Swarm is a social web-browsing site, which is pretty much the same description of StumbleUpon - though the services differ greatly.

Swarm operates through a Mozilla Firefox extensions which tracks the websites the surfer visits and then visually tracks them on their website, though a Flash application. Personally, I think AJAX on this site would be amazing, though no doubt it would take a lengthy amount of time to code.

All sites currently being viewed by Swarm users are displayed on this page as thumbnails. When the user changes the site they are viewing, a line points you to a new one. As the service is anonymous, alll thumbs for all users are in one place, and after 10 seconds this gets confusing!

Swarm allows users to discuss a page, though this feature does not appear to be used very often - perhaps due to the fact messages aren’t stored for very long, and in my opinion live chat doesn’t work when discussing webpages. Note that chatting through this system requires an account, though your surfings remain anonymous.

This service does have implications on the user’s privacy, much like Alexa, however it is somewhat protected due to the simplicity of turning the extension off and the option not to track certain sites.

There is an annoyance in the latter feature though: you can’t block a sub-domain (x.blogspot.com) or a directory (geocities.com/x) without blocking the whole domain and all of it’s other sub-domains and directories. Introducing a wildcard would, in my opinion, fix this.

Though in every way Swarm tries to keep the user’s privacy, it still seems a little scary. I expect many anti-spyware programs may pick it up, as they do with Alexa.

The site is an interesting experiment, though I doubt in it’s usefulness for discovering new websites. For that, I’ll stick with del.icio.us and StumbleUpon.

Tags: swarm, web 2.0, web2.0, flash, internet, web 2, web2

The above collage has everything I’ve blogged about in this blog’s 324 posts.
This blog is one today. In my opinion, I haven’t done badly. I’m the 13,500th most popular blog in the world (according to Technorati) and the 62,000th most popular site, according to Alexa.

I have a lot of people to thank. First of all, I’d like to thank Digg, who gave me the honour of being on their front page twice (which was the turning point for this blog), I’d also like to thank BlogShares, BlogAdvance and BlogMad for helping promote me. Moving away from companies, I’d like to thank Brian Benzinger, all the folks at the Ajaxian and Download Squad, Neil Turner, sarahintampa, and finally Azhar Chougle. Also, can I thank everyone else who reads this blog.

I’m making this post exactly one year after my first. I think I’ve improved a bit since then .

BlogCode is a site which recommends blogs similar to a certain blog, which you specify. This principle is extremely simple, and the site is almost as simple to use.

In order to gain a recommendation, you must choose from an already coded site and code a new one. Coding involves answering questions using a JS slider. These questions are about the blog’s content, writing style, the writer(s) and also consistency. When you have answered 3 pages of questions, it orders a series of results with closeness of matches in BlogCode (i.e. the given answers). For me, I get numerous blogs between 70-80%, including some small one’s I already read, like The Tlog!

More than one person can code a blog, and the more coders the more accurate the recommendations. The need for multiple bloggers to help one another on such a site provides an interesting mix of blogging, a blog directory and social networking.

Some blogs you find through BlogCode are interesting, while others are not. One benefit of using such a service is for bloggers to find similar sites, from which they can gain inspiration. This can avoid bloggers block.If you are logged in, all blogs you code are recorded to your account - allowing you to see developed recommendations.

The site could vastly improve through a much more Web 2.0 design. I find the current design fairly bloated, and I dislike the use of dark green. Also, some AJAX would improve the site, greatly.

I dislike the use of the word of code, as I think like… code… as in HTML or C# and soforth.

You can code and view recommendations for this blog here.

Tags: blogcode, web2.0, web 2.0, blogging, blogs, blogosphere

peoplefeeds is a site which puts all your del.icio.us, Flickr photos, blog posts, and anything else which employs RSS in one place.

The idea, put simply, is so that you (and your readers) don’t have to trawl around multiple sites to find out what you’ve posted. The idea itself is Web 2.0, and it’s del.icio.us, Flickr, and XML-RPC integration is very Web 2.0, though it does not employ any AJAX.

It is possible to integrate this service into your blog, through either a search box and/or tagcloud. Though this is fairly nifty, it lacks a wizard to customise it (and expects you to edit the JS manually), though this is fine for me - some may struggle.

Another moan I have is the over-complexity of the blog system. It requires configuration of XML-RPC, when simply typing in the feed URL (or auto-detection) would suffice. Another moan is about the design - the red is too heavy, a blue would be much better.

However, the site does not check RSS feeds often enough, I think it should check them hourly for changes.

Good idea, though! You can view my profile here.

Tags: web 2.0, web2.0, web2, peoplefeeds, blog, blogs, blogging

Trendio.com is an online stock market game, much like BBC’s Celebdaq. When you join, you get a fake $10,000 to invest in words and phrases.

The game works by the player purchasing shares in a choice of pre-chosen words & phrases. These word’s frequency in the media affects the price of the shares; the word’s frequency is done by grabbing Yahoo! News every 60 minutes.One thing I don’t find very Web 2.0 about this service is the fact that players can’t add words, nor do they have a say in which words will be added. I believe this is due to license restrictions, though I’m sure the latter option is possible. I believe it is important to give the user’s some say, to add a social side to the website.

Celebdaq runs in a similar manner, though it’s only for celeb’s names.

In my opinion, Trendio has a fairly clean layout, though I’d love to see some AJAX (perhaps when buying shares?).

I have to admit I don’t find it as addictive as BlogShares, but it’s still fairly good!

Tags: Trendio, game, celebdaq, web 2.0, web2, web2.0, web 2