Web 2.0? It's all very well...

...but what do you do when it breaks???

I've just come home from a hard day's labour, followed by a fun, friendly evening class, sat down with my laptop, logged on to Netvibes, to be met with...well, a message telling me how much better it's going to become! Which is no good to me right now, as I want to see what's going on in the world. All my carefully collected feeds and blogs, wikis and social networking connections are contained therein, and I can't get to them. Well, that's not strictly true, I could get at most, eventually, going through them one by one, tracking them down, logging on etc etc, but that's no good to me, that's not how I want things to present themselves to me.

It was almost a panicky moment, which is ludicrous of course, but I hope I'm not alone in that. Makes me think about backups, plan B's etc. Maybe I should use i-Google after all. I'm sure it never goes down. Their server cloud model probably means this never happens to them. I have an account there and a few bits and bobs, but somehow it's not the same. Too corporate or American or something....hard to pin down...

Maybe I should just go to bed and let Web 2.0 sort itself out by morning time!

Comments

Social Media and Open Education - getting started...

So, I signed up for a Social Media and Open Education course (EC&I 831) as a non-credit student. The course is being run by Alec Couros from the University of Regina in Saskatchewan (which always makes me think of the Proclaimers song "Cap in Hand"), but that was a several weeks ago. Since then, I have, for various reasons, done nothing... Now, I'm catching up! Easy stuff: Follow all the people from the course who are following me, and follow a few extras. I didn't opt to follow everyone - not sure why not, but I imagine it's because I just felt slightly intimidated by the sheer numbers of them. I'm sure I'll add a few more over the duration of the course as I get to see who's doing what and who has interesting things to say. Mind you, if others use the same criteria, I'm not sure I'll generate many new followers! Sort out Twitterdeck - new Twitter column for course related activity. This should help me to keep track of what people are...

It's been a while...

It's been a while since I last blogged and it's also been a while since I last played cricket. These items are not linked. Cricket season started, for me, on Saturday. We lost, and it was a fairly miserable experience on a ropey ground with even ropier weather. Sign of things to come? Let's hope not. More blogging in the offing? Who knows?

Bing v Google

On the face of it, this battle is still no-contest, however... I came across an interesting item on the RIA Journal blog pointing out that Facebook now uses Bing to power their extended search results and not Google. This possibly goes some way to explain the apparent optimism detected by Rory Cellan-Jones when he recently met with some Microsoft executives . As Rory points out however, Bing has only 3.3% of the market, with Google retaining an impressive 84%. Rory makes the point that he, like many, tried out Bing when it first came out but then reverted back to Google and that Bing’s biggest challenge would be to break down that user inertia. Basically, why bother going to Bing? If Bing can get itself “institutionalised” by becoming embedded in major tools like Facebook then it stands a chance. If it can’t, it will remain insignificant. The big question I have is why did Facebook choose Bing?

Shifting Expectations

Search This Blog