Web 2.0 in a nutshell

I recently saw a presentation from Adobe, in which they had an interesting slide. It's essentially a list of mappings between web 1.0 and web 2.0 concepts and applications. For you out there who need a short intro to web 2.0 or you who just want to know the buzz-words, look no further:

Someone finally did it

In my previous post I joked about mankind and innovation
regarding the USBWine device. This post, however, is dead serious but still pretty amazing.

Some guys have created an "assistant that lets you focus on what you're doing, and not how you do it" as they define it themselves.

What is it? The guys at Humanized had a problem: "Computers are hard to use!". A lot of the task you perform at your computer every day, is in no way optimized for productivity. The goal for "Enso", as the product is called, is to remove these productivity barriers.

Many people have said this, but these guys have actually done it. Whatch the demo here: http://www.humanized.com/enso_demo.php

Unfortunately it doesn't work on Mac :-(

Mankind at the top of innovation

Well, we've finally reached the top. The max potential of the human brain. The best we can be!

What I'm talking about? Presenting: USBWine - the product that finally makes computers truly productive...

An Internet star is born

Once in a while, someone comes along and shows the world some wierd talent, skill, creativitiy, or just plain old stupidity. A lot of these 15-minutes of fame has been awarded through YouTube and American Idol, and another one has seen the light!

This time it's Renaldo Lapuz, performing "We're brothers forever" - an original composition dedicated to the Idol judge Simon Cowell.

I don't want to try and describe the performance, but I will point out, that I've never seen the judges on American Idol dance before ;-)

HTML in the previous

The HTML generated by Contribute, as mentioned in an earlier post, seems to be pretty clean. In the referenced post it consists of <p>, <ul>, <li>, and <a>...

It does, however, insert a <div> in the beginning with the attribute:

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"

But that ain't too bad :-)

Contributing to the blog

Lately I've found some new inspiration in Adobe's Creative Suite 3. I've been toying around with Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flex and today: Contribute.

More specifically I'm writing this post from inside Contribute :-)

Contribute is an application build to help webmasters, blog owners and the like to keep their website and/or blog updated.

So far, here are some of my thoughts:

• The editor seems nice - better than NeoOffice for the Mac anyay. It has some well built "Insert link" and "Insert image" dialogs! I'll get back and comment on the HTML it generates when this is posted
• A well needed change from the web based interface og Blogger (which works great, but is a bit boring)
• The price tag on the software, I think, will scare off some people. With $169 for a single license, I wouldn't go buy it. I guess people who spend every day maintaining websites may find it reasonable
• The blogging feature is pretty cool. Contribute seems to integrate well into your chosen blogging system. It supports Blogger, WordPress and Typepad out of the box, and other blog servers through the MetaWebblog API
• With my system (Blogger) I'm writing the post in-context (screenshot here)
• I can save a post for finalizing later, as with Bloggers interface. In Contribute there is a list of unpublished posts/pages so you can easily find them again
• As nice as the above sounds, I'm still not convinced when it comes to "normal" websites. I just don't see Contribute replacing real Content Management Systems any time soon. Too many features are missing (user management, extensibility etc.)

Those were some initial ponderings. I will probably get back about CS3 soon ;-)