When talking about current developments of the web, mobile devices seem to (finally) become increasingly important.
The web is evolving from being mainly bound to PCs and their browsers to more device independence.

Interesting examples for that are (imho):

• Semapedia
• Yahoo! Go
• Google Local for mobile
  

Especially the ideas and concept behind Semapedia project occur pretty promising to me…

So 2005 was the year when the Web 2.0 hype climaxed.

Following, there has been quite some cynism & “hate” coming in especially recently, too. Also all that made for example Richard MacManus, author of Read/WriteWeb, decide to not get involved in the discussion about the term Web 2.0 itself anymore.

He basically says this discussion would be merely useless and not really progressive. Mainly since the discussions around Web 2.0 are at least supposed to be in fact all about the ongoing developments concerning the web and not about arguing, ’cause of definitions for a term describing them. Well, I agree with him on that point, though I think it’s good an overall term exists at all (may the term itself be badly chosen, misleading and whatsoever).

So also the more general public (finally) starts to catch up with the term Web 2.0 and it’s beginning to get an idea + opinions about. Consequently I think it could be useful to stick to the term so to speak nevertheless.

BTW, there is a post about the “Best Web Companies and Innovators of 2005″ by Mr. MacManus and a post by Dion Hinchecliffe about “The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005″.

Joshua Porter has written an “Introduction to Web 2.0″ pretty recently—seems to be quite a comprehensive overview of this topic containing links to major resources, basic examples and so on.

Apart from that, he also wrote posted some bits about folksonomies today—quote:

“…But now we know why folksonomies are valuable. It is because they do two things very well.

1. One is that they allow people to remember things in the way that works for them. Someone tagging pictures in Flickr or bookmarks in Del.icio.us can use tags that they’ll remember. Instead of working twice to shoehorn a resource into and out of a taxonomy, folksonomies let users do both tasks effortlessly. Reduced cognitive load. Don’t Make Me Think. (if you didn’t read Rashmi’s A Cognitive Analysis of Tagging, you should).
2. The second thing is that they easily enable a bottoms-up classification system. When folks tag multiple resources at the same time, it is easy to aggregate those tags and provide navigation and resources that expose them. This is the reason why popular resources by tags on del.icio.us (like Web 2.0) and Flickr Interestingness are consistently valuable.

It must be stressed, however, that over the last year that we’ve learned (nudged along by Vander Wal) that the first is much more important than the second. If something isn’t valuable personally, it will rarely be valuable for the community…”

Interesting stuff (imho).

When talking about Web 2.0, Ajax has to be mentioned—plus moreover, of course, Ruby on Rails (RoR). This “revolutionary” web-app development framework also provides some bleeding edge Ajax functionalities, mainly through script.aculo.us‘ JavaScript libraries.

BTW: For having a nice first look at Ruby (the scripting/programming language used in RoR) this interactive shell tutorial (running with powered by Ajax) should be recommended to give it a try.
There’s a good online guide to Ruby book (by “why the lucky stiff”, maker of that tutorial) available for digging into it further, too.

So there are really a lot of new Web 2.0 startups flourishing these days.
Evan Williams (currently CEO of Odeo, Inc., previously co-founder and CEO of Pyra Labs, makers of Blogger which is by now part of Google), at the end of this Nov., made imho quite an interesting post about rules for web startups.

I somehow especially like his rule no. 5:

• “…User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more…”

Well, certainly, the whole text is (what I’d call) “somewhat Californian style”. Nevertheless, I think there are some good points in it.

Furthermore, I recently listened to an interview with Jason Calacanis (co-founder & CEO of Weblogs, Inc.), published by Web 2.0 Show podcasting (member of so-called Web 2.0 Workgroup).
Among other things, he mentions the in his point of view pretty absurd way many Web 2.0 startups focus only on features and don’t at all really care about making profits whereas their main “business model” is to be flipped (preferably by Google or Yahoo). Hmm, interesting…

Well, for starting out this thing I thought it could make sense to take a look at Adaptive Path’s Web 2.0 Map, recently published by Brandon Schauer in his essay referring to this.

Although, of course, that document also contains mostly all of those (in)famous buzzwords about Web 2.0, it could be helpful trying to extract the most basic assumptions which are proposed via the map.
So, what does it generally say?

• Web 2.0 isn’t something which “just happened all out of a sudden”.
• There are developments behind it which have been on the way for quite some time.
• So to speak, the right circumstances at the right time finally let them come into full effect.
• Usability and especially so-called user experience are playing quite an important role for enabling it.

To sum it up, many of all the opportunities & promises concerning the Internet (which were already around till dotcom crash at about the beginning of the new millenium) took their time to finally become mature.
Furthermore, they have also enhanced, so to speak gone through evolution, and it seems now like the web is and/or will be all about communication, cooperation & collaboration. Basically, we’re talking about read/write web.

This is also something which in fact seems to be at least quite a bit contradictory to the vision of so-called “information superhighway” of from earlier web days.
In the end, there appears to be really a shift away from conventional broadcasting to merely many2many communication.

This blog is basically supposed to work as my personal (online) space of serendipities, thoughts & ideas about so-called Web 2.0.

It should support me getting along with all those emerging (and imho really interesting & promising) things concerning this ongoing development of the Internet.

And moreover, all the buzz connected with it, too.

To say it in short, I mainly want to use the blog to help me with so to speak finding out what’s it all about, plus what’s “only” the buzz and what’s really here to stay—where’s it coming from, what’s it (possibly) heading for? etc.

Additionally, it could & should also probably aid me improving my English.