Friday, September 7, 2007
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Film and Digital Camera Simulator
The SimCam is an online camera simulator designed to teach basic photographic principles. Whether you are interested in film or digital photography, the concepts are the same.
http://www.photonhead.com/simcam/
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Babelgum another on-demand TV over the internet
Babelgum offers on-demand TV over the internet. The product currently offers 9 thematic channels, which include Babel Picks, News, Trends, Music, Sport, Documentaries, Lifestyle, Animation, and Fiction. Videos also can be gathered through a search tool or "smart channels," which will automatically generate content based on the user's viewing patterns. Other features include the abililty to rate and bookmark video clips. Babelgum will allow content owners to apply for distribution. As of June 2007, Babelgum states that "you will get a 50% share of the revenue generated by the advertising placed in the context of your content. At the beginning we are backing you up by guaranteeing a minimum revenue of 5 USD for each 1000 unique views of a video. This minimum revenue is currently offered until the end of 2007." Babelgum is currently free and ad-supported.10 definitions of Web 2.0 and their shortcomings
I have come to avoid talking about this stuff with people. The first question anyone asks me is “what is Web 2.0?” Unfortunately for the ensuing conversation, it’s a little tricky to provide a straight answer. Every time you find a neat expression for summing the whole Web 2.0 thing up, I immediately think of an exception, or three, or ways that the definition doesn’t really get us anywhere.
In the list that follows, I’ve taken a lot of these characteristics or definitions from Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0?, and also Paul Graham’s Web 2.0 and Jason Fried’s user survey about the term.
1. The wisdom of crowds: We’re thinking here of things like digg that harness collective judgements to decide the importance of news stories. People talk about the power of ‘network effects’ when they’re keen on this definition. Google Search works like this by using the number and quality of inbound links to decide a page’s importance. But the whole idea does not apply to Google Maps, or any of the other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) crowd e.g. Basecamp, Writely, 30boxes, etc., which are nonetheless thought of as being Web 2.0. Nor does it apply to social networks that are just about developing and maintaining friendships, like MySpace, though they do benefit from network effects, of course.
2. Shared Web Applications. One of the definitions from Jason Fried’s list and quite promising. Almost the opposite of our first definition, since it quite clearly applies to things like Basecamp, Writely and 30Boxes. However, there are some Web 2.0 applications that have no social element whatsoever, e.g. Pandora, Google Maps, Orchestrate, goowy. I’m also struggling with the idea of web applications. I can see why digg and Google Search are applications, but to have this as a defining feature of Web 2.0 would mean classifying MySpace as an application. And if I allow that, then almost any web site becomes an application.
3. Web as platform: It’s hard to know where this one starts and ends. In some sense, every web page is using the web as a platform. For Tim O’Reilly, who came up with this explanation, it means services that could not exist without the web, and he’s thinking of things like eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype and Dodgeball. For me, that means that every online community could fall into this category. Are message boards and usenet Web 2.0? Most people would say not. Too broad.
4. User Participation: This is about the pointing out the differences between old-fashioned newspaper and magazine sites and new services like YouTube, flickr, and OhMyNews where the consumers are also the creators. The expression ‘Read/Write web’ crops up among proponents of this definition. Again, it’s rather too broad, so it could equally apply to message boards, but also too narrow in a different way, since it misses the SaaS sites.
5. Rich User Experience: Web 2.0 sites use CSS, AJAX and other technologies to enhance usability and create dynamic pages able to display more information in the same space. But hang on, the default MySpace page is probably one of the least “rich” imaginable. Oh, apart from craigslist. And until they introduced search term prediction earlier this year, Google Search didn’t use any fancy presentation technologies at all. Also, the presence of an AJAX-enhanced shopping cart on an etailer site doesn’t really capture what people mean by Web 2.0. Dell.com, for example, has had a ‘live’ shopping cart for years. It’s a good cart, but Web 2.0?
6. Marketing Buzzword: This is what all the sceptics say. So Google Search and Amazon and eBay and craigslist, all of which are believed to be Web 2.0 applications, because they match some of the other characteristics I’ve described here, are just some sort of modern fad that’s going to fade away, are they? The same thing goes for anyone who wants to describe Web 2.0 as “the new stuff on the web”. I do agree, incidentally, that Web 2.0 has become a marketing buzzword, it’s just that I think that it’s also more than that.
7. Data is the next Intel Inside: Though it’s a bit of a mouthful, I actually quite like this one. Again, it’s from the O’Reilly paper. Data management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies. “SQL is the new HTML,” is another quotation from the paper along these lines. All the Web 2.0 crowd, and we can go from giants like Amazon and Google to startups like 30boxes and Orchestrate, operate mainly from databases to contain and present personalised views on that data. There’s two problems here: (a) data management isn’t quite such a sexy idea as people would want and (b) a lot of the Web 1.0 companies were also about finding clever ways to use databases e.g. Altavista, Lastminute.com.
8. Permanent Beta: Web 2.0 applications are re-released, re-written and revised on an ongoing basis, putting paid to the yearly release cycle that characterised earlier software development. Most Google applications, for example, are still in Beta. flickr is rumoured to sometimes be revised every 30 minutes. MySpace and the other social networks add extra features every couple of weeks. I think that this is a clear characteristic of Web 2.0 apps. But it’s also become a feature of mainstream applications. Windows and MacOS, for example, get new fixes and patches every month. Antivirus programs are updated every day, but they aren’t Web 2.0, are they? The same thing goes for ‘lightweight programming models’. Also, I think people mean more by the term than the way in which it’s programmed. Most users couldn’t care less, they just want it to work well.
9. Using the web as it was meant to be used: This one is from Paul Graham’s essay on the subject. He’s referring to the increases in usability that are achieved through very good design as well as things like AJAX, but also by allowing users to develop their own ways of organising the information they have, the way del.icio.us and flickr do. Again, I have a couple of problems here. Firstly, it’s a bit loose: I’m sure that there were always some very well-designed sites that worked exactly as you wanted them to. The old (and now defunct) UK train timetable site was a perfect web app in many senses: it got you train times quickly and easily. But no-one would call it Web 2.0. Second, it’s a little self-satisfied as a definition and implies we’re reaching an end-point. A lot of the sites described as Web 2.0 have quite clearly got it wrong.
10. Nothing: One of the more popular answers in Jason Fried’s user poll. It’s a hard one for me to evade given that I have just come up with counter-examples or objections to all the definitions I’ve been able to find. Still, I resist the idea that this is nothing. Here are two answers to the question I think are true. (a) A Web 2.0 application, site or service will have a combination of the features given above. Just as black and white aren’t satisfactory for describing the colour of everything, neither is Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. It isn’t a binary division of the web, or a revolution. Instead, we have a spectrum. Those sites and services which satisfy a number of these criteria or characteristics are more Web 2.0 than those which don’t. That is not a value judgement, of course. Sites with no Web 2.0 features can still be wonderful. Sites with a lot of them can be awful. Also (b) Web 2.0 is still too young as an expression to have reached the point where we have consensus about what it means. It means different things to different people at the moment. It may only be with hindsight that we come to be able to narrow things down enough to be able to say what it was in one sentence.
In the list that follows, I’ve taken a lot of these characteristics or definitions from Tim O’Reilly’s What is Web 2.0?, and also Paul Graham’s Web 2.0 and Jason Fried’s user survey about the term.
1. The wisdom of crowds: We’re thinking here of things like digg that harness collective judgements to decide the importance of news stories. People talk about the power of ‘network effects’ when they’re keen on this definition. Google Search works like this by using the number and quality of inbound links to decide a page’s importance. But the whole idea does not apply to Google Maps, or any of the other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) crowd e.g. Basecamp, Writely, 30boxes, etc., which are nonetheless thought of as being Web 2.0. Nor does it apply to social networks that are just about developing and maintaining friendships, like MySpace, though they do benefit from network effects, of course.
2. Shared Web Applications. One of the definitions from Jason Fried’s list and quite promising. Almost the opposite of our first definition, since it quite clearly applies to things like Basecamp, Writely and 30Boxes. However, there are some Web 2.0 applications that have no social element whatsoever, e.g. Pandora, Google Maps, Orchestrate, goowy. I’m also struggling with the idea of web applications. I can see why digg and Google Search are applications, but to have this as a defining feature of Web 2.0 would mean classifying MySpace as an application. And if I allow that, then almost any web site becomes an application.
3. Web as platform: It’s hard to know where this one starts and ends. In some sense, every web page is using the web as a platform. For Tim O’Reilly, who came up with this explanation, it means services that could not exist without the web, and he’s thinking of things like eBay, craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype and Dodgeball. For me, that means that every online community could fall into this category. Are message boards and usenet Web 2.0? Most people would say not. Too broad.
4. User Participation: This is about the pointing out the differences between old-fashioned newspaper and magazine sites and new services like YouTube, flickr, and OhMyNews where the consumers are also the creators. The expression ‘Read/Write web’ crops up among proponents of this definition. Again, it’s rather too broad, so it could equally apply to message boards, but also too narrow in a different way, since it misses the SaaS sites.
5. Rich User Experience: Web 2.0 sites use CSS, AJAX and other technologies to enhance usability and create dynamic pages able to display more information in the same space. But hang on, the default MySpace page is probably one of the least “rich” imaginable. Oh, apart from craigslist. And until they introduced search term prediction earlier this year, Google Search didn’t use any fancy presentation technologies at all. Also, the presence of an AJAX-enhanced shopping cart on an etailer site doesn’t really capture what people mean by Web 2.0. Dell.com, for example, has had a ‘live’ shopping cart for years. It’s a good cart, but Web 2.0?
6. Marketing Buzzword: This is what all the sceptics say. So Google Search and Amazon and eBay and craigslist, all of which are believed to be Web 2.0 applications, because they match some of the other characteristics I’ve described here, are just some sort of modern fad that’s going to fade away, are they? The same thing goes for anyone who wants to describe Web 2.0 as “the new stuff on the web”. I do agree, incidentally, that Web 2.0 has become a marketing buzzword, it’s just that I think that it’s also more than that.
7. Data is the next Intel Inside: Though it’s a bit of a mouthful, I actually quite like this one. Again, it’s from the O’Reilly paper. Data management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies. “SQL is the new HTML,” is another quotation from the paper along these lines. All the Web 2.0 crowd, and we can go from giants like Amazon and Google to startups like 30boxes and Orchestrate, operate mainly from databases to contain and present personalised views on that data. There’s two problems here: (a) data management isn’t quite such a sexy idea as people would want and (b) a lot of the Web 1.0 companies were also about finding clever ways to use databases e.g. Altavista, Lastminute.com.
8. Permanent Beta: Web 2.0 applications are re-released, re-written and revised on an ongoing basis, putting paid to the yearly release cycle that characterised earlier software development. Most Google applications, for example, are still in Beta. flickr is rumoured to sometimes be revised every 30 minutes. MySpace and the other social networks add extra features every couple of weeks. I think that this is a clear characteristic of Web 2.0 apps. But it’s also become a feature of mainstream applications. Windows and MacOS, for example, get new fixes and patches every month. Antivirus programs are updated every day, but they aren’t Web 2.0, are they? The same thing goes for ‘lightweight programming models’. Also, I think people mean more by the term than the way in which it’s programmed. Most users couldn’t care less, they just want it to work well.
9. Using the web as it was meant to be used: This one is from Paul Graham’s essay on the subject. He’s referring to the increases in usability that are achieved through very good design as well as things like AJAX, but also by allowing users to develop their own ways of organising the information they have, the way del.icio.us and flickr do. Again, I have a couple of problems here. Firstly, it’s a bit loose: I’m sure that there were always some very well-designed sites that worked exactly as you wanted them to. The old (and now defunct) UK train timetable site was a perfect web app in many senses: it got you train times quickly and easily. But no-one would call it Web 2.0. Second, it’s a little self-satisfied as a definition and implies we’re reaching an end-point. A lot of the sites described as Web 2.0 have quite clearly got it wrong.
10. Nothing: One of the more popular answers in Jason Fried’s user poll. It’s a hard one for me to evade given that I have just come up with counter-examples or objections to all the definitions I’ve been able to find. Still, I resist the idea that this is nothing. Here are two answers to the question I think are true. (a) A Web 2.0 application, site or service will have a combination of the features given above. Just as black and white aren’t satisfactory for describing the colour of everything, neither is Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0. It isn’t a binary division of the web, or a revolution. Instead, we have a spectrum. Those sites and services which satisfy a number of these criteria or characteristics are more Web 2.0 than those which don’t. That is not a value judgement, of course. Sites with no Web 2.0 features can still be wonderful. Sites with a lot of them can be awful. Also (b) Web 2.0 is still too young as an expression to have reached the point where we have consensus about what it means. It means different things to different people at the moment. It may only be with hindsight that we come to be able to narrow things down enough to be able to say what it was in one sentence.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.
You get great internet features too, such as search, chat and instant messaging, built right into the program - so you find shows quickly and talk to your friends while you watch. And with no schedules to worry about, you can watch whatever you want, whenever you like - as often as you want. Joost is completely free, and works with most modern PCs and Intel Mac-based computers with a broadband connection. Get Joost today!
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
Wedding Mapper
Make a free wedding map to share with your guests.No catches, no spam, just a quality website to make your life a little easier.
Wedding Mapper was built to make it fun, easy, and affordable for you to map out your wedding, ensuring that your guests have all the information they need in order to have a great time at your wedding.
mosaickr
With mosaickr you can create beautiful mosaics from your flickr pictures, and even print them on posters! Creating a mosaick is easy and it's free!
http://start.mosaickr.com/
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