• Splashup
  Splashup is a browser-based image editing tool that mimics the functionality of Photoshop.
  (tags: photoshop editing images web webapp)
• BBC News | In pictures: Knowledge of all fonts, Introduction
  BBC News feature on typography in cinema art. You've probably seen this already…
  (tags: BBC typography fonts)

• Obama iPhone App – Digital Propaganda or Communications Genius?
  Review of an iPhone application released by the Barack Obama election campaign. The application does more than you'd expect – rather than just download speeches and videos it integrates with the phone's address book and GPS to identify contacts living in battleground states and the location of the nearest Obama office. It indicates that the campaign "gets" digital communications to a large extent and one would hope that this level of savvy will persist in a possible Obama presidency
  (tags: obama iphone technology)

Even though I’ve been known to use the phrase “Web 2.0” from time to time, I’ve never really liked the idea very much especially for using them as a high ranking seo service. It’s useful shorthand for when you’re talking to anyone whose knowledge about the internet is defined largely by current trends and ‘hypes’, but really, what’s ever been new about the idea of the web being a platform for user-generated content and social networking? Me and a lot of people I know have been using it for that purpose for nearly fifteen years already.

That said, there’s a case to be made for the validity of the phrase. There’s a combination of interactivity, interoperability and a certain visual aesthetic that can arguably be described quite aptly as “Web 2.0”. But in the last year or so the Web 2.0 brand has been becoming more and more “bubble-esque” as ‘coolness’ has started to outstrip utility within that world.

And as you will no doubt have noticed, we are no longer operating in an economy where coolness carries more weight than utility. The contraction of liquidity will lead to less and less investors being content to capitalise Silicon Valley firms with vapid business models. Products that don’t deliver clear operational value will find it much tougher to get funding.

All in all, it’s like 2000-2001 again, but writ large. The FT’s Lex column (login needed) reported this morning that if the equities markets recover twice as quickly as they did after the 1929 crash, hardly anyone currently over 65 will live to see them reach their heights of summer 2007. The economic climate of the coming years isn’t going to support the kind of culture that “Web 2.0” has become.

But is that really a bad thing? No, I don’t think so. The hardships that this industry experienced between 2000 and 2002 gave it a sorely-need maturity. And the next few years may do the same.

Even if its underlying concepts were never that new, “Web 2.0” has introduced the mainstream to a way of connecting over the net that was previously the domain mainly of people like me – geeks, to be blunt. There is now an opportunity for it to go through the same process of maturation that “Web 1.0” did all those years ago, and this will bring changes into how we create and optimize our websites, so using tools as WordTree reverse ASIN could be helpful for this.

Edit, January 2010: Interestingly the technology sector seems to have held up quite well despite the sustained global recession, which only now seems to be drawing to an end. Twitter might even have moved into profitability in 2009. There are still too many people marketing themselves as “social media gurus” but in general the big companies associated with “Web 2.0” have made well-informed and sensible decisions rather than turn into bloated dot-bomb throwbacks.

• Font Survey: 32 of the Best Programming Fonts
  Samples and reviews of a number of clear, monospaced fonts suitable for programmers specifically and typography fans in general.
  (tags: typography programming)

Ever sent an email you later regretted? Well you might like the new Gmail Labs feature, Mail Goggles. It’s activated whenever you try to send an email late at night, when you’re most likely to be under the influence of alcohol.

How does it stop you sending indiscreet, inarticulate or embarrassing emails? It forces you to solve a number of simple mathematical problems within a set time period. If you pass, it judges you to be sober, but if you fail it silences you… most likely for your own good.

• A Year of Heavy Losses – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com
  A clearly-designed interactive graphic allows you to flip between October 2007 and September 2008, seeing the difference in market capitalisation among 29 financial services firms. Well, there are 29 to begin with, but only 27 by September 2008…
  (tags: visualisation finance economics08)
• Annex Audio – domestic field recordings from 1977
  Bookmarking this for future listening, as I really enjoyed the explanatory post. The producer's now dead father made a number of background recordings back in 1977, when the producer was eight and the marriage of his parents was experiencing problems. Apparently the calm and relaxed nature of the recordings belies the emotional situation of the time.
  (tags: music)
• Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
  A Flash animation visualising the spread of Walmart across the US from its inception in 1968. To paraphrase Jamais Casco, it's a powerful visual argument for treating the study of markets as a form of epidemiology.
  (tags: visualisation animation maps)

Online intelligence service Hitwise released a report last week claiming that UK internet usage patterns were changing in response to the current economic situation. The full press release is here.

Hitwise gathers its data by looking at the traffic logs of its clients’ websites, which number around 1,500. These websites are divided up into a range of categories and sub-categories. Hitwise is therefore aware of traffic volumes to sites in different categories, and has attempted to draw conclusions from changing patterns in these.

This methodology may be imperfect—1,500 websites may sound like a lot but is just a drop in the ocean—but the findings seem to be intuitively correct. For around a year now the subject of how a slowdown would affect online behaviour has been coming up more and more frequently, and the general consensus has been that online retail and price comparison sites are not going to be as exposed to the effects of a drop in consumer spending. Smaller household budgets lead to an increase in price-sensitivity, and price-sensitive consumers spend more time researching and planning purchases as opposed to buying on impulse.

An example of this in the Hitwise research is that traffic to what it identifies as price comparison, voucher or cashback sites increased by 20% between July 2007 and July 2008, after a slight drop in traffic to such sites between 2005 and 2007. Voucher sites seem to be the biggest beneficiaries (to the uninitiated, voucher sites collate promotional codes & vouchers from various retailers, which can be redeemed at checkout for discounts – here’s an example).

However, another contributor to this trend could also be quite simply that British people have become, on average, more sophisticated online shoppers. It’ll be interesting to look at how traffic to voucher and price comparison sites bears up when the growth phase of the next business cycle begins. Will those sites become the online equivalents of Poundstretcher, shunned by all but the most price-sensitive? Or will they remain the first port of call for the clued-up online shopper?