Coffeenatic is a site to share reviews on certain types of coffee in addition to sharing coffee recipes. I love niche social sites like this because they have a clear purpose and act not only as a socialising tool but as a resource.

Unusually for an Englishman, I am not a huge fan of tea (with the exception of roobios tea, thanks Danette!) and would much rather consume coffee (probably due to its higher caffeine content!)!

Coffeenatic allows users to submit reviews of certain brands of coffees in addition to writing recipes to make coffee. Whilst the amount of data they possess is small at the moment, I really hope it expands because it is wonderfully organised. Reviews for coffee are split up into brands, which type of bean was used, the type of coffee which it is, ratings, prices and where they that coffee is grown; recipes are categorised under the ingredients and complexity involved.

Adding a review or recipe is extremely simple: providing you have an account, all you have to do is click ‘Add a coffee’ or ‘Add a recipe’ and fill in a form (which possesses many fields but they are easy enough to complete).

The site possesses a fairly typical ‘Web 2.0′ design but colours are tastefully picked to suit the nature of the website.

Coffee addicts: give this site a go and make your coffee recipes public knowledge (it’s like open-source cola, just for coffee! :P). Friend me if you wish.

I’m going to admit it. I’m tired of Web 2.0. I have a few sites made in the Web 2.0 era which I’ll frequently use but I no longer follow new start-ups. Why? They’re boring!

The bubble’s going to pop… and soon. VC folk are going to stop funding every single typical social network that Joe Bloggs copies invents.

When will it be? When will start-ups stop popping up many times a day? Will it stop with the constant growth of the Web? Don’t all good things come to an end?

Tags: web 2.0

We don’t know what Web 2.0 is yet people are already touting things as Web 3.0. The beauty of Web 3.0 is that PR people will be able to use the buzzword however long Web 2.0 lasts but not a day afterwards; Web 3.0 is something new start-ups claim they are working towards yet no one is sure what that something is.

Whilst the definition of Web 2.0 is fluid, the definition of Web 3.0 is even more so! For a service to call themselves Web 2.0, they generally need to follow that movement of design or require user-generated content. What Web 3.0 is remains much more mysterious and elusive permanently remaining that way.

The term Web 2.0 is misleading to the general public: when they hear it, they think a new Web is out… not a new dot-com boom!

Lets not talk about Web 3.0 until we iron the bugs out of Web 2.0 and perfect it. Maybe one day, the Internet and desktops will be perfectly integrated and there’ll be no difference between the online and the offline… but that day remains decades away.

Tags: web 3.0, web3, web2, web 2.0

Web 2.0 has its fair share of personalities ranging from RWW’s Richard McManus to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington to Orkut Büyükkökten from well umm Orkut.

But who’s the biggest personality? If someone wanted to choose one person to summarise Web 2.0 best, who would it be? Would it be a blogger, like Arrington, an entrepreneur, like Steve Chen, or a charity, like the Wikimedia Foundation. Or perhaps the best personality is the average Joe?

Blogging and Web 2.0 are undeniably linked: both started allowing anyone to contribute to the Internet and both happened at roughly the same time. A blogger and a Web 2.0 personality are, in my eyes, very different as whilst they are linked they are different. However, some of the most successful blogs are about Web 2.0 (eg TechCrunch and Read/Write Web). Perhaps it’d be fitting to say such a blogger who knows lots of what’s going on in the Web 2.0 world would be the best personality? However, these people (and indeed I :P) lack innovation for merely documenting ideas and not writing our/their own.

The people who invented start-ups like Facebook, YouTube or Flickr became rich. Web 2.0 saw these people start off with fairly little but end up making millions and millions of pounds. Perhaps the success of Web 2.0 is best shown in these entrepreneurs as financially Web 2.0 has been very successful for them!

The other category for personality could be us and the projects we contribute to. Time made us the person of the year and look at what we’ve built… a multi-lingual encyclopaedia with 2,000,000 articles in English alone amongst other things!

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