Insightful articles, opinion and commentary about mobile and web.

Went to the Google Wave API Day at the Sydney Googleplex last Friday.

The developer preview from this years’ Google I/O is quite extensive in explaining the features and functionality of Google Wave. At one hour 20 minutes running time it may require a significant chunk of free time to sit down and watch it, but the presentation is thorough in its explanation of Google Wave and well worth a watch.

For those that -really- don’t have the time to sit down and watch a presentation on impressionable new technologies, there is a 10-minute ‘abbreviated’ version also available.

Finally, for those that don’t work in the IT industry, there is a ‘Made Simple‘ video made by a fan.

There is also a rather extensive background and explanation available on Wikipedia for both Google Wave and the Wave Federation Protocol.

Essentially, “Google Wave” comprises of two things; the front-end client “Google Wave” and the “Federation” protocol.

To grasp the concept of separating the two, think of how “Gmail” relates to Email as a whole.

i.e. Email has many providers, and for you to send an email from one provider to another, they must conform to a set of protocols. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to send an email from your personal email account hosted with your ISP to all the various accounts of your friends and family (who may have accounts with Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc).

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Here’s a gem that won’t have the old ad industry guys singing along.

Simon van Wyk talks to information architecture, strategy and social media expert Stephen Collins about online brand communities and how community strategies need to transcend marketing and become integrated with overall business strategies.

“It’s not a technology thing – less than 10% of this is about the technology,” Stephen says. “What’s much more important is the grass roots effort to turn communities that already exist informally into cohesive brand communities.”

Listen to the podcast below.

 

 Stephen Collins podscast [23:11m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Our Search Director forwarded us this piece of gold, courtesy of David Armano’s Logic & Emotion blog:

Recently there’s been a fair amount of chatter about Web 3.0. So I thought I’d start to put a little context around this.

It could be argued that in Web 1.0 users were consumers; in Web 2.0 producers; and in Web 3.0 optimisers.

What do we mean by “optimisers”? Think of it as being the difference between tweeting about the texture of a new type of Cornflakes you had for breakfast (as if the general population really cares) versus telling all of the Cornflakes aficionados in your local vacinity.

The Digital Inspiration tech a la carte blog sums up the differences between Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 as:

Web 1.0 - That Geocities & Hotmail era was all about read-only content and static HTML websites. People preferred navigating the web through link directories of Yahoo! and dmoz.

Web 2.0 - This is about user-generated content and the read-write web. People are consuming as well as contributing information through blogs or sites like Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc. The line dividing a consumer and content publisher is increasingly getting blurred in the Web 2.0 era.

Web 3.0 - This will be about semantic web (or the meaning of data), personalization (e.g. iGoogle), intelligent search and behavioral advertising among other things.

And they go on to provide a series of excellent slide show presentations from various authors who all seek to explain Web 3.0 from their own point of view. Well worth a look if you’re interested in demystifying Web 3.0.