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Over the last week we have been inundated with news about Web 3.0. This was sparked by a New York Times article claiming the goal is to “add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide…”.

Apparently this is going to be called Web 3.0. After the article the blogosphere (I hate that term) blew up with everyone’s anticipation of Web 3.0 and its meaning. I wrote about this in March 2006. And, I created the following diagram:

I’ve recently decided to ignore these monikers. I used to want to be a Web 2.0 company and enjoy success in a burgeoning bubble.

Now I’ve grown sick of “Web 2.0″, “Bubble”, “Built to flip”, etc. I don’t want to read about it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to try to be that. It’s a fad that will die. The media is perpetuating these problems, much like they did six/seven years ago. The blogosphere has become diseased with it. Ninety percent of the startups coming out are adding little to no value to the web or its users but you wouldn’t know that when people like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch write about anything they can get their hands on.

I want to add value to the web. Don’t you think its about time to create things to better the web and community rather than creating to be apart of something - to be included in a phantom term that will mean nothing in two years? That’s my plan. What’s yours?

Tags: Technology, Web, Business, Internet, Bubble

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In a recent trip to New Delhi to meet Indian government ministers and customers, Ballmer said, “Companies that work to make the internet more interactive will be set for future success”. Oh, really? Interesting viewpoint from the Chief Executive Office of Microsoft.

Apparently Steve has been sleeping the last two years as the Web 2.0 craze has pushed the boundaries allowing companies to embrace the edge more effectively and efficiently.

(Photo: AP)

Tags: Business, Microsoft, Web 2.0

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Well, belated birthday. Our first post was actually a year ago last Saturday (Nov 4). For GANB’s one year birthday we decided to do a of things we’ve been putting off.

But first, how’d we get started? Glad you asked.

Starting off as an Internet Explorer hater site, the idea was to take part in the Firefox revolution by giving web developers the power. In a sense we wanted all web developers to join together and redirect any IE users to GetANewBrowser.com (which you can with a tad of javascript). Then on this page we would give instructions for uninstalling IE and downloading a new browser (officially supported Opera and Firefox). We gave news (via aggregated RSS feed) from the blogosphere about why you should not be using IE. It was a fun experiment that never really made any ground. View Version 1.

Once TJ and I decided to blog we thought - ‘What a better name than Get A New Browser?’ to write about web development and design. So we jumped on Blogger and off we went. The majority of posts were about web development and design. I had also started blogging on my personal website about business and technology. We slowly amassed some readership which started to dwarf my own site’s. So I thought why not move my business and technology articles over to GANB where there’s already an audience? Once I did this our readership started to steadily grow.

Time for a new design. The original design was great but we quickly grew out of it and it lacked functionality. I was fed up with trying to hack together blogger so we decided to go simpler, but remain on blogger.

The next design was based of Signal Vs Noise in a sense that we wanted the design as simple as possible but we quickly grew out that as well as Blogger was just not accomplishing what we needed it to.

So TJ wanted a new design and I wanted a new platorm - And the Spring 2006 CSS Reboot offered us a great chance to come up with a great new design and gain traffic. So TJ went to work on this gorgeous design that eminated. I was sick of Blogger and wanted more functionality and control over the platform that we were using. The answer? Wordpress. So I went to work on learning to be a wordpress hacker.

It did not take long after reboot and a bit of our own kind of advertising to need to move to a real server that is not located in my garage (don’t worry, we still got plenty of sites running out there). And for the last six months we have been concentrating on our writing in an effort to provide better content for our growing readership.

Versions: 1, 2, 3

What did we accomplish over the last year?

• ~ 220 Subscribers
• 302 Posts
• 254 Comments
• ~ 3000 Spam Comments
• Technorati Rank ~ 45,000
• Lots and Lots of Networking

So, for GANB’s birthday we decided to do some updates to enhance the user experience and provide more organization focusing on content. When TJ first designed this he described it as having a ‘magazine feel’. I think with the recent updates the functionality has finally met the design potential.

So what’s new? To start we claened up some of the design focusing on organization, content, and usability.

We started to embrace the power of categories as an organizational mechanism rather than a tagging system. Using it for tagging got out of hand and became a mess. It provided no value to our users. Using them as navigation to sub-topics did make a lot of sense. Now our users could find the content we create that is important to them.

• Cleaned up categories to focus on main topics allowing for clearer paths for users
• Created category pages with lists of posts and category descriptions
• We added RSS feeds to each category. We know a lot of you may just read our takes on design and not my constant rants about Microsoft and Google. Now you can do that.

We added related posts after each post, before the comments. We put this there because it gives you an easy way to find out what we have written that’s related to a specific topic your interested in.

And we added a more convenient way to subscribe to our content by adding a subscription page with a bunch of RSS chicklets and an email subscription option using FeedBlitz. Now there’s no reason for you not to subscribe.

Next we thought GANB was getting lonely and needed a sister. We’ve wanted a music / entertainment blog for awhile since we are both avid music fans. So we came up with TwoOhNine and enlisted the help of our good friend and music afficianado Cam (who I will see tomorrow in Seattle!) to lend us a hand writing.

So thanks for reading and stick around because we have a lot of treats coming this year. Enjoy!

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When I was getting ready for work today I was thinking about site footer links and if we still need to use them as a standard anymore.  I understand that most sites, especially corporate sites that need great SEO, so they work wonders, but I see them used even if all navigation is already text based (usually in list form).

So if not needed it still might come in handy on event that the page your viewing is large, you can navigate somewhere else without scrolling to the top, right?  I thought about this and realized on average, even corporate sites I see don’t have this on some of the longest pages anymore.  I see more and more sites replacing the (ugly and unnecessary)  footer links with a simple anchor back to the top.  Now some are more fancy than others when you involve a little javascript, but plain and simple, when I’m not at work (because we still use the footer links as a standard on every site), I’m more trained to look for the anchor than the footer links anymore.

Are the footer links a thing of the past [for non-image based navigation sites especially]?  Do they seem a little cumbersome to anyone else?
Which do you prefer?  Is there really a point to repeat the navigation links at the bottom of every page, or do we still think people need those links?  It comes down to a user to user basis I’m sure, but I think those days are over and most people (yeah I said most people, ha) don’t necessarily look for them as much as they once did.

My vote, if possible, get rid of them, if nothing else it clogs up the space where you could sit your Privacy Policy and Site Map, or more important information… like your validation links :)

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Who cares about the Novell deal? Microsoft revised Vista’s licensing. I’m so glad they did this, because now you may uninstall Vista and put it on another device, although still unable to share the license between devices.

Before, if you installed it that was it - end of license. For people like me who manage several machines in their home this sucks because I am often changing my configurations.

From Windows Vista Blog:

“Our intention behind the original terms was genuinely geared toward combating piracy; however, it’s become clear to us that those original terms were perceived as adversely affecting an important group of customers: PC and hardware enthusiasts. You who comprise the enthusiast market are vital to us for several reasons, not least of all because of the support you’ve provided us throughout the development of Windows Vista. We respect the time and expense you go to in customizing, building and rebuilding your hardware and we heard you that the previous terms were seen as an impediment to that — it’s for that reason we’ve made this change. I hope that this change provides the flexibility you need, and gives you more reason to be excited about the upcoming retail release of our new operating system.”

Tags: Microsoft, Vista

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