People always talk about Web 2.0 referring to websites which encourage user participation such as YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia etc and this whole craze is helping us all.

I first started making websites in 2001 and whenever I mentioned I had a website I received “wow”s because having a website seemed out-of-reach to the average Joe. The Web 2.0 revolution has brought website creation into the hands of the masses even more than the likes of Geocities did.

The ‘beauty’ of sites like MySpace is that when someone joins, everyone around them feels obliged to join. A MySpace profile is a person’s online presence much like a personal webpage is/was.

For some reason, MySpace seems much less intimidating to most people than HTML (many people appreciate having the skeleton made for them yet we nerds hate this :P) and the ‘beauty’ of the Wikipedia is that is provides a central point for information to easily be collated which can easily be corrected/added to (correcting something by clicking ‘edit’ requires much less effort than emailing the webmaster of a site!).

It’s safe to say that a lot, if not most, Westerners (and no doubt Far Easterners) maintain a profile on a social networking site but how many maintain/maintained a personal webpage? You could argue the reason for increasing web presence is the growth of the Internet but you could also argue the increasing ease of establishing a presence (you don’t need to find a host, find a HTML editor and get a domain etc) is also a contributing factor.

Although it helps identity fraudsters and is scary, the fact lots of people have an online presence only helps communication. If you forgot to ask for someone’s email, you can simply search through MySpace and Facebook for it. Regardless of what the critics of the Wikipedia say, it’s a fantastic way to quickly get some information or to get a list of sources (most articles will/should have a bibliography). What other source in the existence of the world has information on over 2,000,000 topics?

To be frank I still love looking at a simple HTML personal webpage or homepage for a piece of freeware as you can quickly get the link/information you’re after but even creating an absolute barebone webpage like that requires some skill and would probably off-put newbies.

Web 2.0 is succeeding as it brings the power to share information over the Internet to the not-completely-tech-literate masses and gives those masses the ability to quickly find that information!

Tags: web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0

Since 2003, my mobile phone operator has been T-Mobile and throughout this period my needs have changed. Over the past 2 years, I’ve needed a data connection much more and until yesterday I continued to use GPRS but today I set my first 3G phone. Whilst at my house I’m lucky to get a UMTS signal, I enjoyed listening to last.fm in the car to a nearby small city.

I thought accessing fairly high quality streaming audio would cost me a small fortune but I was pleasantly surprised to find out that 3G data, like GPRS, is capped at £1 a day (and that’s on PAYG!). I downloaded an amount well in excess of 5MB and whilst this doesn’t sound much it was really convenient.

The beauty of it is that I can use my phone as a modem so I can get speeds between dial-up and broadband in some places and speeds roughly equal to dial-up (GPRS) pretty much anywhere for £1 a day which in my opinion is much better than paying whatever extortionate amount commercial WiFi networks demand!

On my current price plan I pay only 3p per text (this weekend I receive free texts as if you to your phone up on a Friday for an amount over £10, T-Mobile give you free weekend texts) and no more than £1 daily for data. Considering I’m not a big fan of traditional telephony I don’t object to being charged 40p/min for the occasional time where I might use the ‘phone’ aspect.

What’s your favourite phone network and why?

Tags: t-mobile, t mobile

I was reading Rev2’s (belated) Blog Action Day feature and discovered it was about a game called ElectroCity where you are tasked with providing a city with necessary power and features such amusement parks and the amount and manner in which you do it determines how well you and your city do.

You are given with 150 turns to build the biggest, most-environmentally friendly town possible. You are then given a score out of one hundred and a grade (such as B+) as the game seems to be orientated towards New Zealand schools. For your score, factors such as popularity amongst your citizens, environment, energy management and money are counted.

You are initially given a town of 10,000 and $400 to use. With this $400, you can elect to build the likes of wind turbines or become the PRC and use coal power stations! You can also have initiatives in your town such as awareness, a blackout, getting all citizens to use energy-efficient lightbulbs or install solar panels… naturally these also cost money. You can raise extra money through tax (the rate of which you set) but if you set your tax too high, people will leave your town.

Mines and gas wells can also be built and the extracted fossil fuels can either be sold (to raise extra money) or used in power stations (the latter results in pollution which must be offsetted through building forests etc. as you must be somewhat conservative with the little land you have to build on).

The game is Flash based and reminds me somewhat of a ‘tycoon’ game and being a massive fan of OpenTTD and soforth it nearly immediately addicted me. The game’s sponsored by New Zealand’s Genesis Energy and prizes worth up to $10,000 were awarded to participating schools.

My current high score on the game is 87 (which is an A-… due to my town’s low population )… what’s yours?

Tags: electrocity, global warming, climate change, game, web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, new zealand

Today is Blog Action Day

Tired of charging your phone through mains? Why not splash out on various gadgets which could provide a renewable charge to your gadgets?

There are several ways you could charge your phone whilst not using mains’ energy.

1. You could use a clockwork charger!
2. Or perhaps a £30 solar panel?
3. Make your bike charge your phone? (and reduce car use too!)
4. Or a wind turbine? (not commercially available… yet!)
5. May be you could use a wee-powered battery?

Whilst this is obviously a joke post… I doubt any of the above produce significant amounts of energy,,, the message is valid.

Tags: blog action day, gadgets

In May 2006, I applied for membership to the fairly-exclusive blog network 9rules and I was fortunate to be accepted.

9rules has changed a lot since I became a member; I’ve lived through three designs/versions (the ‘original’, Ali and the new Ali2).

The ‘pre-Ali’ 9rules was the first version I experienced and it lacked many of the community features for non-members such as notes. We members had our own forum with thousands and thousands of threads. Besides the forum, it was mainly an RSS aggregator but it had some community features such as community blogs. At this time, communities used to have their own blogs highlighting good entries from the various blogs which constituted that community which were written by community leaders (the Web++ leaders were myself and Brian Benzinger).

In July 2006, they added notes to 9rules. Notes provided a way for non-members to directly contribute to 9rules because notes were basically a mixture between a clipping, forum thread and comment thread which anyone could post to. Opening registration to non-members (who remain non-members of 9rules but member of 9rules’ notes) upset many members as they believed 9rules lost some of its exclusivity but in hindsight it was a good move because it filled 9rules with fresh, public content and an even livelier community. As the popularity of notes grew, members found themselves unable to actively contribute to our clubhouse (private member forum) and notes so many chose one to contribute to most.

In October 2006 even more members were welcomed to 9rules which was also controversial but many of our best members are from those batch .

2007 has seen the introduction of 9rules Ali, which added social networking and 9rules points, and then Ali2, which was a much more refined version of the original Ali with a few extra features (such as Clips which could best be described as a Digg clone :P) and a better design chucked in. Ali2 also saw the closure of our clubhouse and a change in the network’s rules which requires members to be active on Notes… both moves probably trying to bridge the gap between members and readers/semi-members/notes members.

9rules will face challenges in the future regarding what membership actually means but hopefully they’ll overcome them.

Tags: 9rules