GeorgeHopkin.com

FWIW, I’ve decided I’m going to do my best to stop referring to “Web 2.0″ while talking to colleagues and contacts and openly object to any references to “Web 3.0″.

It’s just “the web” - if we stick with the “Web x.0″ naming convention, are we going to eventually see “Web 9.0″? Or even “Web 9.2.4″?

Or will we switch to “Web Vista”? “Web Leopard”? How about “Web Intrepid Ibex“?

The point-oh naming system has emerged because software people need to get a handle on the web.

The rest of us couldn’t give a tuppenny bit, we just want it to work.

Via the Beeb, the web’s father says his offspring is still in nappies:

The world wide web is “still in its infancy”, the web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has told BBC News.

He was speaking ahead of the 15th anniversary of the day the web’s code was put into the public domain by Cern, the lab where the web was developed.

The future web will put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user, Sir Tim said.

“The web has been a tremendous tool for people to do a lot of good even though you can find bad stuff out there.”

More: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7371660.stm

Straight from the horse’s mouth, some of the myths and mysteries regarding which stories are indexed by Google News and why. Or not:

Often publishers ask us why Google News didn’t include one of their articles, or skipped the image associated with an article. In the search for answers, we’ve noticed that there’s a lot of confusion about how we include and rank articles. We’d like to share some of the facts, and debunk the myths.

The quick-read version:

Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH

Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE

Timing the publication of your article improves your article ranking MYTH

Articles that are just images or video won’t be included TRUE

There’s no way to see why my articles weren’t included in Google News MYTH

Publishing a sitemap helps my rankings MYTH

Redesigning my site may affect my coverage in Google News TRUE

If I put AdSense on my site, my article rankings will improve MYTH

More: http://googlenewsblog.blogspot.com/2008/04/psstsecrets-of-google-news-exposed.html

Via Robin Goad at Hitwise, UK web users sure love their online video; YouTube occupies the top two spots with its US and UK offerings, but the Beeb’s iPlayer is coming up fast:

UK Internet traffic to online video websites increased by 178% between February 2007 and 2008. A Hitwise custom category of the top 25 video websites in the UK accounted for 2.22% of all UK Internet visits in February 2008, equivalent for one in every 45 Internet visits last month.

YouTube is the most popular video site in the UK and the eighth most visited website overall. The combined market share of its US and UK properties in February was 69.31% of all UK Internet visits to the custom category.

The third most visited video website in the UK during February was BBC iPlayer. The Beeb’s catch-up TV streaming service has increased its market share of UK Internet visits by 423% since December 2007, and is now the 50th most visited website in the UK overall.

More: http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/03/online_video_traffic_up_178_in_a_year.html

Via Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK, rumours of Facebook’s death may have been greatly exaggerated:

A few weeks ago I said the recent dropin UK traffic to Facebook was not significant as it had happened over the Christmas break. According to 95% of the British media this view was wrong and the fall heralded the end of the social networking roller-coaster as we know it.

Today Hitwise reportsthat Facebook’s market share of UK Internet visits last week (w/e 22 March 2008) was equal to its previous record high of 2.16% during the Christmas week (w/e 29 December 2007)

I hate to say I told you so…

More: http://uk.techcrunch.com/2008/03/25/facebooks-not-dead-it-was-just-resting/

comScore has released several key findings from its Digital World: State of the Internet report, which highlights the changing dynamics of worldwide Internet usage.

Key findings include (taken from comScore’s summary):

·          The U.S. now accounts for 21 percent of Internet users worldwide.  While growth in the number of Internet users in the U.S. has slowed, several Asian and Eastern European countries continue to add new users at a rapid rate.

·          Google is the dominant search brand in most countries, including most of Europe and Latin America, with a few significant exceptions — countries where Chinese, Korean, and Russian languages dominate.

·          Chinese language search engine Baidu currently ranks #3 in worldwide search market share, behind Google and Yahoo!

·          The number of worldwide visitors to social networking sites has grown 34 percent in the past year to 530 million, representing approximately 2 out of every 3 Internet users. MySpace and Facebook are in a tight battle for the global leadership position, each attracting more than 100 million visitors per month.

·          Online video has become the dominant online entertainment format, led by the global popularity of YouTube with more than 250 million visitors in January.

·          The Internet has become an important source of news for most Web users.  The top 10 global news brands show great diversity between country of origin, including the U.S., U.K., China and South Korea.

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2115

Via comScore comes news that YouTube (owned by Google, of course) served one in every three online videos watched in the US in January:

comScore (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released January 2008 data from the comScore Video Metrix service, revealing that YouTube.com accounted for one-third of the 9.8 billion videos viewed online in the U.S. during the month. The total number of videos viewed in January was down slightly from the more than 10.1 billion viewed during a record-breaking December 2007.

Google Sites once again ranked as the top U.S. video property in January with nearly 3.4 billion videos viewed (34.3 percent share of videos), gaining 1.7 share points versus the previous month. YouTube.com accounted for more than 96 percent of all videos viewed at the property. Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 584 million (6 percent), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 315 million (3.2 percent) and Microsoft Sites with 199 million (2 percent).

More: http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2110

Via The Guardian, social networking is still - yes, still! - big business:

AOL, part of the Time Warner media empire, is to acquire leading social networking website Bebo in an $850m (£417m) cash deal.

Bebo, founded by British-born Michael Birch and his partner Xochi in 2005, claims to have around 40 million monthly users worldwide.

The surprise deal marks a major push by AOL to grow its social media business, which consists of AIM, a cross between messaging and social networking, and personal communications network ICQ.

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/13/bebo.digitalmedia?gusrc=rss&feed=media

Via netimperative, UK Internet users apparently fall into five main categories in terms of behaviour when using social media, according to a new consumer survey.

The research, conducted by social network realbuzz.com, indicates that consumers are turning away from traditional social networks and more willing to get involved with online networks committed to improving their physical and emotional wellbeing.

In this State of the Nation Alert you will find a compilation of statistics to provide an unparalleled insight into the state of the UK’s free time versus social networking behaviours.

The research looked at the amount of time and money the Great British public invests in a hobby or pastime.  The report also investigated consumer perceptions regarding work: life balance and the impact of work on our free time.

The Five Social Networking types (in a nutshell here; netimperative has lots more info)

THE ENTHUSIASTS –You just want to share your enthusiasm for a particular sport or activity! Most of your entries tend to be descriptions of training regimes and lists of events, scores or times, as well as descriptions of how well or badly you are doing on any particular day.

THE SELF-CONFESSORS – You have probably just started a diet, sport or fitness campaign, and you need to confess your weaknesses and past sins in order to give yourself the sense of a fresh start. You will usually do this with self-deprecating humour, in order to arouse interest and sympathy in the reader. Your hidden motive, though, is to get help in the shape of tips, advice and support.

THE PHILOSOPHERS – You have a strong need to communicate your thoughts and feelings to others, and the most likely way that you do this is through a travel diary of your adventures around the world. You may limit yourself to detailed descriptions of the things that you see and the people that you meet, or you may also include a personal biography or your philosophical thoughts on life.

THE CRITICS – You also have a strong need to communicate your feelings about things, but it takes the form of offering critiques on anything from the latest film or music group to the latest piece of technological equipment. You love going into detail, and you might even offer a blow-by-blow account of setting up a particular sound system.

THE CYNICAL CLOWNS – You see it as your job to comment on social issues or news items in your own particular outrageous way, to prick the pompous, find the humour in the ridiculous, and generally show a degree of good-humoured cynicism about everything. You like the attention that you get from shocking others, and in creating your own distinct online ‘personality’. It may not even be your real personality, but rather a ‘persona’ that you project, a bit of the frustrated rebel in you that lingers deep inside.

Lots more here: http://www.netimperative.com/news/2008/march/10/online-brits-2018fall-into-5-types2019

Via The New York Times, Google is testing video ads in its search engine result pages (or SERPs, if you go for SEO acronyms):

Google has always had a love-hate relationship with advertising. Its power and wealth come from the $16 billion a year of advertising that it sells. Yet on its most important pages, the results from its Web search engine, it has limited ads to nothing more garish than a dozen words of text.

That is about to change. On Thursday, Google started testing video ads on some pages of search results. And it is developing ad formats with images, interactive maps and other more elaborate features.

More: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/google-tests-video-ads-on-search-results-pages/