Jeffrey Zeldman talks about the demise of the personal website:

In the past 5 years or so we have witnessed a change in how people manage their personal websites. 10 years ago people tried hard to show-off with self-consciously cool websites, or odd little pages with hard to read text about their cat on garish backgrounds. Then came blogging were people wrote about their cats every day, but it was still on ‘their site’. Now we’re seeing people feel much less importance in the ownership of their space. MySpace was possibly the start of this trend, but now with Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, YouTube, etc., keeping your own personal space online just seems like too much hassle now.

What Zeldman does not discuss is that this is happening increasingly with companies and organisations too. Whether they have a Facebook page, a corporate Twitter account, video on YouTube, an eBay account for ecommerce, Amazon S3 for storage or tools like Basecamp, Salesforce and Google Documents for their intranets, the de-centralisation of organisations is happening, and we regularly recommend this for clients.

The web is a buying medium, not a selling medium. Matthew Creamer in AdAge on online advertising.

Things have moved incredibly quickly since Friday morning when, in heavy-handed fashion, Microsoft announced they wanted to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 billion. Not only has it led News International to scramble around to get an offer in, Google has weighed in presumptuously offering help (Google clearly see themselves as the ‘good guys’, even now) and all-in-all very few people relish the idea of the internet institution getting swallowed up by the still-powerful but unloved Microsoft machine.

The deal throws an enormous amount of questions in to the air – questions the legion of voices on the web have been attempting to answer over the last few days. Just one example: the two companies have profoundly different ways of using technology. Yahoo! is a firm supporter of open-source, whether it is through their use of PHP/FreeBSD/Linux or the sharing of their own technologies, while Microsoft use their own proprietary software. When Microsoft bought Hotmail the switch over from open-source to Microsoft technologies was a long and painful process. Will the same happen again for Yahoo!’s multitude of products, a much more complex switch-over?

What is most depressing about it all is that this does not feel like an exciting deal that will lead to new innovation and business ideas, but is instead two companies struggling to understand and deal with their ongoing lacklustre performance on the web. This is a situation that will excite Wall Street, but few other people. That said, Yahoo!, with a new CEO, a restructured organisation, and still huge amounts of design and engineering talent have a very good chance of recovery - which would not be realised if they bow to the pressure to sell.

‘User Determined Computing’  is the rather clunky Accenture created phrase for the situation where people are fed-up with their work-based technologies as their home-based technologies are easier and better.

“Look for things that are evil, broken or stupid. These are usually great opportunities.” Paul Graham, Y Combinator

Last Monday I was lucky enough to be able to attend the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford event at the Saïd Business School, part of Oxford University. For those of you unaware it does exactly what it says on the can: it brings a wide range of entrepreneurs, thinkers and investors from Silicon Valley companies. It was a fun, stimulating and inspirational day, infused with a great enthusiasm and optimism imported directly from California.

Guests included Chris Sacca from Google, Biz Stone from Blogger/Twitter, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn, and a whole host of others.

The most exciting element to all this was the pervasive sense of excitement that everyone speaking at the event still had for the web and it’s possibilities. Their were many events throughout the day, but in particular Paul Graham and Jerry Sanders stood-out. It made me yearn to move out to Silicon Valley and soak up some of that pure optimism.

The most depressing element was realising what a terrible place Britain is for starting web companies and gaining investment relative to Silicon Valley. It was made clear that access to possibilities are so much greater there than here. A group of ex-pat ex-Oxford students from Auctomatic and YouNoodle were there discussing their start-up experiences in the UK and then Silicon Valley. They tried to find positives about the UK culture, but they were not easy to find. Why is this? No one seemed to have a clear answer, but themes of fear of failure, cynicism, bureaucracy and lack of ambition kept on coming up. Sadly I can only find this too easy to believe. Maybe that’s just the way we are.

The culture of the UK media and the web is still so different to the US. While this is clearly a good thing in some respects (we should not become homogenous with the US or indulge ourselves in ‘groupthink’), we appear to fixate on gimmicks and tabloid-style stories. Meanwhile, the US mainstream media takes the web business and innovation much more seriously. In general (and what FoxLand mainly caters towards), the UK’s web business is based around what existing organisations are doing with the web. For our own Silicon Valley-style business culture to really take-off, we need to start acting and thinking big, with more ambition and less concern about failure.

As an aside, the day included a ‘garage’ event wherein I sat in with university students brainstorming the conundrum of how to make start-ups more attractive than large corporates. While this was not a problem I would have anticipated – I would have guessed that to students a start-up would have been an easy choice over a giant anonymous company – I was wrong. Apparently it is hard to persuade Oxford graduates of the benefits to do anything beyond law, accountancy and the big consultancies.

More about the event can be read on the Guardian’s PDA blog, The Telegraph, and New Scientist.

Many thanks to the journalist Sarah Barrell who I came with as a guest.

Update: the BBC on the event.

Not the most exciting of titles, but the The Web Standards Project discusses the UK’s drive for accessibility in government websites. It is bizarre and also shocking that so many content management systems in use by government agencies, ministries and quangos seem unable to generate good clean accessible and semantic code. 

Apart from the hype about the iPhone and social networks, the other thing that the web industry has been obsessing about is the gPhone: Google’s mythical mobile phone. In fact there is no gPhone, or actually, there could be 1000s. Google has just announced Android, a mobile phone operating system that will help developers integrate the mobile experience and the internet. At least, that’s the theory. While interesting, many people may be surprised there is even the need for this. It will be interesting to see what exactly this will mean for us, the users, as well as Nokia, Apple’s iPhone, Microsoft, and the rest of the technology sector as it tries to grapple with the mobile world.

Ever since MySpace, and then particularly Facebook, took off, the industry has been thinking about where social networking should go next. Most importantly, people have become increasingly unhappy about the way social networks keep personal information locked-up in their ecosystems. The web became as pervasive as it is today partly due to its ‘openness’ (look at and contact anything), but conversely social networks are popular partly due to their ‘closed’ nature (look at and contact only your contacts). So, how do we balance these two elements? Google has come up with the OpenSocial concept – a way of making the whole web your social network. See these articles on TechCrunch announcing the strategy, Marc Andreessen’s blog discussing the concept, and Wired does a good job of making the idea accessible. Update: Read/WriteWeb brings up three concerns about the OpenSocial strategy. 

Yesterday saw the unveiling of the new MySpace Platform at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco - a move which has been seen as a clear counterstrike against main rival Facebook.

The MySpace plans are clearly a response to the huge success of the Facebook Platform, which launched last May and which has seen the creation of thousands of third party applications (some, admittedly, more annoying than others).

Showing how important MySpace is to News Corp, the announcement was made by Rupert Murdoch himself, along with Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder of MySpace. Indeed, of the $5 billion News Corp are expected to make in 2008 Murdoch predicted a significant contribution of $300 million profit will come from MySpace alone.

Radiohead have announced the release of their new album ‘In Rainbows’ on the 10th October. They’re doing it on their own without a record label as a pay-as-much-as-you-want download and a fancy expensive CD/vinyl/book behemoth. This is pretty fundamental stuff: the record companies know it, and are scared of it. Time (which features the above quote from an anonymous exec) and many others are discussing what it all means.

Now, more than ever, is the time to fine tune your brilliant web idea that will change the world – or at least get bought by Yahoo/Google/Microsoft/News Corp. Techcrunch UK (which has recently relaunched) discusses a study that shows growth in venture capital in the UK and Ireland. So, if you ever thought that it might be difficult to get venture capital unless you were based in Silicon Valley, now is the time to dust down your ideas.
Update: Venture Beat has more about how venture capital is leaving Silicon Valley.

The New York Times has an article up about how the web’s users are getting older, and (as with other areas of the media) people are realising how they can be a more important and valuable audience than the much desired youth audience.

Facebook seems to be everywhere at the moment. Everyone suddenly seems to be using it, it’s all over the newspapers and television news, and weblogs debate whether it is the new MySpace/Google/Microsoft/AOL. Recently there has been talk of Facebook bankruptcy and fatigue, but while the discussion is interesting, we love it here at FoxLand where it seems to have taken over from email, texting, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and instant messaging. And that’s only in the last 2 months or so that we’ve used it.

Jakob Neilsen argues that for certain organisations or people, it is better to avoid quickly written blog entries (like this!), and concentrate on longer more in-depth articles. It’s an interesting article, but not for everyone. Various good discussions have been started on the topic, and are worth scanning at The Guardian and Robert Scoble’s blog, who takes it almost personally. We primarily write short posts on subjects that we find relevant to our business and our clients. We would at times like to write longer posts, but find that not only do we not have the time, we also want to be as succinct as possible.

Using Web 2.0, Steve Jobs and the iPhone as prime examples, Bruce Nussbaum in Businessweek argues that rather than just employing designers, CEOs should be designers.