Web 2.0 Expo Boring

I was very disappointed in the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday at Moscone Center in SF. I wasn’t expecting much since everything I was interested in was part of the conference and not the expo, but I thought it would at least be fun and interesting. It was not.

I was glad I left late for the city. I stayed home in the morning to work on the big site upgrade that I am doing. I reached about hour 25 of what will most likely be a 30 hour project that I will get paid $300 for. I suppose $10/hr. is a big improvement over the $2/hr. I was making last year. I am happy about the job. It is for a long time client who has sent me many referrals, and the updated site will make it much more usable for us both.

I digress. Back to the expo. So many of the things that I consider to be the future (and present) of the web are open source projects with large enthusiastic development communities. The small expo floor was filled with large corporations and smaller startups focused on selling their products to other companies. The people I spoke with were sales reps rather than developers.

Read more »

Web 2.0 : The Video

The term Web 2.0 has been overused to the point of barely having any meaning. Some people use the term to refer to the way in which the web is changing into a more personal and interactive environment where anyone with access can participate without having to be a computer geek. Other people use the term to refer to the individual technologies that are bringing these changes about. I have no idea what it actually means.

While I am not a big fan of the actual term Web 2.0, I am very excited about the trend of providing people with easy access to cool technology and letting them run wild with it. The best explanation of Web 2.0 I’ve seen yet is this video that I stumbled across on youtube today and watched 4 times in a row. I think non-geeky types might enjoy watching it too.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Autiblogger

I am working on a new project to provide free blogs to the autism community. Autiblogger.com is now in the first public testing phase. It is powered by WordPress MU, and so far all is going very well. I have been wanting to set this up for a while and am very glad to finally …

Read more »

Aspieland.com

My current project, aspieland.com, is up for public testing. It will be a non-commercial site directory of sites by and for people on the autistic spectrum. The goal of this site is to focus on individual home pages and make it easier for us to find eachother on the web. Large community and resource sites …

Read more »

If Architects Had To Work Like Web Designers

From: Software is too expensive to build cheaply

Dear Mr. Architect:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Read more »