YouTube. Sold!

With all the rumors going about the Google buyout of YouTube, I was almost convinced that Google will back out, given the risks of potential copyright issues. But, I guess everybody thinks differently. TechCrunch reports that it has officially confirmed this afternoon that YouTube was bought for 1.65 billion!

Tags: YouTube Google

Writing to Writely

I've finally activated my Writely account after reading this post on webworkerdaily.com. I've always been a Microsoft Office user. With all this talk about getting work done 'online', I've tried several tools to maintain to-do lists, project management tasks, calendars, bill payment, etc. But when it came to documents I was back to Office. Reading reviews about online wordprocessors or spreadsheets did not really motivate me. What intrigued me this time was the appreciation for a lack of features. When was the last time somebody appreciated you for not adding a feature.

That got me wondering, how much of Office features do I really use? Very little. I'm so used to seeing all these toolbars and menus that, I simply can't work without them. It's funny considering that I may have never used some of those features and probably never will. Anyway, now I'm typing away on Writely and we'll see how much I like not being loaded with features.

Oh, I just realized that I can't post to blogger.com if I was in the beta version, which I am. That's one feature I would have liked.

Tags: Writely Online Tools

Web Hangouts

Facebook is the ‘talk of the Net’, so to say. Everyone is writing about Facebook’s possible sale for over a billion dollars. And it’s not just Facebook. ‘Social Networking’ seems to be the most exciting thing happening on the Internet today.

Wall Street Journal’s article on Facebook talks about the popularity of such sites and refers to them as ‘Web Hangouts’. That’s an interesting term to use. I understand that creating virtual work environments could increase productivity by removing geographical and time constraints. But, where does online social networking take you (except for billions in advertising revenue for companies)? What happened to all those concerns about kids spending more time in front of TVs and computers? Now they are going to stay away from ‘real’ friends and create virtual friends.

Are we moving towards a virtual society, where nothing is real and everything is online and virtual. Soon there will be web families with a web dad, web mom, web sister, web brother and every other web relation.

Tags: Web Hangouts Web Society Facebook Social Networking

Virtual Culture

Just read, Tony Conrad’s post on webworkerdaily.com. He talks about how his company works around a virtual work environment. Teleconferencing, IM, blogs, wikis and other online tools allow employees to communicate with each other and work on the same projects from remote locations.

Tony Conrad also talks about steps they’ve taken to manage ‘culture’. What concerns me is that they use the same online tools to manage culture that they use to work. To me, that would only create a ‘virtual culture’ and there’s nothing wrong about that. I think virtual companies should focus on developing virtual cultures and not even try building traditional cultures. Eating pizza, while on a conference call, does not constitute a pizza party. That’s a ‘Virtual Pizza Party’.


Tags: Virtual Companies Virtual Culture

Web 2.0 Logos

Go2Web20 is a great place of start exploring the Web 2.0 world. There were several that I recognized and a lot more that were new to me. Two things caught my attention, the site names and their logos. Somehow, they had a distinctive Web 2.0 touch to them.

Here's another amazing collection of logos on Flickr.

For an analysis of the fonts used in some popular logos, visit FontShop, which declares lime green as the Official Color of Web 2.0.


Tags: Web 2.0 Logo Design