MikePadgett.com

I saw an article on the BBC website last week that asked what had happened to the campaign websites of Conservative leadership candidates since David Cameron took on the post. It made me think once again of all those sites I worked on in my early career. Sometimes one will pop into my head and I’ll wonder what became of it. This is especially true of the start-up .coms I helped build four or five years ago - so today, in the shadow of a growing gascloud of Web 2.0 efforts, let’s take a trip down Memory Lane …

Sitesforkidz

What was it? Sitesforkidz was a space for subscribing children to “build” their own themed websites (there were different styles for different age groups).

The cacophonous Sitesforkidz as it was, and still is!

What could you do with it? Within their site, the child could create content pages and choose from about 100 online games. There was also a dubious mandatory page that featured lots of, er, sponsored links. What’s the verdict? Given the success of online tribal activities such as blogging and MySpace.com, Sitesforkidz was way ahead of its time. What happened next? The service was never quite finished. Despite high expectations and a great write-up in the Dumbarton and Vale of Leven Reporter, like the proverbial emu, the service just didn’t take off. Then it died out like a dodo. Where is it now? Unbelievably, most of the original site complete with Flash intro, is still there today. For the ultimate in bad design (for which I hasten to add I was personally heavily culpable), visit Sitesforkidz.

Bletchley Tiles

What was it? An online showroom for Bletchley’s finest, not to mention only, purveyor of tiles. What could you do with it? Browse a range of tiles, mainly. What happened next? The company sold a few tiles. Then it sold a few more. Then some other agency took over the site. Where is it now? Apart from an exciting redesign, it has survived more or less intact in its original format at bletchleytiles.com

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the Internet Venture Group (tIVG)

What was it? tIVG was a startup for startups. The company invested in the crackpot ideas of would-be internet tycoons, organised development and initiated the marketing process.

tIVG: feel the superiority complex…

What could you do with it? The tIVG website was pure Flash brochureware. It featured a tasteful colour scheme, liberal use of the classic Baker Signet typeface and less than intuitive navigation. What happened next? Nothing. Where is it now? The tIVG website still exists today. Not doing much, but it’s still there alright! Take a look at tIVG

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1st Encounters

What was it? The website of one of the millions of corporate events companies in a feeding frenzy for ‘training budgets’ thinly disguised as tax write-offs. Its owner was holding down a job as a supply teacher whilst awaiting his entry pass to the dotcom overnight hall of fame. His anxiety at the success of the likes of Red Letter Days was made him one of the most demanding and impatient people you could ever meet. Which is presumably why it took more than nine months to finish the site. And we deemed it finished, not him. What could you do with it? It was possible to browse and book any event, from skydiving to skiing, from colonics for your successful sales team to corporate hospitality at Crufts. What happened next? The supply teacher client was obsessed with search engine rankings and even claimed once that Channel 4 had asked him to organise some teambuilding games for the bored housemates of Big Brother. Needless to say, nothing came of it, or the business. Where is it now? Tombstoned. The URL points to the dreaded search page graveyard of dead domains: 1stencounters.com.

Seems like there’s a name for everything these days. The groove between the two branches of your moustache right under your nostrils is called a philtrum.

“Web 2.0″ is another of these odd descriptors, only unlike the groove between your moustache, it won’t stand up to thousands of years of evolution.

“Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?” questions the small child sat on the lap of the rather severe looking gentleman father. The child asks this in big type, which means that the question is actually directed at us.

Men who originally saw this singular poster probably felt a somewhat confusing swelling of patriarchal and patriotic feelings. But with the benefit of hindsight, to me the gentleman father looks a bit disturbed, a bit haggard even, and in front of his kids he would have almost certainly yarned away the worst excesses of shelling and dead comrades like my relatives always have.

Before I get a bit too bogged down in lyrical prose on matters of the Home Front, because Roger Waters has long since cornered that particular market, let me try to conduct a forced march back to what I was originally on about.

Web 2.0 is one of those names that, as a web professional, fills me with uncommon dread. Such self-conscious hokum is the web designer’s equivalent of Mannerism: a group of irritating latecomers taking the hard won standards, the great concepts and the pioneering designs and using them as value adds on pointless start-ups in extremis ad nauseam. The results are the stuff of a hundred keynote speeches.

As we all know, start-ups are nothing new. But what grates a bit is the fact that we should have learned some lessons after the bubble burst on “Web 1.0″ and yet cash is once more forthcoming for crackpot schemes given a veneer of credibility by improved practices.

In this information era, things change oh so fast, and as Alvin Toffler once described at length, the capacity to deal with the pace of such ‘advances’ is simply not within the human grasp. Which may explain the sudden amnesia on the part of investors when it comes to the current slew of whatever-dot-coms. So pardon my cynicism, but some of these schemes look more vague and gauzy than their failed predecessors.

What’s also worrying is that the entirely modern propensity for labelling everything has come up with “2.0″ - an outright suggestion that, like new versions of software, these projects are somehow bigger and better. That’s a view clearly endorsed by such web big-hitters as Ask.com, Google and Yahoo.

If we assume that bigger hasn’t quite happened yet, let’s look at better:

BoingBoing.net, an eminently spellable dotcom, claims to be a “Directory
of Wonderful Things”. (you’ll see, by the way, a lot of these directories in the Web 2.0 Hall of Fame So Far). It seems to pick up on those oddities that keep you on Wikipedia much longer than you intended having looked up a definition of something as prosaic and overused as “AJAX”.

BoingBoing (or BB to those in the ultraknow) is maintained by a bunch of conscientious and probably talented authors who are propping up the site presumably until enough users will maintain it for them while they count the ad revenues (many Web 2.0 sites are, by the way, maintained by authors who may have been recruited from their snappy blogs that have been running ’since before the Internet’).

“The ‘mediocre’ argument really gets me going, though, because it’s anti-people”, says one BB user in response to an article about another article in Wired that the web was mediocre, “People are messy, illogical, and mediocre, and that’s beautiful. Damn beautiful.”.

By the sudden entry of the word ‘mediocrity’ into my discussion, I am reminded of the excellent series of little books by Gerritzen and Lovink in the beautifully blunt NL.Design style. But let’s continue…

Web 2.0 sites - how many will still be here next year?

A tongue-in-cheek look at Web 2.0 comes in the form of James Britt’s excellent Web 2.0 Validator. For those of you who wondered how the Blog that Nobody Reads fared, the result was 6 out of 43! Or why not try Andrew Wooldridge’s readymade off-the-shelf 2.0 startup generator Web Two Point Oh if you’re stuck for ideas on how to break into this emerging market?

Tim O’Reilly, who apparently coined the phrase, surely can’t keep down just a little self-satisfaction when he writes that since he blurted out the concept (or at least the phrase, anyway), Google offers up over 9 million results for “Web 2.0″.

“[C]ompanies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means”, complains Mr O’Reilly. When the phrase was coined, he was talking about positives and he’s right: there are some excellent, worthwhile projects out there. The Internet can indeed deliver worthwhile and often totally free applications and hubs of useful information that help people manage their interests, their work and their lives. People make discoveries with Wikipedia, express themselves through blogs and store their memories with Flickr. The organisations behind these projects create jobs and maintain livelihoods and eventually a bit of wealth might get shared around.

The key driver is that Web 2.0 is largely founded on the idea of community, a quasi-daft utopia that was appreciated and duly bungled by many Web 1.0 startups and company offerings.

It’s what happens to all this when the corporates wade in with their blank chequebooks that’s the underlying concern. When your dearly beloved community in your very own corner of the web gets bought by Yahoo! you get a shock. Your rose-tinted contact lenses drop out because you, quite legitimately, came to believe that no-one owned your community, your cache of photos and your blog. Unstintingly altrustic Oompa Loompas did bits of maintenance behind-the-scenes to make sure the grass still grew, but your picturesque landscape of web services was basically everyone’s and perhaps you didn’t mind dropping a few coins in the tin from time to time.

But the corporates want your data, your money and your Oompa Loompas. Or else they decide your ‘beta’ isn’t working and it gets dropped before ‘release’

[Distant echoes of The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again"]

Now the wording on this particular manifesto is slightly more sensible (i.e. commercial) this time around. Everyone in the web business will realise that, but I don’t think the Internet public does. Plus I cannot help but feel resentment towards those buffoons who market my hard work as a value add.

See also: Zeldman’s article at A List Apart.

I must confess to being fascinated by the progress of these frequently well-funded start-ups that still crop up these days.

First there was Groove, the groupware with online connectivity. I got a bit fed up with the trial version - which was hideously limited - then they were purchased by Microsoft and we all know what that means.

Then this morning, I was ‘invited’ to LinkedIn by a client of mine. LinkedIn is all about connections - kind of a network of approved suppliers where the approval is given by members. A bit like the goodwill factor you get at eBay.

So it’s another American venture. It has American written all over it. The same design trend as we’re seeing with Firefox’s site, GE and, well Groove. The corporate look goes ‘friendly’. I don’t know whether to like it or not. I certainly don’t appreciate the predictably racially-inclusive but always conventionally pretty headshot stock.

All she needs now is a headset…

Time will tell, of course- as it always does - whether this will be popular enough to warrant all those reviews from Forbes et al or whether it will go nowhere fast like so many other projects.