iPod saves life

I recently read this story via flickr.

Kevin Garrad (3rd Infantry Division) was on a street patrol in Iraq (Tikrit I believe) and as he rounded the corner of a building an armed (AK-47) insurgent came from the other side.

The two of them were within just a few feet of each other when they opened fire. The insurgent was killed and Kevin was hit in the left chest where his IPod was in his jacket pocket. It slowed the bullet down enough that it did not completely penetrate his body armor. Fortunately, Kevin suffered no wound.

Now that's what i call a cool story.

Oh, and an engineer from Apple is trying to get the iPod replaced, so that's some good news for the soldier as well. ;-)

More pictures here.

Virb

From the creators of Purevolume, Virb is a new social networking website, and I think it's cool.
You can find photography, music and music-video's, short movies, and some other stuff.
And most of all:

It looks good.

Check it out.

What is web 2.0

In my quest to find out what web 2.0 exactly is, I stumbled upon Tim O'Reilly. He is founder of O'reilly media, a computer book publisher in the world, and next to that he is also called the Web 2.0 evangelist.

On his website i found another "What is web 2.0" article.
I liked this list a lot, and I think it might help some people to make this web 2.0 a little more clear.

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

Another thing I found was this image, which might also make it easier to understand web 2.0:



Anyway, I don't want to focus this blog on all sorts of theories, whether Web 2.0 is just a marketing phrase, or a hype. I think that the word-cloud and the list make it a little easier to understand it. So this is what web 2.0 is in my eyes: It's a new use of techniques to help to create a new experience for the user (think AJAX & Flash), next to that, there is the social aspect, (think things like User generated content, Blogging, Podcasting, etc.).

I'm not that good at defenitions, but I hope you now have an idea about what web 2.0 is.
If you really want to get into depth, I suggest reading the What is web 2.0 article by Tim O'reilly.

Greets,

Joël

Hi

Hello everybody,

My name is Joël Zwaan, I am a webdesigner from Holland.
In this blog I will share my thoughts about pretty much anything related to web 2.0, design, new web-applications, gadgets, and more.

I started this blog for a few reasons: first of all, I'm really interested in web 2.0, and in internet in general. I love to follow developements and new ideas.
Another reason is that I want to start experimenting with SEO, and I want to use this blog to try techniques, strategies, etc, to get a high position in google.

Make sure to check out the blog regularly for the latest news.

Greets,

Joël.