#web 2.0

What is Twitter?

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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:

YouTube Preview Image

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!

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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…

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TechCrunch Reinvents Itself by Going Green

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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.

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coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

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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. =)

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