Web 2.0 Stores > Fast, Simple, Search Engine Friendly Ecommerce

The birth of Web 2.0 has brought about several blogging 2.0 services and applications that are currently available to users interested in unique blog services and features related to 2.0. The following list describes and links to many of the popular blogging 2.0 services.

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Visible.net is a new provider of state-of-the-art ecommerce and online marketing services.

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Being a blogger for quite a few years I couldn’t help but read Tim O’Reilly’s post about a Code of Conduct for bloggers, following the Kathy Sierra incident that flooded TechMeme with outrage (and rightfully so) with the preposterous personal threats against Kathy. And having read and thought about it, I decided not to write about the proposed Code of Conduct because honestly I knew others would do a great job of dissecting it first. But there’s a couple of ideas that I feel are important to bring up at this point: Blogging is about community, and any community has bad seeds. This is one of the consequences of being human - you are bound to have people disagree with you, dislike your work and diss your efforts. Not being “right” for everyone is what makes you strive to become better every day. Just imagine a world where no one would voice their opinion against you - perfect, right? Wrong. This makes it easy to assert that yes, anonymous comments are wrong or to be frowned upon, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they shouldn’t be accepted. People do feel more comfortable speaking their minds about certain things if they do it anonymously - again it is only natural. There’s obviously a big line between an opinion and a threat, and here naturally common sense applies. It is the nature of the blogosphere to be “unmediated” (remember the whole “We are the media thing”?), and a Code of Conduct only serves as an excuse for traditional media to discredit both bloggers and those who read blogs. Naturally rules apply to blogs - but those should only be the rules upon which society itself is based on. The blogging community doesn’t all move in the same direction, and that’s the beauty of it. There’s no need for a formal ruleset to control the tide. This is obviously a philosophical question and not a moral question. We all understand when lines are crossed and action must be taken, but isn’t trying to regulate something that excels in (well,) entropy and unmediated growth a little too “weird”?

Quick post to let everyone subscribing to this blog and not Goplan’s own blog that there are three very important updates with the application. We just opened a public sandbox (a server everyone can access and test, even you! Now!), opened our SOAP API and announced our pricing model. Without going into too much detail (all details are on the Goplan weblog), we have been getting a lot of requests to see bleeding edge updates on Goplan, as well as press requests to see the application, so the now open sandbox server can be accessed by anyone freely for evaluation purposes - but you need to keep in mind that data in the sandbox server is NOT preserved, as we frequently update the code and conduct tests on it (so don’t use that one for production).

Everybody loves widgets - they’re everywhere. They’re on “Ajax homepages”, like Netvibes, Google, Live.com, on my OSX Dashboard and on the new Windows Vista Sidebar - everywhere, really. Now, they’re starting to invade our blogs too, and the question is: when is it going to stop?

Content first, please

Widgets give you one thing and one thing only (at least so far): little bits of useful information. Now, useful information is exactly that, useful, but usually (most of the time, I hope) not as important as content. That’s why the OSX Dashboard hides widgets away so you only see them when you need them. Let’s put it this way: what’s really important to your readers? Is it what you write on your blog, or is it the last tracks you’ve heard on Last.fm, or maybe the time in San Francisco in a beautiful stylized watch, or webcam widgets showing 5th avenue (everybody loves those) or, let’s go all the way with this, what about a streaming music player? - I bet everyone would love that. The fact is, nobody really cares about anything but your content - and truth be told, thats good: it means you write, and people read. So what is the point of having weblogs look like christmas trees if that only annoys the hell out of people, makes page loading a pain in the butt, and confuses the eyes to a point where they scream at the brain: “Find the feed URL and lets get out of here, now!”.

Well, Christmas is coming, right?

The “blog as christmas tree” is the metaphor I came up with for the widgetification of weblogs and websites. People cram everything they can into layouts, like they were decorating a christmas tree. There is one very important thought here, though: in a christmas tree, the focus is the tree, whereas on your blog, the focus is your content, not your recent searches, your google ads, your shopping list or your 50 album recommendations. Remember when people visit blogs like this, their brain screams “get out, just get out now!”.