By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. The Web 2.0 Bubble
An Atlantic Monthly article says Web 2.0 will fail (sound familiar?) and for the right reasons: "MySpace does not let users network meaningfully with people outside its walls, and it does not let them import some functionality that promotes or drives revenue to other corporations... as the value of social-media tools becomes inevitably unsexy and commoditized, it may be only a matter of time before the Tila Tequilas of the world, inspiration for millions of page views, decide they might as well go elsewhere. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Syndicated Web Ratings - an Idea Whose Time has Come?
This is a good idea that comes up from time to time (I mention it in my Resource Profiles paper). I doubt that we could ever have a standardized rating system (there will never be global agreement on 'accuracy' or 'family-friendliness') but ratings metadata can be pretty simply encoded. Here is a simple pseudo-schema (similar in many ways to the hreview microformat) that would do the job:
Rating:
- Item - item being rated (identified by URI)
- Scheme - rating scheme being used (eg., LDS family-friendliness scale)
- Field - field (eg. language use)
- Value - value (eg., 'mild profanity')
- Author - person doing the rating (identified by OpenID)
- Date - date reviewed Aggregating these provides you with a set of ratings on various resources. You can then assemble views (or 'profiles') of the resource, depending on what rating systems you use, what people you depend on for the ratings, etc. This is how we'll do it, eventually - it's just a matter of people collecting ratings and posting them as simple XML. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Some Real Data On Web 2.0 Use
Survey, British-based, of 1400 respondents, on the use of Web 2.0 technologies. The respondents are self-selected, so expect the numbers to skew high. Even so, we get some useful data about the patterns of use. That iCal, for example, attracts only a smal percentage of calendar users, while Google Calendar, yahoo Calendar and Outlook are running neck and neck. We also see that World of Warcraft is a lot more popular than Second Life. Everquest, Chess and HalfLife are also more popular. More...