Zach Beauvais

I know this is behind the game, and that the bleeding edge of blog reviews has moved well beyond online streaming service Hulu (even though it’s not yet out to the public). But I received my beta invite last week and have had all this time to play around with it.

My initial thoughts: none.

No, not one initial thought. Hulu doesn’t work in the UK. They don’t tell you: "Hey, if you live in the UK, you will be able to access and begin your Hulu experience, but when you choose a show to stream, you’ll be disappointed. Have a nice day." You have to jump through all the Beta hoops to get there first.

Now, I know I should have known better, being a generally web-savvy chap. But after a few pre-reviews of the Hulu service, I decided not to read any more blogs about it until after I’d tried it out myself. I knew not to expect too much, after reading the last review over at Between the Lines , but I wanted my own experience.

Since then, I’ve found dozens of blogs about how bad it is that Hulu doesn’t work in Europe. Aside from whingeing about the lack of support, I can’t really think of anything more to write about Hulu (apart from its ridiculous, trying-too-hard-for-the-Web-2.0-market name).

But, doesn’t this kind of go against point of the web? The idea that we can make connections, share content, stream and connect?

The good folks over at ZDNet.com have published a couple of posts from my blog. In a bid to increase the scope of their topics, ZDNet have created a blog called Web 2.0 Exlporer, which is made up of guest bloggers’ posts. In this blog, two articles of mine have been posted. Please feel free to go and have a look (though it might be boring reading it twice!)

How Smart Can a Link Be?

Web 2.0- Don’t call it that!

Let me know what you think (either using ZDNet’s TalkBack feature or my Contact Form)!

I just read an ingenious article over at Copyblogger about mixed messages and Yogi Berra- more famous for befuddled witicisms than for being one of baseball’s all-time greats.

Dean Riack transformed some of Yogi’s most famous statements into aphorisms and translated the meanings for us. A perfect example:

Yogi: “Ninety percent of the game is half mental.”

Translation: Think before you act…

I love this kind of article: a mixture of wit and helpful advice easily read and well-formed.

Thanks Dean!

When social networking is the topic, I imagine most people think of Facebook, Myspace or LinkedIn—sites fundamentally  derived from self promotion and entertainment. Despite the high language used to discuss social networking and Web 2.0, most of my time spent on them is all about having fun or trying to look better to others (which is what LinkedIn is primarily for). But what about the idea that the world is now connected? Why do I spend most of my time online ‘socialising’ with people I already know, or participating in interests in which I’m already interested?

After all, the idea of a network (on online community) is to create and maintain connections between people and groups. It is only a matter of time before connections are made which open eyes.

Bloggers in Burma have been using the web to broadcast their message not to let the world close its eyes to the community disaster there. YouTube has been mentioned to contain many thousands of clips from soldiers in or from Iraq. This is a serious source of information, a broadcast network between communities. And it seems that this call for help could be so easily ignored if it weren’t for the persistence of the messages: ignorance as a refuge is shrinking daily.

But where’s the 2.0 in this Web? Where is the sharing and the interaction from these blogs and discussions? Have a look at Kiva.org, the most inspiring website I have seen in months.

I have subscribed to Tim Ferriss’ blog for a few weeks, and have found its content enlightening and interesting. Having done a degree in applied linguistics, I found the his item about learning a language in an hour interesting, if slightly mis-named.

Tim reckons that you can work out how to learn a language in about an hour, but not actually become fluent in it in that time. He lays out a plan for analysing and comparing differences between languages we might already know with a target language, and using that information to make decisions about how to learn.

As part of my studies at Kings, we looked at learning styles and communicative competencies. (Check out George Yule for more on linguistics). I would have thought that the idea that you can focus on a particular tactic for learning a language lies partly with the language itself (and for that, Tim’s blog entry seems completely apt), but also on identifying one’s own learning styles and techniques. Then, a language could be tackled in a way which makes use of one’s particular strengths while focusing on the areas which would most help.

I highly recommend Tim’s blog, and think it’s well worth a few hours reading!

Describing a company or concept as "Web 2.0" is so, last half-decade. Nevermind that most people still haven’t heard the phrase. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and poll your office or family: unless you’re not allowed out of the IT dungeon or your family all work as tech-bloggers, my guess is that they haven’t heard or don’t understand the term.

This isn’t really surprising. If you hear about a "new internet phenomenon" on mainstream news, the chances are it’s either on it’s way out or is so firmly entrenched as to be unremarkable. For a perfect example of this, look up ‘Facebook’ in a national publication and note the language used to describe it’s shiny-new cover–regardless of the fact that most people reading this blog will have been on Facebook (or gone off Facebook) at least a year ago!

It even now seems that there may be a financial impact on describing your new startup as "web 2.0". According to Mashable!, several VC’s are stating quite clearly that they won’t back Web 2.0. I have also noticed talk of bubbles breaking and ‘meteoric rises’ with the implication that it won’t last very much longer. So many potential break-throughs won’t see their funding if they’re too 2.0.

This phenomenon is firmly entrenched in ‘techy’ social networks like Digg. When I dugg a news story about the semantic web, I noticed the overwhelming majority of comments were along the lines of "semantic web is so cliche", or "Watch out, here comes Semantic Web 2.0, Run!".