Concept 2.0

Facebook have recently relaunched their new look and what does it now really look like? MySpace of course.

Having already had MySpace try to turn themselves into a Facebook clone it would seem that the favour is now being repayed.

I'm not sure there is much debate as to whether the semantic web is the future and whether the next step is web 3.0.

The real question is, what name is it going to go by? Is the semantic web actually going to be re-named to web 3.0 by popular adoption?

I have a feeling this would be a bad idea for several reasons. For a start, the semantic web is a huge step forward. Web 2.0 wasn't. I love web 2.0, but it wasn't the huge step forward that the semantic web *should* be.

Secondly, even though this is really the same point, it gives the idea that web 2.0 is the progression from web 1.0. It is, sort of, but it is really just a new way of thinking rather than the next step.

Last year, it's widely believed (although there doesn't seem to have been any official announcement) that Google started blocking requests to get a site's PageRank.

Yet have a search around and see how many sites are still offering PageRank checking. Am I missing somrthing?

Google have announced they will be cleansing websites from it's AdSense program that are too ad heavy, probably in a response to the amount of sites that abuse the program by sticking up a photo and two lines of text along with 7 AdSense adverts.

MySpace has finally given up trying to beat Photobucket and just gone and bought it out. The price was apparently settled on last week as $250,000,000.

Text Link Ads have launched a new service called Feedvertising. It's basically a plugin for WordPress which allows you to easily add sponsered links to your RSS feed. It seems to be quite customisable too, as shown by the demo video you can have them sell your ad spots but they also allow you to sell your own links or link to your other websites which seems quite a nice feature.

The 5th beta of phpBB 3 is now out and not only that but the news posting about it remarks that the next version will probably be a release candidate - meaning they have virtually finished. Importantly, there will be an upgrade path from the release candidates so while it's still very questionable to use it in a production environment, it's plausable and any development work and re-modding can start without fear of your work being undone by a new release.

WordPress 2.1 is now out in final code format - it's the start of a new stream of product releases with a good handful of new features and more importantly it's not a bugfix on the old one so you don't have to rush to upgrade straight away to keep the hackers out of your box.

While I'm constantly reading about the dozens of web 2.0 social networking sites that launch daily, I rarely hear about them closing down and just generally crashing and burning unless it's major news. But are they are still going? There are so many launched I wouldn't have thought so.

So I think it would be quite interesting to see the failure rates of these sites. I'm almost tempted to set up a site monitoring them to see how long they last.

I was watching some pointless show at like 4am the other day which involved people who wanted to find dates going on this show and you could phone and text in and speak to them and they could communicate with you back. In between this the presenters talked to the various people looking for dates.

One thing got me thinking about this - this reaks of Web 2.0. But on TV.

After all, who is to say this new user-based community orientated  thinking should be confined to the web? TV has recently seen a massive rise in interactivity, with digital bringing loads of extra content to TV channels, Tivo is putting the user in control and while phone in votes are nothing new, they have seen a massive rise in recent times.

Take for example music channels too. These are almost exclusively controlled by viewers who send in their song requests by texts and the videos played are (presumably) those selected by the people viewing the channel - i.e. the users. Indeed, these types of things were around before the Web 2.0 buzz so perhaps TV 2.0 was the original revolution.