Archive for “Industry”

You’ve heard about Wikipedia, YouTube, “user-generated content”, and Web 2.0, right? But what’s their significance—isn’t it all just a fad?

The idea that people can contribute to and share “media”, as well as consuming it, is actually a big deal, and it’ll probably affect you, whether as a user or a publisher.

Clay Shirky’s speech at the Web 2.0 conference back in April, “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus” provides a wonderful perpective on where this fits in with our everyday lives, and specifically our relationship with television. Shirky compares television to gin, and argues that, “it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender [of watching sitcoms],” that we can begin to work out what we can create by using our spare time to participate.

You can also watch the speech as a video. Great stuff!

It might sound a bit sad, but I was genuinely excited last week: Firefox 3 was finally released. If you’ve never heard of Firefox, it’s the open source web browser that rose from the ashes of Netscape, after Microsoft claimed victory in the original browser wars.

Since then, the browser space has started to get interesting again, with Apple’s excellent Safari now available for Windows, Opera appearing on the Nintendo Wii, and Microsoft restarting its browser development with the release of Internet Explorer 7.

Firefox is now a mainstream browser, with market share of 10-20%, depending on who you ask. It runs on three major platforms (Windows, Mac and Linux), and version 3 features improved performance, an ingenious bookmarking system, a smart interface for saving passwords… I could go on. Check out the Wall Street Journal’s review.

If you’ve never used Firefox, I urge you to give it a try–it makes using the web feel more like a pleasure and less like a fight. It’s easy to install–just get the download and you’ll be up and running in minutes.

If your IT department only supports Internet Explorer, try giving them a call–many IT people won’t mind installing it. If that fails, you always could install it on your home machine…