Sociocorpus » web 2.0

Is there anything worth watching on NZ TV?

Dan Randow — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 22:16:46 +0000

New “web 2.0″ NZ TV listing site http://throng.co.nz works like I’d want a TV listing site to work, if I wanted a TV listing site. It shows what’s on now, soon and tonight, with weightings for popularity. That’s three out of four, but Throng also tells me “Members may personalise their listings to highlight their favourite shows and hide ones they’re not interested in.” Thing is tho, most of what’s on TV, I am not interested in. What I want is to see the odd rare thing that I might actually be interested in watching. So, rather than just hide all of it, I think I’ll ignore Throng. If there’s something on that you think I’ll really like, would you please let me know.

So Simple a Kid would Get It

Dan Randow — Mon, 14 May 2007 06:41:18 +0000

Every month, a few of us meet up for dinner and geek conversation. We call it the Valley in Christchurch. Well, this month we were joined by a couple of actual valley guys, Peter Weck and Hans Brough from Simply Hired. They’re nice guys and we had an interesting conversation: interesting because it was mainly about us, and Christchurch and New Zealand. But we did find out a little about them, and to express their gratitude and generosity, they gave us tee shirts.

I am thinking about branding at OnlineGroups.Net right now, so I took particular interest in what they had on their tee shirts. I was impressed by the simplicity of the message: if you hate your job, then you’ll love our search. I figured that anyone would get that message, even without the graphics, and that even without the words, the graphics would get most the message across, too. I decided to test this with a four year old. I showed her the back of the tee shirt and asked “in this picture, who would you rather be, the elephant or the person?”.

“The elephant” she replied. Horrified, I asked why. “Because the elephant gets to stand on the stool”. Darn, that makes sense. Determined to salvage some dignity for us adults, I asked the same question about the picture on the front of the shirt. This time, she preferred to be the person. Why? “Because the person gets to hold the shovel.”

OnlineGroups.Net is Open for Business

Dan Randow — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 21:23:57 +0000

After nearly four years developing the underlying open source technology GroupServer, we decided that it’s too good to keep it to ourselves. Sure, there are variouls successful GroupServer sites but we figure that lots of people don’t want a whole installation, they just want some groups or a site. So we decided to build a site where they can have that. After many months of polishing the interface and building the ’shop’, OnlineGroups.Net is open for business.

OnlineGroups.Net allows you to create your own site and then add online groups. Sites and trial groups are free. Our online groups work equally via email and the web. There are other tools that provide this but we believe that OnlineGroups.Net has the most usable interface. What other tools don’t do is allow you to have your online groups on your own site. With a little help from us, OnlineGroups.Net sites can be completely customised.

We want to have tens of thousands of sites running on this service so that we can make GroupServer better faster, and build our specialised services business. So please, start a site and try out our online groups, tell us what you think of them and, if you like them, spread the good word (web feed).

Three Key Phenomena of Web 2.0

Dan Randow — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 23:41:39 +0000

Last evening a gave a presentation to the NZ Computer Society entitled Web 2.0: Hype or Reality?. Before I had even shut the laptop lid, Michael Sampson had blogged the session. Here’s the (PowerPoint) presentation that I used and [coming soon is] an audio recording of the session.

The main risk that I took was to attempt to isolate three key phenomena of Web 2.0:

the read/write Web – the first time since before the agrarian age that humans have had about equal opportunity to contribute to the shared corpus, as we do to access it
social computing – it’s about conversations, not content and there is a person inside the computer (there’s a credit missing there – who said that?)
decentralised computing – small peices, loosely joined

Of course, it isn’t hard to find 20+ year old technologies that meet these criteria. FidoNet and UseNet, for example. The difference, of course is adoption, and hype.

Web Me 2.0

Dan Randow — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 06:24:34 +0000

As we prepare to launch our own Web 2.0 offering OnlineGroups.Net, I am constantly looking around to get a feel for the space that we are entering. I won’t try to define Web 2.0, but I can point to a couple of the lists that I look at, and imagine being on.

The one I have most fun with is the The Museum of Modern Betas because it keeps changing, blog-style and has such a cool name. Dion Hinchcliffe’s list is a classic (and has logos) and he has now added more. The eConsultant Web 2.0 directory is huge. I’d like to see some Aotearoa (NZ) links pop up on Innovation Map. The listible list (where you can add and rate items) is Web 2.0 itself. And the Web 2.0 Awards illustrate some of the criteria for success. And LOGO2.0 provides a retinally overloading graphical representation.

There is no shortage of lists of Web 2.0 sites. There are even lists of lists.

Now, to see if we can get ourselves added to some of these.