FooCamp vs BarCamp
cat vs dog
Mac vs Windows (hee hee)
Coolest thing since sliced bread, this.
Technorati to be bought?
Rumour has it that Technorati‘s about to get snapped up by ‘a large search engine company’. Last time I blogged a rumour like this, it turned out to be true, but I can’t winkle even a single bit of data (neither a 0 nor a 1) out of my contacts at Technorati. Pfft. Trust me to hang out with such honourable people.
Last.fm relaunch site – with tags
The guys over at Last.fm have have finally merged the Last.fm music playlist sharing and internet radio site with their Audioscrobbler.com site, which served the plugin that you need to make Last.fm work (fyi: my page). I spoke to them about that before Christmas, but sadly didn’t get the chance to work with them. What’s really cool about the new redesign is that they’ve added tags to the mix, so you can forget about all that horrible music taxonomy stuff and just tag stuff however you like. Plus there seem to be a lot more in the way of charts now, for the statistically obsessed. Good work, guys.
One in six Americans reads blogs
NYT article about the fact that one in six Americans now reads blogs, based on the Behaviors of the Blogosphere (PDF) report from comScore Networks, which I’ve downloaded but haven’t had a chance to read yet. I’ve a three hours train journey tomorrow, maybe I’ll get a chance then.
Links, blogrolls and patterns
danah boyd blogs about the patterns she observes in bloggers’ linking behaviours, some of which are very interesting. A few of her comments, though, leave a little to be desired in terms of comprehension of existing technologies which address some of her problems with links – something Joe Clark ably discusses.
Blogs take a shine to Moore’s Law
Is there a Moore’s Law of the Blogosphere?
The reason for asking that question is the announcement this week by blog tracker Technorati […], in its annual State of the Blogosphere report that the number of blogs in the world has jumped from 7.5 million in March to 14.2 million today.
In other words, in appears the blogosphere is doubling in size every five months. Or even more staggering — a new blog is being created out there somewhere every second.
Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors.
If Moore’s Law holds true for blogs, in three years we’ll have 2,000 million blogs. And I bet people will still be talking about ‘bloggers’ as if we are al the same.
Email is for old farts
Email is for old farts, apparently. How very apposite.
Where are all the British tech start-ups?
Tom Coates writes a great post asking why all the cool tech start-ups seem to be in America, and why there are so few of them here, despite the fact that the UK has some amazingly smart and inventive people. Comments on this post are a great insight, and I don’t just say that because I commented.
Technorati keyword searches now by language
Technorati have now implemented language filtering for keyword searches, with their beta providing the opportunity to filter by Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese or Spanish. So, I can search for ‘pledgebank’ in all languages, or I can narrow it down to just French. Nice!
This is only a beta at the moment, but Dave Sifry tells me that they will roll out more languages in due course.
Web 2.0? It’s about finding people
Susan Crawford has a great post about how all this structured metadata in Web 2.0 is really about helping us to see the patterns in the networks that we are a part of, find people that we need to find, and create bonds we need to create in order to get things done.
These meta-informational thingies are letting us see our online environment in ways we can’t possibly see the offline world. What’s important isn’t just that these thingies are dynamic (although that’s clearly important) but also that they can be (1) visualized and (2) affected by the attention of individuals.
[…] we can find issues and people we want to work on/with and then actually do something about it. That’s the big difference. All this high-quality meta-information allows us to see the rules and roles that make up groups online, join those institutions for brief periods of time (because we’re just the right person for the job) and change the world.