There are a lot of things that annoy me about Web 2.0 - the lack of sound business models, the buzz-driven approach to investment, the return of pastel colors, but I don’t think anything bothers me more than the cutesy culture that pervades this entire quadrant of the IT sector.
Yahoo and Google started the [...]

Consumer activist sites like The Consumerist and online review aggregators like Yelp and Amazon have helped put more power into the hands of the consumers; corporations who run unethical marketing campaigns or ones that treat their customers poorly are rightly ousted by sites like these.
Ultimately bad reviews and stories from these sites force companies [...]

Over the past two weeks TechCrunch has been struck by the Steve Gillmor phenomenon, also known as the sudden appearance of articles boasting outrageous claims written in an unintelligible, somewhat bombastic style.
Joel Spolsky was an early pioneer in the field of Gillmor translation, but as you can tell it’s a rather difficult field of study [...]

Not a week goes by when I don’t read a post about Twitter. It’s a technology that’s soaked the panties of many web 2.0 aficionados - that’s probably the most succinct, crude way to put it.
I’ve been pretty hesitant to try it out, namely because I was dubious when I heard people shouting praise [...]

Today I read on RW/W about “How to Make Facebook Useful Again.” Speaking as someone who just graduated from college a week ago, I can tell you that Facebook’s utility has plummeted drastically since I was a freshman.
A few weeks ago one of my college friends installed an application which spammed my feed every day [...]

Tom from TomsTechBlog wrote a piece today about the backlash against social media consultants and “social media experts.” I originally started writing this piece as a comment in response to his post but I decided to make a full post out of it.
The basic issue is that the advice handed out by most “social media [...]

A few weeks ago I received a friend request on StumbleUpon from a dude named Andy MacDonald who runs an SEO/Meta-Blog called Swift Media UK.
The day after I accepted his friend request I received a Stumble from Andy, asking me to read over one of his new blog articles about “engaging your readers” or something. [...]

Cool brands are like a vacuum, nature abhors them. The cooler they get, the more attractive they become to the uncool and the harder they have to fight to retain their hip customer base.

Digg’s social networking features, and I’m not talking about the shouts, but the very core of Digg - the emphasis on recruiting your friends to sign up and subsequently vote on articles is what has moved Digg away from the diverse and different media to narrow, mainstream content.

The New Year is here and a number of the Web 2.0 blogs have looked at the highs and lows from 2007, but I want to focus on the tech frontier and what’s coming down the pike for Web 2.0.
1. Google Sees Failure for the First Time
According to Yahoo! Finance, GOOG is sitting comfortably at [...]