cloudsoup

WordPress 2.0 release candidate – 3, I think – is out and due to be announced as the first release of WP2 and this is it.

I’ve trashed my budding theme because I believe WP2 has all sort of new hooks and variables that will impact on plugins and themes. Haven’t had time to find out more yet.

I wish the default theme wasn’t quite so nasty.

New theme coming soon and new podcast too.

Ryan Carson, of Carson Systems moans to me that I should have given him a chance to respond to my gripe before I blogged it.

It didn’t occur to me for a second that I should offer Mr Carson editorial control of the content of my blog when, in talking about ‘Web 2.0′, I used his upcoming London conference as an example of the hype. I still don’t understand why he thinks,

if you have gripes against what we’re doing, that you would give us a chance to respond to your accusations before publicly posting about it

Here’s why I don’t find Mr Carson’s protestation too compelling: the front page of his website carries this recommendation

I enjoyed it enormously

“These workshops are coming to London later in the year and I can definitely recommend that people look out for them.”

Tom Coates, Plasticbag.org

That would be the Tom Coates who is speaking at the London workshop on behalf of Yahoo. Along with his ex-colleague Cal Henderson, now at Flickr, recently acquired by Yahoo…So Ryan Carson is carrying an advert for a workshop he’s organising from a paid speaker at that workshop.

Right.

From Dave Winer

There’s actually a third kind of Web 2.0, it’s the province of people who neither make huge piles of money catching bits of Google Wind™ in their sails, nor understand the connection between the various products that get Mike so excited. They just like to be “in” on the latest stupid tech buzzword, to go to conferences wearing natty clothing and calling people evil who dare to criticize the stuff that they’re so hip to. They are friends with other snarky people who go to conferences, wear interesting clothing and call other people evil.

I guess he’s talking about this sort of thing (and here).

Of the nine workshop speakers, three are Yahoo (Yahoo, del.icio.us, flickr), one is from the Workshop organisers, one is a designer who appears to have borrowed heavily from k10k in his time. One’s from Google, one from Feedburner. I don’t know how interesting their clothes will be. The only wonder is that Ben Hammersley won’t be there.

The Web 2.0 AJAX hype is just that – hype. I remember using the XMLHTTP object in IE when it was first available to send data to and fro without needing a form submit. Years ago, that was. And I’m not too taken with some of the leading lights in the movement. Tom Coates, for example, was once rather po-faced when I laughed at his CV, which described him as PhD Classics [incomplete],. Tom used to teach Greek (presumably Ancient Greek) at a University although, mysteriously, he doesn’t speak Latin. Incidentally, the Tom Coates who speaks so highly of Kong shouldn’t be confused with the Tom Coates who’s an expert in Gromov–Witten invariants and mirror symmetry at Havard. Just in case there was a possibility of confusion…

I’m with Joel Spolsky on Web 2.0:

The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It’s not a real concept. It has no meaning. It’s a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day…

the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless “Web 1.0″ idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade’s mantra, “They just don’t get it!”

With the Xmas holidays upon us we might find time to sort out this blog and import the old posts. A plain, understated, black-on-white style with room enough to display images. Liquid or non-liquid, don’t know.

Then import any old posts from the previous setup.

Ok, so online bookmarks are a great idea and from now on I’ll be managing my own. The social bookmarking of del.icio.us, though, I can’t replicate and I’ll just have to wait until Yahoo sorts it out. But all I wanted right now were my bookmarks.

Doubleplusungood.

This is currently the state of del.icio.us:

del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we’ll be back as soon possible.

After being bought out by Yahoo. Similarly, as soon as Six Apart announced their deal with Yahoo, their Typepad service went down for 18 hours.

I don’t get the Typepad proposition, anyhow. Putting aside Mark Pilgrim’s contention (Freedom 0) that the utility of non-free software approaches zero, the pricing seems unattractive.

Currently, Typepad services are pitched at three levels, costing $4.95 per month for a single hosted blog with one author to $14.95 per month for ‘multiple’ authors and unlimited blogs.

My hosting – the excellent Dreamhost – costs $7.95 per month for unlimited domain names, unlimited WordPress blogs with single-click installs, unlimited MySQL databases, single-click install for phpBB, Gallery. MediaWiki, Mambo and other applications, support for Perl, PHP and Ruby on Rails, Telnet / SSH access to the server, free domain name registration and just about the best reputation for a low-cost hosting service I’ve come across. That’s Dreamhost. If you sign up to them, mention me – cloudsoup – it’ll take some money off my bill. Or sign up to them anyway, I can’t praise them enough.

I suppose Yahoo might buy Typepad. They’ve being making a few peculiar purchases and strange hirings recently.

As my lectures bring me from industry to industry, I find myself amazed by just how little fun most people are having. Whether separated from one another by policy, competition, or cubicle, the last thing that seems to occur to people is to have fun together—when it should be the first priority. Instead, managers feel obligated to reign over employees; executives think they must hoodwink their shareholders; sales believe they must strong-arm their clients; and marketers assume they must manipulate the consumer. All for the life-or-death stakes of the next quarterly report…

Instead of relentlessly pursuing survival even after our survival needs are met, we must learn how to do things because they fulfill us— because they are, in a word, fun. Fun is not a distraction from work or a drain on our revenue; it is the very source of both our inspiration and our value. A genuine sense of play ignites our creativity, eases communication, promotes goodwill and engenders loyalty, yet we tend to shun it as detrimental to the seriousness with which we think we need to approach our businesses and careers.

If we can switch our orientation to fun, and see it not as an anarchic threat that needs to be quelled but rather as the core motivator and source of meaning for all human thought and behavior beyond basic survival, we will enable ourselves to reach levels of success that were previously unimaginable. Our very definition of success transcends survivalist notions such as cash reserves, time remaining, or personal safety, into the realms of self-worth, meaning, connection to others, and greater purpose. Plus, it’s better business.

Rushkoff, via BoingBoing