The Justice of Truth and Money

Who better to correct the incorrect stories of the media than those wronged? Who better to receive payment from the value of our personal data than we ourselves?

Both these themes find a home in current thinking by Nicholas Carr, Tom Foremski, James Cherkoff, Jeff Jarvis, and Ross Hunter, as down-and-dirty Web 2.0 begins to yield to the bright new Web 3.0. We are foreshadowing the Semantic Web, with its promise of clean data, crowdsourced to a shine by all of us.

Foremski Exults That the iPhone Will Break the Telco Stranglehold

We exult with Valley watcher Tom Foremski as he explains what Apple has done with the iPhone: namely, slipped a Wi-Fi trojan horse into the Telcos’ deathgrip on the cellphone future. iPhone, says Foremski, will blow the “cartel” apart. This is turn will unleash massive creative forces. It’s a beautiful picture he paints.

In his recent post entitled - wait for it - “The Trojan Horse iPhone: How Apple will Break the Back of the Wireless Telco Cartel and Trigger Silicon Valley’s Next Boom Cycle” Foremski lays out the compelling arguments for the scenario.

NYT Rumors of the Dot Calm Era Are Exaggerated

Sunday’s New York Times said that the growth of commerce on the Web was experiencing a “dramatic slowdown,” and noted that “Internet fatigue” was setting in with consumers. It was a sky-is-falling article, but even on its face it was hard-pressed to make a case.

MyBlogLog Calls Kettle Black

On Thursday Techcrunch editor Michael Arrington broke the story that MyBlogLog was planning that evening to introduce tagging to its social networking system, allowing members of the social networking system to tag other users. One of the tags, however, was a user-applied public tag calling another user a spammer. At this, a howl arose from the locals.

Google Universal Search - Luck Has Flown But Will Return

Google on May 16th presented a slightly different search interface, with markedly different search returns, as it deployed its long-planned Universal Search. Why this is a landmark event, and what it all means, is best told, as so often in the search world, by Danny Sullivan, the most respected commentator in the business. Go here to see Danny’s Google 2.0: Google Universal Search

Web 2.0, We Hardly Knew Ye

It’s not over yet, not quite. But Nick Wilson says there will come a thinning of the herd, and the Web will focus for a while on doing some more useful stuff, like interacting more cleverly with information, and delivering services and results in pages that are worth clicking in for.

New Search, Semantic Web Coming?

At first blush the concept of the Wikipedia model adapting itself to search technology and posing a threat to Google seems improbable. But Jimmy Wales says that search is broken, and he can fix it:

“Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

“Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that.”

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is a do-it-yourself “mashup” capability hosted by Yahoo for anybody to use. This means you can take any number of RSS news feeds, and edit and combine them into a single, customized feed. The result is more powerful than you might immediately think.

Quattro Gallery and Katy Nail

It’s a small world, as we noticed the other day when we went over to the Quattro Gallery to look at its current exhibition “Animal”, featuring the work of local Austin area artists. The exhibition includes the art of noted Austin painter Katy Nail, and we wanted to snap some pics for her website, since we adore Katy, and just by the way, Hunter and Associates built the Katy Nail website - which was our great pleasure and privilege.

Funny thing though, the building that houses Quattro Gallery seemed very familiar to us.

A nod’s as good as a wink…

…and hints are all you’ll get from this campaign :)

We’re watching an understated little (one-page) site called Linkie Winkie. The site appeared a few days ago on June 23rd, and we saw its announcement in ThreadWatch in this story about a new viral experiment.

keep looking »