middledigit.net | jonathan hopkins

Hammer, meet nail. Just watched this and had one of those spine tingly moments. A short video on the We Think proposition from Charles Leadbetter A great little piece of video based communication about an amazing take on how the web has changed the world. Wow. Big stuff.

More here. Illustration by Debbie Powell. Audio by Something Non Descript. Via here.

Having worked with Yahoo! at two agencies across pretty much all of its products (including Search with Ged as a client!), I was a bit sad to hear about the job cuts in the pipeline and read some of the more cutting articles that appeared after the financial results. A lot of people have pointed to the fact that Yahoo! lacks any sort of vision and has yet to deliver a solid product roadmap that gets people all excited about its future again.

Now, I know that really recently Yahoo! revealed it is testing Del.icio.us results being incorporated into Yahoo! Search, but I’m still left with that nagging feeling that I’ve had for months that they are failing to make the most out of what is one of the most essential things on the web for me today - Del.icio.us. Now I didn’t get on board with Del.icio.us until 2006, March 18th to be precise - when I saved my first bookmark, a guide to free open source software on Open Source Mac. But, since then I’ve fed it like a beast and have saved over 2000 links to valuable, interesting stuff. If I lost all of those links I would be really rather unhappy indeed. In fact, I regularly back them up. Not that it would be the same but at least I’d have some record of all those amazing things I’ve found on the net.

Anyway, I’ve digressed a bit. My point is that even though I’d consider myself a fairly heavy user, I never really use any of the other features like saving links for other people or using the delicious network to find links from other people. Instead, I either stumble into someone’s bookmarks after they pop up in search results or go on a bit of a bookmark Safari after checking out someone’s blog that includes a link to their del.icio.us profile. I also think that the only person whose delicious master feed I get over RSS is Lynette Webb at Google (more on Lynette here). Surely that’s a bit odd - am I alone in this?

So the big question. Why doesn’t Yahoo! work more closely with Del.icio.us and integrate it FULLY into the Yahoo! Search experience? Surely, it’s sitting on a goldmine of filtered information - hand selected and saved information from human beings across the planet. Even just a custom simplified big search box start page (crude mock-up above!) that defaulted to searching the del.icio.us network and a better UI for the results would be a start. Just like we’ve learnt with Twitter, the Google homepage and countless other examples (very recently Instapaper too) - simple is best when it comes to the tools used to manage information. Sometimes it’s better to strip back features than serve everything up in one go.

Now that’s just one thing that could be done. There’s heaps of other stuff that I’m sure is possible. I just don’t see whay it’s taking Yahoo! so long. Remember - it was December 2005 that Yahoo! bought Del.icio.us - over 2 years ago. That’s ages in web-time, especially at a time when Yahoo! needs to pull a rabbit out the hat more than ever before.

Great one from Hugh today re “the annoying buzzword social media”. Made me laugh out loud.

Well it’s not that bad really is it? But, I do think this is worth reading. Found via the good people at neoco, it might be old (really not sure) but definitely still makes you think. Was 1.0 the creation of it, 2.0 the realisation and quick-fix of it and 3.0 will be the creation of something completely different? I don’t know. But I do know that the internet isn’t all that sh*t right now and in the future (say, inside 5 years), think it’s gonna do stuff we haven’t even thought of.

It’s all getting a bit cosy isn’t it? The predictable consolidation is in full swing. Via Jaiku blog.

So, someone tried to stake a claim as to what the official definition of web 3.0 is. And it’s all kicked off. Raises a lot of questions, main one being when will we stop going up in numbers. Thats all a bit “Windows 98″ isn’t it?