#web 2.0

What is Twitter?

· Comment

A cou­ple of friends and fam­ily have been asking:

  • What’s up w/ the sta­tus updates I see quite often?
  • What’s w/ the “@” (at sym­bol) next to names on your status?
  • What the heck is a tweet?
  • etc.

Rather than point­ing them to Twitter’s site, I rather just show them this video:

I hope that makes sense. Thanks to Com­mon Craft. They have done a great job explain­ing it “in plain english” =)

Update
Some Twit­ter terms writ­ten by Peter Cash­more on Mash­able.

Valleyschwag to open up shop!

· Comment

In the next sev­eral days we will unveil the Val­leyschwag Gen­eral Store, where our cus­tomers will be able to pur­chase future issues of our famous schwag bags. And by pop­u­lar demand, we will be offer­ing some of our most requested schwag items for sale.

This store replaces our sub­scrip­tion ser­vice alto­gether. We will notify peo­ple by email when a new issue of Val­leyschwag is avail­able, giv­ing them the first oppor­tu­nity to place an order at the Gen­eral Store…

Con­tinue reading →

TechCrunch Reinvents Itself by Going Green

· Comment

One of the sites I fre­quent, TechCrunch, has emerged with a redesign.

TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005, is a weblog ded­i­cated to obses­sively pro­fil­ing and review­ing new web 2.0 prod­ucts and com­pa­nies. In addi­tion to new com­pa­nies, we will pro­file exist­ing com­pa­nies that are mak­ing an impact (com­mer­cial and/or cul­tural) on the web 2.0 space. TechCrunch is edited by Michael Arring­ton, who also writes a com­pan­ion blog, CrunchNotes.

This time around, things seems to be quite green. Other notable fea­tures of the redesign would be that the main-content area got moved from the cen­ter, to the left. Fol­low­ing that, most of the ads were then flanked on the right, which used to be on the left and right sides of the main-content.

I don’t know what it is, but the green skin just reminds me too much of Technorati’s. Besides that, I think the font-size and line-height improves on usabil­ity from the last ver­sion. Although, I kind of am still used to the sub­tle, nat­ural col­ors of the last one. Any­ways, con­grats to Michael and cre8d design/Rachel Cun­liffe on the launch.

Con­tinue reading →

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

· 9 Comments

I was actu­ally think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and simple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a global con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­mented, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able discussions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if other users are also on coComment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­ally com­mented on, and only com­ments left by other cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­ier than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­puter.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coComment’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CMS/site-platforms it sup­ported, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing format,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(untitled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and hasn’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pretty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coComment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­pletely yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­mented some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-interactivity. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the other fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pretty much, like all the other “Web 2.0″ application-sites. =)

Con­tinue read­ing →

  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment visit to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]
12