If you’re like me, you will probably check your RSS feed after you’ve emptied your to-do list and encounter several hundred articles! It is essential to check them frequently, but not too frequently, so it doesn’t take hours to read and you don’t miss any interesting articles.
There are ways to keep your RSS load to a minimum:
- Do you use public transport? Use your mobile to read your feeds. Consider using an online reader, like Bloglines, which offers a mobile version
- Use a desktop client, like NetNewsWire, which can sync with online services.
- Subscribe only to blogs which you truly want to read. Perhaps go for blogs with less frequent posts!
- Go for power reads if you can. For 5 minutes every couple of hours, check your feeds to ensure that you don’t end up with a massive load of posts to go through. Time yourself though to ensure you don’t go over 5 minutes!
- Give yourself a limit for one post… perhaps 20 seconds maximum per post (depending on your reading speed!). If you decide to comment, you can obviously exceed this!
Now, it’s time to practise what I preach!
Cambrian House (review), a website which allowed ideas to be crowdsourced (many people work together) into products, has ‘failed’. They are selling their assets to another venture film for much less than what was invested in it. As their CEO said ‘our model failed’. I am not going into this but you can read all about it here, here and here!
Everybody is saying crowdsourcing has failed but I beg to differ. There are so many successful collaborative, crowdsourced projects left. Whilst they may not style themselves as a crowdsourced project, it’s hard to argue that they are not!
The most successful crowdsourced project has to be Wikipedia. How many other encyclopedias can boast 2,000,000 articles made by over 7,000,000 users? In my opinion, 7,000,000 people can easily be classed as a crowd and 2,000,000 articles can easily be considered quite a lot of collective work!
The Open Directory Project is another crowdsourced project. It is one of the Word’s largest directories of websites and the moderators are all volunteers who work together. It is much more formal than Wikipedia and not quite as collabrative but once again shows how individual efforts combined can make something great.
Crowdsourcing hasn’t failed, just better business models need to be established on how to use it.
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
