No not pinocchio, this is Ponoko. What is Ponoko you ask? “…the world’s largest marketplace for product plans. Creators and consumers use these plans to share, buy, sell and make individualized goods.”
So people can make, share, sell and buy…well, stuff. Ponoko has started out making a framework, they have some guidelines (like materials, size restrictions and such) but you design it. When you tell the world via the Ponoko site. The you browse the site and buy stuff.
Now you may buy the plans, you may buy a kit. But it is all about collaboration and open sourced relationships. People can get what they want and others can sell what they have.
It’s like some people are good designers and some have cash in hand, ready to buy. Let’s let the designers do that on an open system and then let the people with money jump in and buy.
If there is one thing my circle of friends (Jason, Annette, Nick and Abe) would agree that I say way too much is it’s all about the conversation - we need to engage people in a real life convo.
We’ve heard a lot of people repeat the Web 2.0 cliché that “Content is King”. But the new thinking is that Content is not King, Context is. The internet has evolved in stages over the last 10 years from “Surf” to “Search” to “Find” and now the challenge is to “Filter”. We can get a massive amount of relevant information in a nanosecond…
So here’s the message marketers in this brave new world need to get…Be Part of the Conversation…With or without you, the conversation is taking place. The choice then is to participate and help shape it, or ignore it and let it shape you.
Source: WikipediaI love forums - and really they have been around forever. (Pre-internet is forever you know.) But I am really frustrated that there has been very little innovation in the area. Why s that?
Do they (forums) really not matter anymore? It seems like they were one of the first conversations to happen on the web. They pre-date IM and basically allow a “real-time” chat. (Its really close to realtime, you would refresh for new comments.)
I wonder if forums will evolve - or will they become obsolete via other technology. Wiki’s are great, but they don’t offer the conversation forums do. Twitter has the real time feel and conversation, but it is hard to archive and search the good information later.
So what is next? I’m not sure - although I’m not going to make it to the Web 2.0 conference in San Fran this year - I’m hoping to send the challenge along with a friend to pop it into a birds-of-feather session.
I throw around some web words sometimes, just figuring many people know what they mean. Here is a good definition of a word (or combo of two words) which is very big in the “Web 2.0″ world - cloud computing:
“What is cloud computing? It is basically an Internet-based network made up of large numbers of servers - mostly based on open standards, modular and inexpensive. Clouds contain vast amounts of information and provide a variety of services to large numbers of people. Users of the cloud only care about the service or information they are accessing - be it from their PCs, mobile devices, or anything else connected to the Internet - not about the underlying details of how the cloud works.”
This is another post which references the same material I posted from Silicon Valley Watcher article yesterday. But I would have to say my favorite quotes comes at the very end:
These are just some starter terms. You may notice that my descriptions sound a little tongue-in-cheek - you have to have a sense of humor when you’re inventing almost meaningless marketing terminology - but as KPCB has made clear, for our industry to survive, we need a new meaningless word.
So get to it! The survival of your job depends on it!
Chris Shipley wrote an article which declares we need to put an end to “free”.
For much of the last 24 months, new consumer Web services have been offered to the market for free. Well, my friends, it’s time we stripped the mask off of “free” to take a long look at what’s really going on here.
He does a great job of laying out the various “free” plans - then really lays it down at the end. I do somewhat agree with Chris on the tone of the article - but there has to be more hidden here somewhere - I would be interested to see your comments or how the comments start to roll in on this one.
When I first began reading the article I almost choked on my Diet Dr. Pepper - when I read the line:
“We have absolutely no interest in funding Web 2.0 companies,” says Randy Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins.
My reaction was disbelief. It wasn’t until I consumed the entire article to see what this guy was talking about was the terms in which people use seem to be getting old and stale for VCs.
After reading Tim O’Reilly’s comments near the bottom (and agreeing 100%)
Either KP is getting sucked in by the hype end of Web 2.0, and failing to understand what it’s really about, or else, more likely, they are using another term for the same thing.
Now that makes sense. At my company we have ditched the “Web 2.0″ montra for calling anything like it a current web technology. To me it really is just what you do - if you want to have a successful website - you need all the “Web 2.0″ bells and whistles…I guess we just have to stop using the buzz word.
“I was a little late to the game on Twitter, but it’s quickly becoming my favorite social network, and represents the best of what I think is the power of Web 2.0. Despite all the ‘exciting’ news about Facebook over the last 36 hours, I have to admit, I’m experiencing a bit of Facebook fatigue.”
I found both of these articles interesting - what I really like is it appears people are really trying to figure out Web 2.0 - not just going with the flow.
I found this article that talks about enterprise and web 2.0 - it explains how enterprise is divided on the new technologies…they know they need to adopt - but they are not comfortable with “cloud” computing.
In adoption of Web 2.0 the biggest pushback was from IT - whether right or wrong the article stated:
“There could be a lot of reasons why employees don’t use web 2.0 tools. What I found surprising in Forrester’s report was that IT decision-makers appear to be quite happy that only 15% of employees in their company use web 2.0 tools.”
My only issue here is we have a group of corporate front line web developers and designers trying to compete with the small, agile web 2.0 companies - and they cannot get adoption from within.
But, IT has a point in that we all want to assume the data “inside the house” is safe and sound.
I found a link to this article on Digg and found it funny. And even though this is done as a bit of a comedy - we can take a real look and apply some of this stuff.
What it does do - it tell you what the “buzz” words are and focuses on the things which “appear” to be important. Also - check out the comments at the bottom, this is why many people are choosing to disable comments.
Image by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³ via Flickr
