I've gotten really fired up lately around a new way to approach one of the business ideas I have been exploring, and that's had me avidly researching all sorts of cool companies and technologies and development methodologies - most of them in some way or another related under the "Web 2.0" umbrella.

But just what is Web 2.0?

According to Tim O'Reilly:

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them."

Rather dry - and it fails to capture the true paradigm shift that is going on in technology, and in society.

But during my research today I stumbled across this AMAZING video that "explains Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes."

This is worth a watch, for geeks and non-geeks alike:



This was created by Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University.

I love how he elegantly goes from written text to html to xml/css to rss to blogging to online communities to "mashups" to the semantic web to the evolution of human intelligence - all in a way that even a non-geek who has never looked at a line of HTML can understand.

He concludes with this:

We'll need to rethink a few things... copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetoric, governance, privacy, commerce, love, family, ourselves.

*tremble*

He totally has managed to hit a resonant chord within me.
I'm inspired!

After being impressed by a demo from serolynne of how she uses it, a few days ago I set up free account on www.statcounter.com to monitor the traffic going to www.radven.net.

One of the many cool things StatCounter lets you do is see what pages and search terms people have used to find your web site.

Checking the log this morning, I burst out laughing to see that somebody on Google Australia searched for "first erection pictures" and found a link to my Burning Man photography on the first page of results.

Peter will be so amused....

*laugh*

I'v spent the past fews days learning how to use RapidWeaver.

Though it has more than a few quirks and weird UI over-complexities, overall it seems to be a really cool and powerful website development program and I am pretty happy with what I have been able to make it do. It sits nicely in between the powerful pain of hand-coding, and the confining simplicity of applications like iWeb.

I last worked on www.radven.net back in June, when I first tried experimenting with iWeb - creating the old site in just an afternoon.

But iWeb made adding simple things like Flickr Badges, JavaScript snippets, iFrames and such nearly impossible.

With RapidWeaver, I have already been able to figure out:

+ How to embed a Flickr badge into a sidebar.
+ How to incorporate my LJ post headlines onto the front page. (Using the awesome Feed2JS tool!)
+ How to incorporate my Amazon Store directly within my site.

There is a lot more cool stuff on the drawing board too that I haven't finished yet.

Anyway, please check things out. Thoughts, comments, and feedback appreciated!

www.radven.net (NEW)
www.radven.old (OLD)

I've spent the afternoon experimenting with Apple's new iWeb web design program, and in the process I have replaced the stub site that I had up at www.radven.net. Check it out and tell me what you think.

Have any of you used iWeb? Any thoughts on it? Any favorite alternatives?

It was pretty darn easy to get the site up, but I don't think iWeb will be flexible enough for some of the advanced features I plan to put on the site - such as live GPS tracking maps...

Already I am bummed that I can't seem to find a way to integrate nicely with my nifty new flickr pages.

So - any thoughts?