"web2.0" in Weblog

I’ve just been reading about Squidoo and its aim to provide a place for people to mark out their ground as experts and make money from what they write about. Mike Rundle and Michael Arrington were both quick to point out that just starting a blog would accomplish this and Wikipedia provides space for the rest.

Why is this interesting? Well, it’s interesting because it demonstrates the shift in how people perceive blogs. I still remember when people associated blogs with online diaries; these days they seem to have more in common with magazines. Not all of them, mind you, and I’m sure they are perceived differently across demographics but I think it’s an interesting shift: Blogging for credibility is now a given.

A perfect example of this is Pete Cashmore’s Mashable site. It’s a blog on Web 2.0… That’s it. It’s well written, updated regularly, on topic and, well, very good. What interested me was the two main navigation links at the top left - home and consulting. The blog says ‘credible’ and he says ‘hire me’.

MySpace has become incredibly popular in the last year. It now boasts somewhere over 55 million members with another 150,000 people signing up every day. That’s simply incredible. It’s approaching the population of Britain and growing 150 times faster! And it’s launched its first (as far as I know) number one act on this side of the pond, the Arctic Monkeys, as well as propelling Clap Your Hands Say Yeah to half a million sales in the first week of their album’s release. It’s getting to be more society than social…

Despite its success, everyone I know who’s signed up slates its design. Now, the web development community puts a very high value on great design but we’re obviously not getting the big picture… The site is built on a great idea. Wood for the trees. I read somewhere recently that if every entrepreneur stopped to make the right decisions then many of our farourite products wouldn’t exist. I’ve seen this first hand ar Wordtracker: Mike and Andy wrote the system in 3 months and got it out there. Since then they’ve been working hard to do things again, the right way, but it’s an incredibly long process. If they’d done it that way from the beginning they would never have been able to afford the time and the product woudn’t exist.

This reminds me of Peter Morville’s user experience diagram with the interlocking hexagons combining to make a useful application. The sucess of a website doesn’t depend comletely on any single thing. An acceptable design will satisfice if the end result is great. All those folks out there writing webapps on the Web 2.0 wave would do well to remember this. Start with that great idea that solves a real problem and people will come.

With everything that’s going on with Google at the moment it’s worth revisiting EPIC: “It’s the year 2014, the New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? And what is EPIC?” Now read The Google File System and Welcome to the Google Twilight Zone…

Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, who put together the EPIC movie, appear to have been pretty much bang on with their predictions. The idea of the Google Grid is facinating and entirely plausible… Could Google be the new Microsoft? Is Bill Gates worried?