So I see Diane has tagged me with the “5 reasons why I blog” thing, which I hadn’t even known about till reading her post on it!

And dont’ worry Diane, I’m actually fan of target=”_blank” depending on the context

So, here’s my reasons…

1. Because I can.  Using software like Wordpress makes it so easy.
2. To learn what this whole blogging things about.  As a web developer interested in Internet technology, actually having a blog would seem a good way to work out how they work, what they are about etc…
3. I’m quite highly opinionated.  The blogosphere really appeals to those who like to rant.
4. On occasions I feel there are some things I’d like to say that other people are actually interested in, and can maybe learn from.  I’m not a regular blogger, my posting habits vary from 3 months with no posts, to posting most days.  Depending on whether I think of something that I think other people care about.
5. It’s an easy way to power a site that I use as a sandbox to mess around with.  I’m never expecting to get much traffic here, I do next to zero in terms of marketing it, an it literally is a place for me to play around and try things.  I just also happen to post proper content to it as well.

I can’t be arsed tagging anyone else with it, these things tend to linger round like dodgy emails otherwise, so I’ll act as one termination point

OK, I think just about every blog I’ve read over the last day or so has already mentioned it, but hell, I hate the idea of what Kathy had to say as well.

Kathy has been one of my absolute favourite bloggers recently, thought provoking and interesting to read, I think a great many people could learn a lot from her.  Even then, her true skill is in making you think about the problems in different way, rather than tell you how you should do things in her ‘better’ way.

So yes, whatever the reasons, regardless of male/female, or anything else, to start making those kinds of aggressive comments, and even worse, going to the level of creating completely over the top imagery is absolutely wrong, and I’m glad it’s being condemed all over the place.

I think there are a few cracks in the Web 2.0 veneer appearing at the moment.  It’s always had it’s detractors (me for one), but there just seem to be a few more people now asking “So what now?”.

It seems to have been triggered by SXSW I think, lets look at some links.

I linked to Zeldman’s Web 1.0 is the new Web 2.0 the other day.

Peter Da Vanzo is linking to a VC suggesting web2.0 is deflating a bit.

That may be not many, but I’ve seen a few more and now lost the URL’s, if I find more people talking about it, I’lupdate the post.

Perhaps jumping the shark is a bit over the top, I think Peter Rip in the VC link above put it quite well.

Much of the “easy” innovation seems to have been wrung out of the Web 2.0 wave.

We’re moving away from being able to get traffic just because you’re Web 2.0, novelty effects are wearing off, maybe we’re entering the stage where people want to do useful stuff, and a reason to keep doing it.

I’ve been looking at the issues surrounding getting Flash video on web sites recently.

SWFObject is a pretty good way to go about it, built from a standards point of view, with accessibility in mind, the basics are pretty easy to use.

The only thing that didn’t seem terribly clear, was that it doesn’t do anything automatically about people who do not have Flash installed at all. This is on purpose it seems, and I can see a certain amount of sense in that, it jsut wasn’t something that seemed as clear as it might’ve been.

One compromise I’ve come up with is to have a link in the text that’s displayed if Flash or JS isn’t setup that skips the detection for Opera and Firefox, as they will attempt to install the plugin anyway, and a link to Adobe for IE to get it installed. Not tested Safari yet to know how that works.

There’s theres the basis of the information needed about passing the value of an flv file into the player (so you have your flash video player, and just tell it which video to play) at quip.net.

I’m not sure whether I agree or disagree with it, but I do find it particularly amusing when Jeffrey Zeldman says things like web1.0 is the new web2.0

From everything I’ve read, it sounds like SXSW was awesome.  Would’ve been nice to go, but I think I may have found it a bit overbearing to be honest.  What we need is people to do great session overviews like SERoundtable does for Search Engines Strategies conferences.

People have talked for years about how everyones going t be accessing the internet via their mobile phones, or through some screen on the door of their fridge, or some such other ‘alternative device’. But it’s never happened, almost all internet traffic is still done through a desktop/laptop PC/Mac.

Most mobile phones are useless when it comes to the web, they can’t browse normal web sites generally, the number of sites with mobile specific content is small, people find them annoying to use it seems. It’s really never taken off in the way people expected. Worryingly, I don’t think a lot of people realise why it never really took off. Read the rest of this entry »

Via Nick Wilson’s clickinfluence, I found an article by Anastasia Goodstein talking about some of the differences between MySpace and Facebook. Then today Li Evans pointed to a valleywag story from Cre8asite talking about how poor an advertising platform Facebook seemed to be generally.

Now Facebook seems to be a poor space for advertising generally, not jsut compared to MySpace, but it does strike me that the difference highlighted in the first article probably point to some of the reasoning behind it performing badly for advertisers.

About MySpace

Teens who are all about entertainment, especially music and video will continue to remain loyal to MySpace. If you think about the site’s roots, it began as a community that grew out of the L.A. music scene.

and about Facebook

Facebook began as a closed college networking community for Ivy League students — it always placed value on knowing people offline (on campus) as well as through Facebook.
…
Facebook offers teens a great toolset for doing what they do online and off — socializing. And because it was for college students first, it has that aspirational cool teens love too. It’s less flashy, less about being famous and more about being social.

Seems to me from those 2 snippets that it’s not surprising that one group is more susectible to advertising than the other.

I also added some comments in the Cre8asite thread about the difference in the access and look of the 2 sites.

[On Facebook, ]unlike MySpace, you can’t go in and browse a certain amount of the site and profiles without being logged in.

as soon as you hit the myspace homepage, you’re bombarded with advertising all over it. I go to the Facebook homepage, and see none, in fact it’s a farily simple page.

I don’t follow SEO practices and techniques overly closely.  I pick up on the general things, and attempt to keep my general knowledge on the subject up-to-date, but I’m no hard core SEO fan.

So when Rand talks about going over a topic again, I realise I missed it in all previous cases anyway!

It’s something I would usually have gone along with as a good general thing anyway, but Rand’s premise is that it’s better to get a whole load of links to your domain as a whole, instead of using the practice of collecting a load of links to a page that in turn points to you.

Content on a well-linked to domain often outranks far more relevant or individually well-linked-to content on other, less linked-to domains.

You can get to a point where new content, with no direct links, on a well linked to domain, can out perform other pages on similar topics with more direct links, but a less well linked to domain overall.

If a domain is well linked to generally, it gains trust, and a page on a trusted site will find it needs less direct links to gain visibility.

In a search for 24 season two, Amazon.com’s page, with less than half the external links and lower direct relevance than Fox’s 24 page is ranking #1. In fact, there’s almost a dozen big-name domains with few external inbounds ranking ahead of the official page.

I don’t think I would ever have gone to the extent of having seperate domains to use for link building, that then in turn link back to my main site.  It sounds like a diluting factor anyway to me.

Via Simon Willison I found an article by Mark Hurst about his Page Paradigm idea.

A couple of quotes first off

On any given Web page, users will either click something that appears to take them closer to the fulfillment of their goal, or click the Back button on their Web browser.

and

Web developers often waste time worring about “where content should live.” Should it be in section B? If so, we need to put big links from Section A to Section B. And then the secondary navigation will list Sections A through C, which are part of category D, because users might need to see the relationship between C, B, and the sub-tertiary wormhole that just opened in the site map!

Meanhwile, the user is on the site thinking, “Do they have it in size three?” and ignoring every element on the page that doesn’t appear to take them toward that goal.

I like this idea, and I would suggest it’s not just web developers who have this problem, some large projects  I’ve bee involved in recently have suffered from this exact kind of tinkering from the clients.  So and so a section should be colour coded the same as something else, people might want to see all stuff related to this thing….

Everything ends up ‘having’ to be interconnected and becomes mind nummingly confusing and awkward.

This seems to be a result of design by commitees and overthinking functionality where the actual goals aren’t referred to properly.  Something has an overall objective, but then there’s a rapid kind of feature creep where they say “ohh, form there it would be good if people could…”, when actually, it’s probably irrelevant and just adding clutter to a page.

But what do I know, I’m just the guy who’s got to turn it all into working web pages, I don’t understand the audience, or have any idea of what does and doesn’t work on the web….

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