On New Years day, I had the opportunity to buy CelebFace, a celebrity gossip site.

Although it is my most recent acquisition, it’s the first one to “go live. I’ve got a few other projects on the boil that is imminently going public, but they’re about 1-2 weeks out.

I’ve got big plans for CelebFace, and have already engaged some people to work on it. For prosperity’s sake here are a few snapshots of the the original format (as I bought it)…

I won’t give away the new design yet, but here’s a teaser with the new logo design…

OK, maybe I’m cheap…
I must be one of the miority in the known-universe that doesn’t have Adobe Photoshop (using Corel Paint Shop Pro instead).

Anyway, I’ve been really getting into looking at all those cool Web 2.0 stuff, but all I could find are Photoshop tutorials on how to make those logos.

So I figured I’d have a shot at doing it in Paint Shop Pro (PSP), and I came up with this:

I’ll also made avaialble the source files for those that want to play around and see what they come up with!
PaintShop Pro format
Photoshop format

I’ve made some pretty crazy “tech” predictions in the past, such as:

• Hard drives? Why wouldn’t a 5 1/4 floppy be enough to store everything you need?
• IBM PC with 640k of memory? No one will ever use so much!
• The mouse will never take off, I can do things faster by typing into a command line!

Luckily, some of my more recent predictions have been a little more on-the-mark, such as:

• 56k modems are still too slow. There must be a cheap way to get faster access.
• NCSA Mosaic is the future. The Internet will finally reach the masses.
• Google is my search engine of choice. Yahoo and Alta Vista will lose market share. 
• Youtube will be the next MySpace.

Here are some predictions for the future. Wonder how close I’ll be :) 

• Everyone will know and use tags as the preferred method of access before the end of 2007.
• Del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, etc is the future. Google and traditional search engines will start to lose significant marketshare within the next 2 years.
• Ruby on Rails will become the preferred web development platform (over PHP, for those who were curious) within the next 2 years.

I thought this was really interesting, showing the expansion of “major” religions over time…

It was only recently that I really start paying attention to Web 2.0. While I was at eBay (LOL, yeah the irony of it all), I always thought Web 2.0 was a marketing gimmick. For those that have an interest and time, there are like a bizillion articles written about what Web 2.0 is. Here are some things that stick in my mind:

• What is Web 2.0

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

• From Wikipedia: Folksonomy is an Internet-based information retrieval methodology consisting of collaboratively generated, open-ended labels that categorize content.
• Tags. It will surpass text searches as the preferred way to look up information, and will be the only practical way to search the videos, etc.
• Social bookmarking. Collaboratively mapping out the internet. This will ultimately make today’s search engines obsolete, which is why you’ll see Yahoo and Google pushing for “social network searches”.
• Learn to Web 2.0-ify your graphics:
• Learn to make some Web 2.0 buttons.
• Slideshow of Web 2.0 logos (how fitting that the slideshow is on Flickr, one of the premier examples of Web 2.0).
• Analysis of Web 2.0 logos.
• Color palette of Web 2.0 logos.
• Make entire logos with Web 2.0 style

Oh, and the “next big thing” will be probably be first discovered on Digg!