Do you want to learn about the future of web applications? If so, when choosing an event, you might want to make sure it’s one that cares about including speakers based on merit, instead of based on arbitrary gender qualifications. I judge merit to...

Background: Yahoo’s launched an interesting and innovative new service, Pipes, which lets users with a relatively low degree of technological expertise combine structured sources of web data such as feeds. In this way, it’s possible for non-experts...

I’ve seen a lot of weird, very belated, hand-wringing about Flickr requiring early adopter users to sign in with their Yahoo accounts. This is prompted, I understand, by those users having gotten an email letting them know about the required...

Picture Terry Semel holding a little lion cub up in the air with both arms extended. What’s that? It’s the Circle of Life! Well, maybe Circle of Life 2.0? Okay, enough Lion King — maybe it’s just Justin Timberlake again: “What Goes Around… Comes...

Another great Wall Street Journal online debate: Is ‘Web 2.0’ Another Bubble? David Hornik and Todd Dagres’ excellent back-and-forth was unfortunately overshadowed by the dead week between Christmas and New Year’s, but it’s well worth the...

There weren’t a whole lot of really new things announced at the Web 2.0 conference, mostly large companies saying what you’d expect. But one of the launches that stood out was stikkit. There are plenty of reviews of the service; I’m not here to talk...

A month ago, I began a series of posts outlining some common themes: Any system faces danger when it becomes a monoculture Diversity offers many broad-ranging and sometimes unexpected benefits There are many parallels between biological systems and...

The first version of Google Apps for Your Domain has been released, offering hosted applications that provide free, ad-supported services including email, chat, calendar, and simple web page creation. Each of the services is integrated with Google’s...

Speaking of memes from a year ago, last year I created a site called ishavingamassage.com. (That’s “Is Having A Massage”, not “I Shaving…”) The domain is a (gentle) poke at Flickr, which uses the message “Flickr is having a massage.” as its...

Or, “Yahoo bought everyone on my buddy list, and all I got was this t-shirt”. Following up on the discussion about Web 2.0 from last week, the only thing as glaring as who was missing from the room was the talk of a new bubble. I can’t even count how...