’t like it.
I don’t want to go into too much detail, but generally the absence of physical feedback for the three different “buttons” requires the user to get that from the visual/acoustic feedback on screen. The presence of two more buttons is not visible and not haptic. So it remains a mental concept.
It is a nice object to explicate the notion of affordance.
If you still feel the term »Web 2.0« is not yet well defined you may help out by doing this collaborative definition: Web 2.0 or Not
Yesterday there was a meetup of web people at Hallmackenreuther café in Cologne. The topic was »Web 2.0« (among others). Now I read through the comments and I found people complaining about the spontanous informal character and the absence of something what they call »web 2.0« in the few presentations given.
Here is my take on this:
The mere fact, that 80 people come together within few days of notice, arrange for beers, beamers, laptops without formal invitation just by using a Wiki and some keywords (here, here, here and elsewhere) to me is already »Web 2.0«. The »Web 2.0 presentation« they were hoping to witness were themselves! It would have been impossible to do it that way some years ago.
But speaking of »Web 2.0« as technological term:
People use it as a meme. It’s an abstract word like »peace«. It doesn’t mean a thing – it’s a mode. A mode where technology can be a catalyst for emergence, spontaneity and openess. It does not come with the flaws of the »old school« openess where the idea that »anything goes« needed to be reinforced by expressively doing ridicolous and artsy things. That’s not needed anymore: the concept is understood. Today we have »conditional openess«: there may be a license attached or a policy you have to agree on.
In terms of technology I think »Web 2.0« is flawed for one reason. »Web 2.0« is what »Web 1.0« should always have been. So the pre-web2.0 time would actually be the time of »Web 0.8 – alpha-dev-release – USEWITHCAUTION«. There is nothing »Web 2.0« about following web standards, using reliable JavaScript engines, taking advantage of potent frameworks or working with scripting interpreters that were designed with the web in mind from the beginning on. There is nothing »Web 2.0« about providing a usable interface that doesn’t require you to wait after each click and that helps you to get things done without reading through tons of README.txt files with corrupted umlauts and things.
We just need to admit that the web as we know it was a beta release for the last 15 years and that it has matured technology-wise. And if one day we can get rid of the browser dependency then we have reached an original design goal! I would have no problem if someone calls that »Web 2.0« just because the first major milestone was reached. It’s a big project. It makes more fun to raise the version number at every milestone! No one wants to work on a beta for the rest of his life (well, some do indeed!).