What’s the characteristic difference between Web 1.0 and 2.0? While I can’t come up with a unified theory of this, I do believe that one the most striking differences is the ratio between male and female users - opposed to Web 1.0, Web 2.0 is for girls, (too).
As they say, “a bunch of anecdotes isn’t […]

One of the most important aspects of the Web 2.0 movement is personalization. The idea is that different people are interested in different stuff - the challenge is to give each single individual the personally most relevant experience of the web.
Most services approach this problem in a very similar manner: They keep track of what […]

Joe Seither, product manager for Claria’s PersonalWeb and author of the Claria Blog, wrote about some of my recent posts in an admittetly flattering way and I am certainly happy about this kind of attention.
However, I feel the need to get some things straight regarding my last post on Attention monetization. Dropping Claria and […]

Starting from Seth Goldstein’s mantra of attention being “the substance of focus”, I claimed in my last post that attention is the currency of intentionality.
However, if attention is already a currency itself, what does it mean to monetize it?
There seems to be no obvious way of how attention itself can be monetized in the sense […]

“Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought…It implies withdrawl from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the […]

Last.fm is a social music service that consists of two components: A player and something they call the “audioscrobbler”. The latter is a plug-in for iTunes that sends every song you play to a last.fm server to create a musical profile of every user, given she has installed the audioscrobbler software. Last.fm uses this data […]

Just got wind of a german Facebook clone, studiverzeichnis.de. By and large it seems to be a one to one copy of the original (save the replacement of “blue” in the code by “red”). Ever since I saw my cousin Mher use Facebook for the first time (it’s limited to people with .edu email adresses […]

Just found this amazing tool via infostethics:

Do a search for whatever you’re interested in and see how the results of Google and Yahoo! differ - blue dots indicate results returned by both engines, white dots represent unique results of each engine, respectively. The lines connect equal results.
I wouldn’t have thought that their results are that […]

Philosophers have racked their brains for ages over the concept of objectivity. Do we all share the same reality? Does a particular type of green look the same way for me as it does for everyone else? Who knows.
Recently a friend and I figured out that this problem seems to extend itself to Google searches:

On […]

…or as French philosopher Virilio puts it:
Every time a new technology has been invented, a new energy harnessed, a new product made, one also invents a new negativity, a new accident.You can’t invent the car without inventing the crash. Recently Stan pointed out that this is precisely the case with what every internet innovation has […]