web 2.0

It's a common internet adage that there are no women online; clearly untrue, massively misogynistic, yet still trolled out in discussion forums everywhere. XKCD provides this brilliant counterpoint:

(linked under Creative Commons from the truly suberb XKCD web comic, by Randall Munroe)

This week the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference was held in London. Unfortunately, due to a bad landlord, I was unable to make it over to the conference till the end of the last day, but nonetheless managed to catch a very interesting panel on some of the lessons that successful web application developers and companies had learnt over the last few years. I also had a chance to get a feel for how the industry is feeling in the wake of the sub-prime crisis and a general economic slowdown. I had anticipated that the tech crowd might be subdued; even concerned, by the threat of a cut in investment, but it seems that the community is still financially bouyant, and there is no shortage of interesting new applications and programming languages to keep innovation happening. (I particularly like the look of the new Adobe Air system for taking web based applications onto the desktop).

It's no secret that mainstream media often raises an eyebrow (or two) when discussing bloggers and their contribution to news publishing. After all, it took respectable publications and national newspapers years before some of them reluctantly adopted blogging, and even longer for TV channels to mention the thriving and booming political blogosphere on air. However, the relationship between the bloggers and news professionals still remains blurry, tainted with a mix of competition and patronising comments: established journalists look down on bloggers' 'lack of objectivity', while Internet writers voice their discontent by criticising mainstream media's lack of credibility (1). {more...}