Wired News has published Web 2.0 Winners and Losers. Notably, MySpace is listed as a loser:

They say 100 million users can't be wrong. Well, can't they? Regardless of how popular MySpace is or how many bands, web celebs or stalkers it continues to empower and enable, the social networking site is about as pleasant to look at as last week's cat vomit. The user interface is clunky and counterintuitive. Advertising is ubiquitous and invasive. The garish backgrounds and animated images seem sucked from some terrible time portal that leads straight to the nascent web of 1995. Oh, and auto-launching audio widgets and video players? Don't get me started.

Get a grip, Wired. Web 2.0 is about how the sofware is used to connect people, not just what it looks like. I personally believe that the garish websites are no better than 80's New Wave fashion styles (yuck), and not much better than the early rush of Blogger themes, either. But it is a style that represents an evolution in website "fashion" within a very, very, very large community. Let's give it credit for being what some people like even if it doesn't agree with refined aesthetic values of website design.

It's always great when someone in the field creates a valuable teaching resource. Karl Stolley's Sustainable Web Design is an excellent introduction to desigining websites with XHTML and CSS. What I especially like about is that it begins early on with an introduction to markup languages. If writing teachers are going to teach XHTML/CSS in writing for the web and multimedia writing classes, I believe we need to also introduce our students to the general concept of markup languages to prepare them for using XML in the future.

Hi Folks:

I'm working with a group who is trying to look objectively at Facebook, Myspace and other social networks to find if there are meaningful lessons about their popularity which we could incorporate into electronic portfolio design for use in higher education. It might well turn out that these spaces are popular with students mainly because their "teachers" aren't there, but we're hopeful that there are some more objective lessons to take away.

The first step in our project is to engage in a fairly complete literature survey. We're working on a bibliography, but I didn't want to pass up your collective knowledge -- does anyone know of scholarly work done/being done on Facebook and Myspace specifically that we should not miss?

If you haven't heard of it, you will: Web 2.0. It's exploding into conversations online at the moment. Is it a useful way of describing the way that the web is turning to a distributed environment where users push/pull/share content in communicative acts rather than just visiting static virtual spaces? Or is it just business hype?

• from BusinessWeek It's A Whole New Web
• MacManus and Porter 's Web 2.0 for Designers
• Downes's What E-Learning 2.0 means To You
• apophenia: Why Web2.0 Matters: Preparing for Glocalization

To me, Web 2.0 is Tim Berners Lee's Semantic Web meets social software.