For any interested parties, I watched Outfoxed on Sky, a satellite network owned by Rupert Murdoch (though not on one of his channels).
I’m so flattered. The iPodderX developers have been reading my ideas.
There’s so many subscriptions I skim over and never really read. I need a clear out in Bloglines.
Wow! We have snow! Snow, I say!
Thomas Hesse: “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?”. Similarly, most people don’t know how their car brakes work, so who gives a fuck about that? More technological stupidity here. My favourite, as both a Nano and Motorola Razr user? Ed Zander’s “Screw the nano”.
Dave Winer: “The dark side sees eyeballs and user-generated content. The light side sends them away, trusting that they’ll come back. The beuaty of it is that the light side works and the dark side doesn’t. That is where the optimism of web people comes from.”
Neither Good Nor Bad
I use Web 2.0. I use Gmail (or rather, ‘Google Mail’). I use Technorati. I use Remember the Milk. I use All Consuming and 43Things and Flickr. I use del.icio.us. I’m just testing PeopleFeeds. I love upcoming.
I also use Dave’s OPML Editor, which has it’s roots in software designed in the eighties. I use LaTeX, command line interfaces, SSH and strange home-brewed stuff.
Why is there such a backlash against Web 2.0? Because, apparently, it’s proponents haven’t learnt the lessons of the dot.com boom. Indeed, some haven’t. There are certain parts of the Web 2.0 craze which I disapprove of. I dislike perpetual beta. I dislike this culture of invite-only testing (reminds me too much of the worst part of school cliques).
But, Web 2.0 is producing applications that are good. Gmail is the only email client I’ve used which hasn’t sucked. Del.icio.us is a tool that I’ve been looking for since I first started using the Web in 1996. Google Maps is the only mapping site I have found which doesn’t suck.
Flickr could be better. I dislike the upload interface, and the pages load quite slowly on my PC. I really dislike what Yahoo! have done to Flickr. That sucks donkey cojones. I’m not wild about Flock much.
I also cannot find an online RSS reader that doesn’t annoy me. Bloglines is still the best of breed, and even that has things which annoy me. It does have the major upside of an XML-RPC interface so that I can pull the headlines down in NetNewsWire for reading on the train. It has a mobile version, so that if I’m flush with cash, I can read it on my phone.
Web 2.0 has served an important role in the development of the Web, even if it does bomb or is not financially successful. The dot.com bubble burst cleared out a lot of the crap. People now look sceptically at mail-order dog food and Internet connected fridges. Similarly, Web 2.0 has asked us to up the ante.
As a user, I must say that the software I want is very much different from the software that is being made. There is a whole history of good ideas out there that we need to pick up. As Dave has said: “That’s retro, and old school, and given the way things have turned out, progress.”
Web 2.0, beyond the hype, is a family of good software, good ideas and democratisation of the Internet. This can only be a good thing. As for the future dot.bombers? Well, don’t use them, and let the market sort them out. If people are silly enough to pump money in to bad ideas, then bad ideas will continue to happen. But if software isn’t useful, it won’t be used.
Wow. I founded a Flickr group called Philosophy and then rather absent mindedly forgot about it. I come back today and there are 69 members and 255 photos, some rather beautiful and thought-provoking. They exhibit a certain serioussness and je ne sais quoi. Note to self: don’t start stuff and ignore it.
I’m just transferring the analogue recording of Mynga Futrell and preparing it for podcastin’.
Dawkins and Dennett respond to Kitzmiller. Mmm. Sensible.
