Web 2.0 is such a contentious term… I could never really understand why. Yeah, sure. It’s a buzzword and its meaning is kind of vague, but for me, it’s also been a call to action, a marshalling of the troups, a way to name the excitement that we should *all* be feeling, if we’re working in this space at the moment.
Now, before you write me off… yes, I was there for the last bubble. I was there before it, I worked through it, and I suffered the pain of the aftermath. (No, I didn’t get any shares that made me a millionaire, and I didn’t get one of those great redundancies that were going around… mostly, I just survived.)
I think the reason that Web 2.0 sits quite comfortably with me is because, rather than thinking of it as a new ‘version’ of the internet, I think of it as a new generation.
Generations are brief periods of time that were raved with pop cultures throughout the world. Many characteristics of these generations are the music, fads, and inventions placed in each period of time. (via wikipedia)
Generations don’t require ‘new’ things, they react and respond to the generation before them and to the social, political, technological, and media environment that they are born into. Theoretically, they learn from the mistakes of the past (although, this is not always the case!), the benefit from the learnings of their predecessors, they are more adept with advances in technology and live ‘natively’ with it – using it in ways that previous generations had never considered.
New generations are supposed to outrage their elders, to annoy them, to make them shake their heads and think of the good old days. They are supposed to make many of the same mistakes their elders have made, albeit in new ways (although, sometimes in v. old ways too), they are supposed to be troublesome and challenging and sometimes wild.
Via TechCrunch today I came across a new beta site – Jobby. This is a site that allows you to upload your resume and create a bit of a personal profile (if you’re hunting down work), or if you’re a potential employer, to search for suitable talent.
There’s nothing particularly special about that but – as Michael Arrington points out – the interface is worth a second look, if you’re into that kind of thing. Michael says:
The interface is exceptional and you don’t have to do more than click a couple of times on a tag cloud to set up tags. You’ll have to try it to fully understand how it works.
I think that might be a *bit* of an overstatement, but it certainly is a *very* efficient implementation of the ‘tag cloud’ as a interaction device, in this case, for creating lists.
Ajaxian is similarly impressed and says that Jobby:
combines a solid combination of interface and functionality to create an easy to use kind of user experience
The interface designers at Jobby do need to be congratulated for taking a new ‘web 2.0′ interaction concept that has been poorly implemented in so many places, and applying it in a new environment where it solves old interaction design problems. So, let’s check it out…
In the last few days I’ve seen a few blogs I read celebrating their 4th birthday. I’m not sure what was going on this time 4 yrs ago, but it must have been blogworthy 
Congrats to you guys…. sorry I can’t remember who you are just now! (that’s the hazard of reading so many feeds, I’ve found!)
On the other hand, I’m celebrating a 2 months of blogging. The first thing is to say that it seems like so much more time than that! At the risk of sounding like an utter dork, blogging has become an integral part of my everyday. Even when I’m not actually writing a lot of posts, I’m often thinking about them. I’ve discovered that it’s relatively rare for me to blog ‘off the cuff’ in response to something I’ve just happened upon. Although, I guess, that’s what my daily links do, in a way. Blog posts actually take some time for me to craft… longer than I’d originally expected, but not so long that I actually go back and proof read them before I send them live…! Maybe next month (when WordPress launches its spellchecker!)
So, two months down and I’m still here… clearly this is not a fad. And I’m addicted to more than Google Analytics now. I finally put down some cash for BlogBeat. As I’ve discussed in the past, it’s far from a perfect stats package, but compared to other alternatives I’ve tried (paid and free), it gives me most of what I want. I still use it in combination with Google Analytics, and will continue to do so. And, I’m still waiting for the day that MeasureMap finally send out their beta invitations. I have high hopes…!
Lots of linky goodness today, including a bunch of links to people blogging their experience of IA Summit 2006, just wrapped up in Vancouver, Canada. Wish I was there! Thanks for the blogging guys
I was reading a great post by Russell Beattie recently on handheld stylesheets and the great implementation that Opera have launched on their community portal recently. It took me back to my (not so distant) days finishing up my Masters degree with our digital project. As you may guess, my group did a mobile project.
It was a great little project and it really allowed those of us who’d been working in web for so many years to apply our skills to a different platform and develop some really interesting learnings. For me, I was pretty amazed by what we found with regards to Information Architecture and Interaction Design.
Being a university project, of course there was a lot more research involved than you’d usually have the budget of the time to do for a commercial build. This allowed time for me to definitively show that there were very, very few ID conventions when it comes to interface design for mobile web content.
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