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Following on from my lengthy post on the topic of what the heck Web 2.0 actually is, an excellent paper on Web 2.0 [PDF format] has appeared on Pew Internet’s website. It draws on Hitwise data about the growth of usage of certain “Web 2.0” sites (such as Wikipedia) compared to the stagnation of “Web … Read more

In an excellently timed follow-up to my post about Web 2.0, the BBC has signed a memorandum of understanding with Microsoft to act as a framework for joint projects between the two organizations, including Web 2.0-style stuff (the details are vague, but we can probably expect stuff like video sharing). Hopefully this will mean that … Read more

There’s been a bit of buzz around MSN’s new Soapbox video sharing site of late (currently invitation-only beta, I’m afraid). Initial reactions seem to have been reasonably positive, whilst pointing out that of course Microsoft has a lot of catching up to do if it’s going to compete with YouTube. At the same time there’s … Read more

Off-topic, this, but I have just discovered the Microsoft fontblog, which is set in the divine Candara font, which is new with Vista. I’m a total font geek, so I’ve reset the font for this blog to Candara too, though if you’re not running Vista or haven’t downloaded Candara, you’ll still see it in the … Read more

One of the questions I’m asked pretty frequently is, “What exactly is Web 2.0, anyway?” I’m going to have to answer this question in some detail for an audience at McCann Erickson  next month (I’m hoping to post my material here after the fact), but I thought I’d blog something brief here, which – who … Read more

Have just received an e-mail to tell me that CrazyEgg has (finally) launched. It’s a niche, low-end A/B testing tool (entry level pricing is free, scaling to $99 a month for up to 250,000 visits a month) with some nice heat map and page overlay reporting. I’ve instrumented the home page of this blog; I’ll … Read more

Have been failing to keep the blogmonster fed over the last few days because my wife’s been in hospital with appendicitis. People (mostly who’ve never been there) keep telling us how lucky we are to have St Mary’s hospital, Paddington, so nearby. All I can say that if this is how a well-run NHS hospital … Read more

It looks like this: The picture above is a map of the blogosphere from Matthew Hurst’s fascinating Data Mining blog. Here’s Matthew’s description of the above image: The dark edges show the reciprocal links (where A has cited B and B has cited A), the lighter edges indicate a-reciprocal links. The larger, denser area of … Read more

Presentation Zen is a blog I’ve been following for some time; it’s written by Garr Reynolds, who is an evangelist for clear visual communications – presentation skills, in other words. In an interesting post from April this year, Garr talks about the increasing wave of “slideuments” – documents masquerading as collections of slides. You know … Read more

There’s an interesting post over on Marketing & Graphic Design ROI which raises the point that web analytics dashboards can do more harm than good in some cases, by encouraging users to focus on (and get excited about) metrics that are not necessarily the most important ones that they should be measuring (Joseph cites an example … Read more