manonabus.com

Actually I’ve been quite busy with Rich Cochrane, setting up Big Ideas. We’ve just launched our first podcast - given Rich and I have both been doing stuff on the net for 15 years we are surprisingly lax in getting into new forms - which I spent the weekend editing. The edit - of a discussion about pyschogeography - simply involved taking an hour’s worth of audio and making it into 45 minutes of something coherent. Armed with the excellent Audacity, some headphones and a quiet room I thought it would take no time at all. 7 hours later…

It’s amazing how difficult it is to select the material. I hope our contributors think it accurately reflected their contributions.

Since I last posted I have:

• met one new grandparent
• lost two other grandparents
• changed jobs

…so the blog hasn’t been the highest priority. But since then all this 2.0 stuff really has leapt forward. There’s also been a lot of “2.0 is so much hype” (for example, see http://www.schillmania.com/content/opinion/2005/10/dont-believe-the-web-20-hype/), but it occurs to me that although the label is lame, the user-generated content thing really is a shift. And that shift, I think, is down to the fact that for the first time users have tools that work. I have a number of clients who spent a vast sum on a ropey CMS that now isn’t used or is broken, implemented relatively recently. Now there is so much excellent software that is esy to implement and use, the does so much more than produce webpages from dull templates. I know it’s a more complex story, but I can’t help thinking that 2.0 isn’t so much building on what went before on the web, so much as destroying it and getting it right this time.