Firetop

Last week I attended the E-Publishing Innovation Forum in London and was a little surprised to find that one or two speakers were still presenting Web 2.0 solutions such as article commenting, ‘twittering’ and peer to peer networking as the must-have for all web publishers. I use the word ‘surprised’ because it is my firm belief that this is not the case; we shouldn’t all stop focusing on a yet to be exhausted Web 1.0 by getting overly excited about some modern web applications which really DO NOT fit all publishing scenarios – especially those in many B2B sectors. (more…)

I’m just starting to recover having logged out of the ’social networking’ site Yuwie. I thought I’d take a look at how viable the site’s business model is - stickiness of content etc. so I created a new profile. In the process of doing so I had to click ’skip’ to fifteen concurrent pages offering me debt advice, mortgage advice and all manor of other rather suspicious looking offers before I could even edit my profile… many were repeated over and over again. Once on my profile page I managed to load up a photo of myself before the strobbing ‘PC error’ style leaderboard adverts made me feel positively sick (I kid you not). So stickiness this site definitely doesn’t have, it’s main attractor is the ‘revenue share’ deal offered to all members. (more…)

A three week holiday from blogging and I’m back, it didn’t really start out as the plan but became a necessity when I took on rather a lot of work launching a new website for a Firetop client, overhauling a whole site for another, and finally getting the next Firetop Ltd project rolling. Yesterday I attended rather a good 1-day conference at Brighton’s Corn Exchange called ‘Widgety Goodness‘ - an odd sounding title I suppose if you’re not familiar with widgets in a ‘non-A-level economics’ / ‘non beer-drinking’ sense. Essentially it covered the onward march of the mini-applications used by people within Social Networks like Facebook, and custom home pages like iGoogle to define themselves and/or access relevant content from web publishers. (more…)