For the million rand…how many internet users are there in the world?

The Internet World Stats has just released the estimate figures of world internet users as of December 2007.

6,606,971,659 and counting…give or take.

‘Ello, ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s all this going on ‘ere, then?

I know I know, Design Police has been doing the blog rounds, you’ve seen it, I’m sorry ok! Funny headline though eh?

But it is just such a cool concept. I think I’d be too lazy to cut them out though. I’d get someone else to do that. This also goes well with an earlier post, *cough* Concept Interactive…

What actually does Web 2.0 mean?

I think very few people actually know. And that includes marketers and advertisers and a lot of other people in the digital industry. Many people call it meaningless marketing, others see it as one of the most important sections of the web textbook.

Well the term covers a lot of ground, but essentially it refers to the web, post the dotcom crash around 2000, 2001. When venture capitalists were throwing millions into startups without asking for anything resembling a business plan, when that 15 year old kid down the road was charging £10 000 to put up a website about grannies cats and it came with the ubiquitous rotating @ sign. Vomit. So now the web pre 2000 is referred to as web 1.0. Got that? Great. The web has grown up a lot since those heady days, the mistakes have (largely) been acknowledged and while it did set the digital industry back somewhat, ok a lot, the web is flourishing once more, but now with more direction and maturity.

The term web 2.0 is generally credited to Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty following the O’Reilly Media conference in 2004. As the story goes, they were brainstorming ideas for a main theme for the conference and realised that there had been a major shift in the way designers, developers and end users were approaching websites and the web in general. Websites that had survived the dotcom bubble crash as well as the new technologies that were developing were fast turning the web into a more streamlined, more user friendly big brother, resource.

As Tim O’Reilly writes, they formulated a list of what they thought were some of the main examples of web 1.0 vs web 2.0:

DoubleClick <—> Google AdSense
Ofoto <—> Flickr
Akamai <—> BitTorrent
mp3.com <—> Napster
Britannica Online <—> Wikipedia
personal websites <—> blogging
evite <—> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation <—> search engine optimization
page views <—> cost per click
screen scraping <—> web services
publishing <—> participation
content management systems <—> wikis
directories (taxonomy) <—> tagging (“folksonomy”)
stickiness <—> syndication

Is it becoming clearer now? Still with me? Brilliant. So basically there wasn’t any deliberate plan to revise the web and update it to version 2.0, O’Reilly just wanted to make the point that after the no rules Wild West Web of 2000 and 2001, the web was starting to matter again. Web 2.0 has taken on many meanings and thus means different things to different people, but you could also argue that we’ve moved onto web 3.0 and even web 4.0.

Some people are starting to argue that we’re entering another bubble and hence may be susceptible to another crash. There’s an excellent essay on paulgraham.com which argues that will not be the case. Venture capitalists are driven by exit strategies and their exit strategy in early 2000 was to sell to gullible investors. There obviously aren’t many gullible investors left, the IPO market is gone. Now the only way to make a profit is to get bought and the people fronting the cash want to be certain that what they’re buying is profitable or is likely to be profitable in the future.

So web 2.0 encompasses many things digital, design has also moved on, a loose list of of web do’s and don’ts regarding design is being implemented, eg, getting rid of ‘under construction’ pages and useless animating elements, rather giving emphasis to style and simplicity and finally realising that content really is king and designing a page around it’s content, rather than all style and no substance. Branding is actually starting to take a back seat to the content, i.e it’s not all about the bigger logo (watch that, it’s a classic), and footers of websites are starting to become very functional areas. People have learnt to scroll. Most people when talking of Web 2.0 and design talk about large text, reflections, cute icons, rounded corners,  strong colours, gradients (used properly) and easily defined sections and areas on a page. Some of these will drop away as other trends replace them and the ones that work will stay.

So there you go and as one of the co-founders of this much used, possibly over used term, I’ll leave the last word to the big guy, Tim O’Reilly,

“The network is opening up some amazing possibilities for us to reinvent content, reinvent collaboration.”

Long live the interweb. Actually I got the last word.

The internet was crap in 1996

This is awesome. I love looking back at what the internet used to be like, the God awful graphics and navigation, the incredible vomit inducing use of Flash and all the rotating email @ signs and “under construction” graphics. Haha. Do yourself a favour and have a look at these beautiful examples of the internet in 1996, especially the Pepsi website.

You are the strongest link.

As an interactive designer most of the time, here’s part I of a selection of links that I like to check up on regularly.

http://www.thefwa.com – Probably the most coveted award for full flash and video sites. Bandwidth required.

http://wwwcpluv.com – One of the most respected creative networks around showcasing beautiful design in all spheres, everyday.

http://www.mostinspired.com – A resource that pulls in the most popular websites which have a daily showcase of new designs and site. If you’re doing a site design and looking for inspiration, this should be one of your first stops.

http://www.styleboost.com – A very well respected showcase of sites that catch Johan Bakken’s eye.

http://logopond.com/ – Identity inspiration.

http://www.flashden.net – An excellent and easy on the eye resource for Flash files. Files come with a charge, but are not expensive and if you’re not an actionscript guru, then it’s well worth a bookmark.

http://www.behance.com -Another excellent network and starting point for creative professionals.

Best animated ads of 2007

Check out some of the best animated ads of 2007.  Some classics. I used to LOVE Paddington Bear.  Bit weird, I know.

Lacoste take on dentist for having a crocodile on its signage.

I mean, come now. Give it a rest. Similar to an earlier post I published about MTN vs Nando’s, Gillian Jones vents on Marketingweb about a few other companies who are losing sight of the bigger picture, namely Lacoste and Tiger brands. When will people realise that public perception of your brand is key and running around putting up prices after you’ve screwed your customers already without telling them, or taking on a dental practice in a small England town (who’s residents probably have no clue as to what the Lacoste is and if they did, I’d doubt they be clamouring to buy their overpriced polo shirts) because the dental practice includes a crocodile in its signage, is just not cool. Read the Marketingweb article here.

McDonalds has also been known to swing its big corporate paunch around. In 1994, they forced Elizabeth McCaughey to change the trading name of her coffee shop McCoffee. She’d been running it under that name for 17 years and had called it that as an adaptation of her surname. That wasn’t a first for them either. Wikipedia has more.

eBay is another one. They’re apparantly intent on making themselves the only ‘bay’ on the internet.

It’s a war out there.

Is it a bird, is it a plane, no…it’s the Silver Surfers!

Going for Worst Blog Headline of 2008 there.

This is just a quick one. A new term has emerged to describe the older generation who use the internet, ‘Silver Surfers’. Nice. So then I came across this site the other day, Silver Surfers Day 2007. It’s a day billed as “the biggest annual media literacy campaign for older people throughout the UK”. While I applaud the concept, for a site that’s for the ‘mature’ surfer, it’s pretty hard to read! Everything is light blue on a white background and the design is enough to put me to sleep. I also didn’t notice the tiny function to increase the size of the text on the right until later. I really think they could take another look at their colour scheme and the design. Light blue on white is never going to be the easiest thing to focus on, especially for the older generation!

Anyway, check out the site, you also have the opportunity to become a BT Internet Ranger to a Silver Surfer. Awesome.

Professor of Media bans Google and Wikipedia. Uh huh.

As an avid reader of books, literary novels, this article I’ve just come across on theargus.co.uk piqued (yip, word of the day toilet paper) my interest. A professor of media at the University of Brighton has banned her students from Google andWikipedia. If you’ve ever needed to give an example of irony to anyone, head on over to that story!

Her gripe with Google stems from the fact that students are simply repeating whatever they find first on the search engine. They’re just not reading books anymore and she bemoans the fact that in the quest for new technology, books and traditional media have been left behind. While I’m totally on her side in getting students to read more books and experience the wonderful print side of life, I think – as many of the people who left comments pointed out – that the idea of banning Google and Wikipedia and the like, to force students to read is clearly not the right way to go about things. As with most things in life, there needs to be a balance. It should also be up to the University to teach the students how to do proper and legitimate research on the web. Wonder if they’re allowed to read a book about Google?

Knowledge is power as Francis Bacon once opined. Or as someone else said later, books have knowledge, knowledge is power, power corrupts, corruption is a crime, and crime doesn’t pay…so if you keep reading, you’ll go broke.

I may have digressed.

Facebook gives you the option to delete and move apps

Facebook in my opinion has never been the most user friendly site, strike that, it’s NOT a user friendly site and it took me awhile to work out how to add and delete various bits of content on my page. To this day I have yet to find out how to change the year of my birthday once it’s in my profile, there’s just no edit or delete button anywhere to be found. If anyone knows, please give me a shout!

But one of the main reasons I gave Facebook my massively uninfluential support in the beginning (it’s rapidly losing it), was because of it’s clean uncluttered look, so different to the seemingly LSD inspired MySpace pages. Not that I ever had or will have a MySpace page. See what happens when the general public gets hold of the design reins. Carnage.

So all was well and good for awhile, until Facebook introduced…applications. Carnage all over again. Users started adding apps left right and center to their profiles and possibly the worst thing about it, was letting users send out mass invites to their ‘friends’ to add the same app. Now, users profiles are becoming so cluttered, it’s hard to find the wall, let alone write on it. Complaints about cluttered profiles and useless apps have finally reached the people who matter at Facebook and very soon they will introducing a “profile clean-up” tool, so you can more easily organise your apps in your profile page. You’ll be able to acknowledge and keep your favourite ones in full view, but store the ones you don’t always use somewhere else where they can be expanded if needed.

I’m sure the people who are developing the apps advertisers won’t take this as good news and frankly I’m not too sure if going to help substantially unclutter profiles. Time will tell. Read the official post on Facebook’s blog.