Web 2.0: I just read about a new site called outside.in, which is one of many locality based sites. I mention it because the web address "outside.in" is cute (using the Indian top-level domain .in), and they are a great example of web 2.0 at work. They clearly have a mechanism to match web articles to geographic locations (known as geo-spatial mapping), based on town names. When I put in my local zip-code, it produced articles from Newton and surrounding towns. It also allows users to add content to the site: for example, restaurant reviews. So this combines clever new "mashups" (the geo-spatial mapping), plus user-generated content, plus a bit of naming whimsy (or branding hopefulness). I would say that is web 2.0.
Jewish Social Scene 2.0: My good buddy, Ilan Segev, has no blog. (Does that make him Ilan 1.0?) So lacking the forum to break his own news scoops, he passed on a viral video ad for Koolanoo.com, which promotes itself as either the first or the biggest Jewish Social Networking site. As I mentioned the other day, social networking is "big news" in the web 2.0 world. Koolanoo (a hebrew word meaning "all of us") is certainly not the first Jewish social networking site (Jewish Geography, for one, has been around since 2000), but it is the first to look like MySpace or Facebook, and I guess that for this generation, that is the comparator.
Idiocy 2.0: Google issued an idiotic posting, no doubt prompted by their lawyers who are upset at being sued now they own the YouTube copyright problems, telling everyone that "google" as an everyday word is bad, Bad, BAD. They have a trademark to protect, and it is clearly more important to them than their reputation as a smart company. Their company motto is "Don't be evil". Perhaps they should add "Don't be idiots, either".
No comments:
Post a Comment