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Big in Japan: Web2.0 Is Dead and Japan is the Next Hub of the Web?

Robert Sanzalone of Blognation Japan has an interesting interview with Zooomr’s Kristopher Tate in which he expounds on his vision of web development’s future.

He’s almost got me convinced…

Kristopher: My goal is simple. I’m going to make Japan the next center of the web!…

I really want to get bloggers excited in Japan. It doesn’t seem like they have much forward voice here. That needs to change. The bottom line is this: Web 2.0 is dead — the brand is. In the valley everyone is scrambling for new ideas. But Google and Facebook have sucked up core talent. There isn’t anything new or exciting happening there. It’s become a bubble. Japan holds the second largest GDP globally. It’s infrastructure is amazing. 3G is here and people know how to use technology.

Read the rest here.

Super Roman Glue

First concrete, now superglue… is there anything the Romans didn’t engineer?

I’m sure the location that this glue concoction was recovered had something to do with its makeup (much as Roman concrete varies from place to place based on location of origin in the Empire). However, this is still pretty amazing considering the time gap:

Analysis shows that the Roman glue was made of bitumen, beef tallow and pitch. But researchers said they had failed so far to recreate the adhesive and that sawdust, soot or sand might have to be added to complete the process.

“When we finally manage to remake the superglue, it will easily compete with its modern equivalents,” Mr Willer said. “After all, which of today’s glues stick for 2,000 years?”

Glue Used by the Romans Has Stuck Around for 2,000 Years – The Independent

Medieval Archaeology Journal Online For Free

Not for everyone, but if you’re a history nerd like I am, this is a great opportunity:

An early Christmas present from the Society for Medieval Archaeology:

Good news from the Society for Medieval Archaeology and the wizards at the Archaaeology Data Service. The first fifty (50) issues of Medieval Archaeology are available for free online. Its not quite open access, because the issues can’t be archived elsewhere, but that’s no real problem as long as the ADS stays funded.

The Society exists to ‘further the study of the period from the 5th to the 16th century A.D. by publishing a journal of international standing dealing primarily with the archaeological evidence, and by other means such as by holding regular meetings and arranging conferences.’ It’s clear making the journal freely accessible is going to do a lot for their work, but even so when you also have to balance the financial needs of the Society it’s still a courageous step in a field where most publications are subscription-only.

But the real reason to celebrate is that the journal is very good. There is plenty of stuff in it that deserves a wide audience. For instance Pictish symbol stones are a bit of a mystery. However I can read about them in the article Investing in Sculpture: Power in Early-historic Scotland by Meggen Gondek, which is available as a PDF from Volume 50 of Medieval Archaeology.

(Via Alun: Ancient Science and the Science of Ancient Things.)

Facebook Pages in Google?

GigaOm has an important scoop…

Now I have some skinny on a recent development that could have long-term ramifications, among them Google sending more traffic to Facebook.com.

The company will soon announce that some application canvas pages (ones that don’t require a special login) will become publicly indexable by search engines like Google. So for instance, our GigaOM Question Of The Day app can be indexed and made available in some limited form to people not logged onto Facebook. Apps get a public-facing web presence of their own.

If this is the case, imagine the SEO’ers scratching their head as they try to optimize their FB pages. At any rate, this is as good a reason as any for your company to start taking social media seriously.

From a Direct Marketing Perspective, Facebook Beacon is a Terrible Idea

Facebook really is boring me with their marketing attempts. I’ve basically begun to snub my nose at it because, quite simply, what they’ve rolled out so far will never work or sustain any sort of revenue for advertisers (or marketers). There are already too many concerns over privacy, data ownership and FB’s long term sustainability as a platform to cause much skirt hiking.

Beacon is a horrible idea and has been sloppily executed. It reminds me of the toolbar apps from 2002.

I like (love?) Facebook as a social network, but as a marketing paradigm, it’s just not a good fit… at least for marketing in its current stage of evolution. Perhaps one day marketing will be able to find employment in social networks, but at this point we’re still too closely linked to offline models and metrics that break down when you try to translate them to the social networking world (or the web in general in my opinion).

Google owns advertising and will continue to do so (especially after they move into mobile and/or release their GDrive application and start paying users to host their data in exchange for ads to compete with Amazon who will do the same… yeah, you heard me).

Tony Hung has a good run down of possible futures for Facebook if Beacon crumbles.

Reality Check

Thanks to Phil at BadAstronomy for the reality check…


In the new Hubble image of the galaxy M74 we can also see a smattering of bright pink regions decorating the spiral arms. These are huge, relatively short-lived, clouds of hydrogen gas which glow due to the strong radiation from hot, young stars embedded within them; glowing pink regions of ionized hydrogen (hydrogen that has lost its electrons). These regions of star formation show an excess of light at ultraviolet wavelengths and astronomers call them HII regions.

Go out and look at the stars tonight. It’ll make you a better human.