George Oates from Flickr talks about what they learnt building and working with their community. Very relevant for us right now…

More and more people just use Google to get to websites rather than bother typing in a hard to remember web address. Read more on Search Engine Journal.

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.

In testing we know that many users search for websites rather than ever enter a web address, even when they search using a term such as “fox-land.co.uk”. As Cabel Sasser notes, in Japan things have gone one step forward, and web addresses are now not even used in advertising.

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

The New York Times (login required) compares the relative website design of US presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, to the debacle between Macs and PCs.

The U.S. is going through a period of concern about literacy in the young, but it is not all as it seems. Steven Johnson in The Guardian talks about how many people are reading more than ever.

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.

The internet is often thought as being a vast virtual ‘cloud’ that spans the world, built primarily by software. It is then somehow a surprise when you are reminded just how physical the infrastructure the internet is built on actually is. Whether it is by the recent news that a single cable in the Mediterranean broke so Asia and the Middle East had to do without their MySpace fixes, or maps such as this that show just how we are all connected.

‘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.

How the cheap and plentiful technologies that power ‘Web 2.0’ may be leading to a drop in the job market. The early paranoid fear that computers and robots are taking our jobs might finally be coming true. Between 2001 and 2007 “online employment had actually dropped 29%”. This is Nick Carr’s thesis as explained in The Guardian.

“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.

Jeffrey Zeldman explains web design: “The experienced web designer, like the talented newspaper art director, accepts that many projects she works on will have headers and columns and footers. Her job is not to whine about emerging commonalities but to use them to create pages that are distinctive, natural, brand-appropriate, subtly memorable, and quietly but unmistakably engaging.”

We regularly research Content Management Systems, and in a recent spate of Googling I came across an article by Jeffrey Veen called “Making A Better Open Source CMS” from 2004. Sadly, most of its points are still completely relevant. Three years later and it is still hard to find a system that feels it is put together with the average user in mind (i.e. not techies). While Wordpress is not in any way perfect (what is?) or powerful enough (what is, unless custom built?) for all situations, it is relatively easy to comprehend for the user, which is why we so often recommend it.

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.