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I have to admit it, I get fan­tas­ti­cally excited by Web 2.0. As much as I love many of the com­pa­nies that have appeared on the back of the tech­nol­ogy, I love it for more nos­tal­gic rea­sons too.

I got into this busi­ness back in the day when the web was just com­ing on-stream, got my first inter­net account with Com­puserve, read my first issues of Wired and Mondo 2000, and believed this stuff was going to change the world.

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After all the run up, the end­less prepa­ra­tions, the extra pairs of socks, our Byte Night team came out the other side unscathed and raised over £5,500 in the process.

All eyes were on the weather on Fri­day as it looked like they might be bet­ter off build­ing an ark than zip­ping up a sleep­ing bag. In the end it stayed dry and our team of Rod, Belinda, Nikki and Katie got a lux­u­ri­ous 4 hours sleep before being woken by the chimes of Big Ben and the joy of dew-sodden clothes.

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No I’m not try­ing to fill space with noth­ing to say (even though it’s Fri­day). For any­one work­ing in an agency, the lorem ipsum text is prob­a­bly the one pas­sage of copy they see most in their pro­fes­sional lives. If they are an art direc­tor or designer they usu­ally wish that all copy could be like lorem ipsum. If it doesn’t fit, sim­ply lose a few let­ters out of a word here or a word there. Copy­writ­ers, how­ever, bemoan the fact that their copy will have to fit a pre-set word limit that’s been cre­ated just to look good in the lay­out.

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Tech­nol­ogy mash-ups are all the rage right now. It’s seems to be a byprod­uct of the web 2.0 / open source mind­set. With so many com­pa­nies releas­ing the source code to sig­nif­i­cant parts of their soft­ware, it’s become eas­ier than ever to spawn new ser­vices.

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Ah the 80s. When men were men. When women were men. And when most chil­dren were men too. When the hair was a big as the expense accounts. And when adver­tis­ing ruled.

Fri­day saw Ban­ner turn back the clock to the 80s with Power Dress­ing Fri­day. Ban­ner­ites from across the com­pany dusted off their braces, put on their whitest white socks and their best Face-magazine pouts.

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Viral Video Chart is a site that works out how con­ta­gious viral videos are by the num­ber of times they are linked to or embed­ded in other sites.

From the site:

We scan sev­eral mil­lion blogs a day to see which online videos peo­ple are talk­ing about the most. We count the num­ber of times each video is linked to and the num­ber of times each video is embed­ded. Every morn­ing, after we’ve had a cup of cof­fee, we pub­lish a list of the 25 videos that gen­er­ated the most buzz over the pre­vi­ous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yard­stick of what’s hot and what’s not.

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ChangeEverything.ca is a new com­mu­nity site based on the area around Van­cou­ver. It’s essen­tially a large com­mu­nity site focused on ideas about mak­ing the area a bet­ter place (although as a con­firmed Vancouver-phile I find this con­cept per­plex­ing). In some ways the site is sim­i­lar to A year of liv­ing gen­er­ously but it’s not a not-for-profit project.

The rea­son I’m talk­ing about it here is that, as much as it has a not-for-profit feel to it, the site is in fact funded by local bank Vancity. To quote from their part of the site (sorry, it’s a bit long):

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When it’s a walk­ing tour, a music les­son, a ser­ial book.

Over on the Future­lab blog, Karl Long has an inter­est­ing arti­cle on uncom­mon uses of pod­cast­ing which cov­ers these appli­ca­tions and a num­ber of oth­ers. I par­tic­u­larly like Karl’s semi-throwaway sug­ges­tion of an alter­nate com­men­tary for movies – although why stop there, why not re-voice entire movies?

I also recently read of pod­casts being used as pseudo-personal train­ing guides. Handy when you need that lit­tle extra moti­va­tion to keep you on track – just…eight…more…push-ups…

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It’s an old tenet of the inter­net, infor­ma­tion wants to be free. And for the most part it is. Some­times over­whelm­ingly so. The del­uge of infor­ma­tion that hits our inboxes/feed read­ers every day is vast. Even when you screen out the mes­sages invit­ing you to get pre­scrip­tion meds / buy stocks / grow your penis by two inches, there is still more com­ing in than many of us have time to deal with.

I remem­ber years back first dis­cov­er­ing the BBC news site. ‘Great’ I thought, ‘every­thing I need in one place.’ But there are times you want a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, so you flit around from site to site. Then came Google News which nicely aggre­gated across sources and News­Now which updated every 5 min­utes.

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Since the intro­duc­tion of Intel-powered Macs, there have been a num­ber of devel­op­ments promis­ing the abil­ity to run Win­dows on a Mac. Typ­i­cally this has either been through a dual-boot approach such as Apple’s own Boot Camp or the run within OS X vir­tual machine approach of Par­al­lels Desk­top.

Now soft­ware com­pany Codeweavers, how­ever, is promis­ing the abil­ity to run Win­dows appli­ca­tions within OS X but with­out requir­ing a copy of the Win­dows OS. The prod­uct is CrossOver Mac and looks very interesting.

From the web­site:

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