I have to admit it, I get fantastically excited by Web 2.0. As much as I love many of the companies that have appeared on the back of the technology, I love it for more nostalgic reasons too.

I got into this business back in the day when the web was just coming on-stream, got my first internet account with Compuserve, read my first issues of Wired and Mondo 2000, and believed this stuff was going to change the world.

Of course it has changed the world (almost universally for the better in my opinion) but it hasn’t been plain sailing. The hype behind the dot com boom eventually ended in a blaze of bankruptcies and business went off a cliff. We entered dark, cautious times that, frankly, weren’t much fun for anyone involved.

Which brings me back to nostalgia. Web 2.0 for me represents a renewed optimism. We have new companies being born every day (see TechCrunch US or UK for details). We also have some dying too (although generally with less VC cash attached this time). And we potentially have a redefinition of the relationship between companies and their customers.

But is it all just another bubble? Are we kidding ourselves into another over-optimistic version of the internet-as-nirvana argument? And will this really spell the beginning of a Cluetrain-inspired marketing 2.0?

This is probably the biggest conversation we’re having at Banner right now. Opinion ranges from the “this will change everything, starting now” end of the spectrum to the “only bloggers are influenced by bloggers let’s get on with the real job” end. We don’t have all the answers, I’m not sure anyone has, but it’s a really important conversation for anyone involved in technology marketing.

To this end, we having a bit of a get-together we’re calling Inside the bubble on the evening of 9th October. We’ve invited some friends, some clients and some smart people who have interesting perspectives Web 2.0. We’ve also booked out the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion (the cosmic egg as they’re calling it) just before it’s going to be closed and taken down. It should be pretty cool. It’s a panel discussion style event so no PowerPoint or endless speeches just the chance to ask people from the likes of TechCrunch UK, Google and etribes among others for their take on what Web 2.0 means for technology marketing.

Anyway, we’d love to see you there so consider yourself invited (click here to find out more and to register).

After all the run up, the endless preparations, the extra pairs of socks, our Byte Night team came out the other side unscathed and raised over £5,500 in the process.

All eyes were on the weather on Friday as it looked like they might be better off building an ark than zipping up a sleeping bag. In the end it stayed dry and our team of Rod, Belinda, Nikki and Katie got a luxurious 4 hours sleep before being woken by the chimes of Big Ben and the joy of dew-sodden clothes.

A huge thank you to everyone who sponsored us, who let us cash in favours and who put in the hours to help make the event a success.

And it’s not too late to help us add to the total. You can donate here.

No I’m not trying to fill space with nothing to say (even though it’s Friday). For anyone working in an agency, the lorem ipsum text is probably the one passage of copy they see most in their professional lives. If they are an art director or designer they usually wish that all copy could be like lorem ipsum. If it doesn’t fit, simply lose a few letters out of a word here or a word there. Copywriters, however, bemoan the fact that their copy will have to fit a pre-set word limit that’s been created just to look good in the layout.

The question that always comes up at some point is: what does it mean? Explanation of its roots can be found at Lipsum.com. From the site:

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old. Richard McClintock, a Latin professor at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, looked up one of the more obscure Latin words, consectetur, from a Lorem Ipsum passage, and going through the cites of the word in classical literature, discovered the undoubtable source. Lorem Ipsum comes from sections 1.10.32 and 1.10.33 of “de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum” (The Extremes of Good and Evil) by Cicero, written in 45 BC. This book is a treatise on the theory of ethics, very popular during the Renaissance. The first line of Lorem Ipsum, “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet..”, comes from a line in section 1.10.32.

As to the meaning, it comes from a treatise about pleasure, toil and pain (this feels somehow appropriate). A full translation can be found here – although the lorem ipsum we use today is a bit scrambled from the original. The Ipsum.com site has a Lorem generator as does Subterrane.com (along with other non-lorem passages).

Of course you don’t have to go the Latin route (geddit?). Using the Jabberwocky XTension in QuarkXPress you can select from a range of texts (including Esperanto and Klingon). I’ve also seen some agencies write their own spoof copy (although the one time I tried this the first person to look at the concept got half way through the copy before realising which reduced the impact somewhat). But my favourite text generator so far can be found at Malevole.com – if only all copy was so quick to create.

Technology mash-ups are all the rage right now. It’s seems to be a byproduct of the web 2.0 / open source mindset. With so many companies releasing the source code to significant parts of their software, it’s become easier than ever to spawn new services.

The daddy on this is Google Maps which has been mashed more times than a sack full of spuds. It’s been mashed with BBC News to give BBC News Maps so you can see where top stories are coming from (and run the other way). Combine it with a whole bunch of others and you get Weather Bonk (not sure how well that translates into UK English) that shows the weather where you are without you having to look out the window. It’s even been mashed with Flickr to create Dog Friendly Hotels. In fact, the ProgrammableWeb site lists over 500 others using Google Maps and over 1,000 mash-ups in total.

There are, of course, mash-up marketing opportunities for companies both in terms of creating new services and in how they communicate and engage with customers. Rod Banner covered a new service idea in a recent edition of BiteMe (our regular newsletter) where social networkers could use their own prestige and connections to sell personalised products (eg NikeID gear) – you can read the article here.

Surely this is just the beginning. Increasingly, communications must have intrinsic value in their own right over and above their informational content. Engaging with the customer, partnering with them to create solutions, entertaining them in interactive, non-linear ways – these are the characteristics typifying more and more successful marketing initiatives today.

We can do this interactively through adding mashed functionality into interactive comms. Or we can take on a mashed mindset to create more effective, more integrated campaigns. The result, I believe, will be deeper, more enduring relationships with customers (plus, we’ll have more fun in the process).

Source: ProgrammableWeb (via ValleyWag).

Ah the 80s. When men were men. When women were men. And when most children were men too. When the hair was a big as the expense accounts. And when advertising ruled.

Friday saw Banner turn back the clock to the 80s with Power Dressing Friday. Bannerites from across the company dusted off their braces, put on their whitest white socks and their best Face-magazine pouts.

The day was to raise money for Byte Night, the tech industry’s annual sleep out in aid of NCH, the children’s charity. The actual event takes place over night on Friday (22nd September) and we are still looking for more sponsors for our team. The team includes Katie and Nikki (pictured with Graeme above) and you can sponsor them here. Just 3 days left, altogether: “I feel the need, the need for speed.” (Sorry.)

Viral Video Chart is a site that works out how contagious viral videos are by the number of times they are linked to or embedded in other sites.

From the site:

We scan several million blogs a day to see which online videos people are talking about the most. We count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded. Every morning, after we’ve had a cup of coffee, we publish a list of the 25 videos that generated the most buzz over the previous day. We reckon this is a pretty good yardstick of what’s hot and what’s not.

Is it interesting? Yes (although discovering what’s hot is a depressing experience). Is it perfect? No. It doesn’t allow you search and there’s no way to find out any stats behind the vids (some mash-up with Google Trends or Alexa’s traffic rankings would be ideal here).

Personally, I prefer YouTube’s most viewed and most linked pages which give more information – albeit only from a single site. It will be interesting to see how Viral Video Chart evolves over time and whether it can add more depth to its offering.

Source: Xeep’s video on the net

ChangeEverything.ca is a new community site based on the area around Vancouver. It’s essentially a large community site focused on ideas about making the area a better place (although as a confirmed Vancouver-phile I find this concept perplexing). In some ways the site is similar to A year of living generously but it’s not a not-for-profit project.

The reason I’m talking about it here is that, as much as it has a not-for-profit feel to it, the site is in fact funded by local bank Vancity. To quote from their part of the site (sorry, it’s a bit long):

So maybe you’re wondering… why is Vancity creating an online community? Why would a bank care about anything other than its products and sales?

First of all, and this is important, this site is NOT a place where Vancity will sell you mortgages, term deposits and accounts. (To everyone who was just aching to find a place where we’d bombard you with annuities come-ons: sorry if we yanked your chain.)

Second, and more fundamentally, Vancity isn’t a bank. We’re a community-based financial institution that is as interested in making our community work as it is in making money. And these days, community is more and more about what happens online, which is why we’re so interested in the Web’s potential for supporting community development in the Lower Mainland and Victoria.

We have a triple bottom line, which means that we don’t gauge our success merely on our profitability, but also on how we are helping the communities and improving the environment where we do business.

As an exercise in creating relationships with customers, I really like the site. It has a deftness of touch and confidence you don’t see often. The writing is good too.

It’ll be interesting to see how well ChangeEverything works in terms of community participation. It will live or die on how many people take up the idea and get involved. At the moment it has a relatively limited number of active participants but to be fair, it is new.

Personally, I wish it well.

Source: TechCrunch

When it’s a walking tour, a music lesson, a serial book.

Over on the Futurelab blog, Karl Long has an interesting article on uncommon uses of podcasting which covers these applications and a number of others. I particularly like Karl’s semi-throwaway suggestion of an alternate commentary for movies – although why stop there, why not re-voice entire movies?

I also recently read of podcasts being used as pseudo-personal training guides. Handy when you need that little extra motivation to keep you on track – just…eight…more…push-ups…

I’ve also seen podcasts are also used as meditation aids – over at Zencast, one of the first podcasts they put up was a set of 5/10/20 minute silences which ended with a single bell chime. This solved the “I wonder how long I’ve been sitting here maybe I’ll just look at my watch – is that all?” problem.

There is nothing to say that a podcast must follow the downloadable radio show format – this is like saying all websites should look like magazines. And with the expected growth of video podcasting (sorry, can’t use the term vodcasting with a straight face) who knows where the technology will take us?

It’s an old tenet of the internet, information wants to be free. And for the most part it is. Sometimes overwhelmingly so. The deluge of information that hits our inboxes/feed readers every day is vast. Even when you screen out the messages inviting you to get prescription meds / buy stocks / grow your penis by two inches, there is still more coming in than many of us have time to deal with.

I remember years back first discovering the BBC news site. ‘Great’ I thought, ‘everything I need in one place.’ But there are times you want a different perspective, so you flit around from site to site. Then came Google News which nicely aggregated across sources and NewsNow which updated every 5 minutes.

But, of course, this was all controlled news with an editor deciding what I needed to know. Where’s the fun in that?

Now we have social news, news by the people for the people (well OK for the most part links by some of the people for some of the people). The principle being that collectively, people are pretty smart (a Wisdom of Crowds thing). So we have user-driven sites such as Digg – with it’s current controversy around users burying stories they disagree with – and Newsvine (my personal favourite).

And now we have Spotback which claims to be a new breed of personalised news service. Spotback is tag-based, you set in what you’re interested in when you first go to the site. Then, with a bit of AJAX wizardry, the site generates your personal news page which essentially looks like many others. But, the thing about Spotback is that it learns what you like. You can rate stories, indicating your preferences, what you’d like more of and less of. The theory goes that over time Spotback will deliver just the kind of information you want. It’s a nice interface which can be easily customised and can deliver news in an RSS feed.

Of course, when I have a service that can predict precisely what I want to see, feeding me the kind of news that I’m sure to agree with, the fear is I’ll miss out on the unexpected, the challenging, the downright uncomfortable even.

Maybe it’s time to go back to the BBC.

Since the introduction of Intel-powered Macs, there have been a number of developments promising the ability to run Windows on a Mac. Typically this has either been through a dual-boot approach such as Apple’s own Boot Camp or the run within OS X virtual machine approach of Parallels Desktop.

Now software company Codeweavers, however, is promising the ability to run Windows applications within OS X but without requiring a copy of the Windows OS. The product is CrossOver Mac and looks very interesting.

From the website:

CrossOver Mac allows you to install your favorite Windows applications and games on Mac OS X. CrossOver includes an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing Windows software simple and fast. Once installed, your application integrates seamlessly in OS X. Just click and run your application directly from the OS X Finder. Clicking a Windows file or document — including email attachments — will launch the appropriate Windows program, allowing you to work on the files. Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.

The software is in beta at the moment and you must have an Intel-powered Mac (dammit!). Codeweavers are offering a free time-limited version for users to play with. Initial reports indicate that for the most part it works OK (well enough for a beta anyway).

If this approach delivers on promise it will be a boon for those who prefer OS X but need to run Windows-only apps such as Microsoft Project. It also holds out the vision of a time where applications and operating systems are largely independent (this is already there in many open source programs).

Of course the real long term question will not be whether to choose OS X, Windows or Linux but whether to go for a hardware-based OS or a web-based one. But that’s for another post.