Interview on this Experiment

Mark Maher interviewed me on this experiment. Sorry for not posting for a while – all too much of project work. Maybe this actually is the key challenge for internet industry professionals in their upgrade process to new things: so limited time and so many new things to learn.

Anyway, more to to be written soon. My trial on using Shozu and moblogging tool has been very nice. I like the tool a lot!

Notepad on steroids or Office 2007 replacement?

Google just introduced ‘Google Docs & Spreadsheets‘. Since I am a ‘googler’ I had to try it out. This will probably be the next big thing, right? Although I had just installed Office 2007 on my computer I coudn’t wait to see what would replace it! So, after rushing to Google and signing-in I started to write my first document, this posting actually. At first you see a lean and mean interface, good I thought. Then I got the creeps, hang on, maybe this is all there is! To give you an idea, this is what it looks like…

Are you Google or Yahoo?

Being veeerrrry much into web 2.0 I started uploading my pictures to web-albums some time ago. Google now has Picasa Web Albums to which I signed up. Really nice service if you ask me. It is a tad less ‘social’ since there is no public listing of photo-albums of people and you cannot search it but it is really nice if you want to have your online album and share it with people. One of the cool features is that not all photo’s are public. You can make private albums and invite people to look at them. A colleague of mine wanted to share his wedding pictures but he didn’t want the whole world to see them. Using Flickr this is not possible (or at least not that I know of) so Picasa Web Albums would be a good option. With Flickr you can only limit the sharing of photo’s to other Flickr user who are your contacts. But this forces people to have a Flickr account (e.g. a Yahoo account) in order to see my photo’s. Guys, wake up! Do you really think my mom has a Flickr account? I am glad to see that Google understands me better…;-) It seems that in the world of web2.0 you are forced to be either me2.0_yahoo or me2.0_google…..or even me2.0_microsoft…

Towards web 2.0 lifestyle

Welcome all to follow our experiment. We are two digital media industry professionals that have both worked in the industry for close to ten years. This blog will be a diary of our joint trial to upgrade ourselves to the requirements of the “web 2.0 lifestyle”.

What do we mean by this?

To be short, most the gurus and visionaries talking about the web 2.0 praise the revolutionary character of it. Most of the experts are very positive and open about their beliefs of the phenomena. Yet, very rarely we have found anyone talking and discussing about :

1. What kind of things should one carry out to “live” like web 2.0 philosophy calls for?
2. What are the challenges for consumers (esp. the mass market) to adopt to the “new user-driven internet”?
3. Practical hints and discussions on the “web 2.0 upgrade” for existing industry professionals i.e. the ones who were also there at the time of web 1.0.

We decided to make this design experiment to upgrade ourselves to the new era. Also we want to be as open as possible and boost discussions within others in the cyberspace about ideas and experiences in these issues.

Please feel welcome to read, to comment and to guide us to this new world!

Tommi & Martijn