I would like to point out, however, that technorati isn’t the best example for the type of thing you’re questioning. By looking at that tag cloud I would guess that technorati itself is achieving it’s goal of bridging real world and online; they have writers writing about real things on blogs. They’ve reached their target market (writers). Not all blogs are about tech and web 2.0. In fact, in my quest to find as many as possible, I only found about 10 – 15.

The second thing I’d like to address is that web 2.0 is not a trend… it’s not a pixel-font site design or “grunge” web site design. It’s not about design at all. It’s about usability, which trickles down into design. There is a wide range of design styles in “web 2.0″ that are all usable. So the question isn’t really “is web 2.0 affecting your life?”, it’s more along the lines of “is the new direction of the internet affecting your real life?”

To that, I would say of course. I’m on it right now communicating with you. It just happens the things I care the most about (outside of friends and family) are online.

All in all, ‘web 2.0′ isn’t going to bring anything to peoples real lives that the dot com bubble didn’t. It doesn’t matter how good you make a website, you’ll never achieve the goal of being fully integrated into someones lives until you modify the way in which we all interact with the internet.

For example, when I sit down at my computer, I know I’m going to be onlnie, looking for cool stuff or just communicating. In order to bring it into my offline life, I have to make a special trip to the computer, or pull out a gadget. I may run to my computer to print out google maps or mapquest directions before I head to a store I’ve never been to; I may log into my work computer and check my calendar before leaving for the day because I may have to work that evening.

Until we integrate it into our lives more, the internet won’t drastically alter how we live.

Although I must say, looking at a menu and ordering a pizza online and having it show up at my door 30 minutes later is pretty damn cool. :)

Old world – Microsoft Exchange and Sharepoint:
Outlook/ corporate email
Outlook Calendar/ blackberry/ laptop
- result: synchronisation is great but everything is so slow. Hourglass just to open an email. Also files are limited to intranet. Personal and corporate stuff are totally separate.

New world – Google and 37 Signals:
- gmail for company mail and personal email, both read within the same inbox, and managed by labels.
- Google Calendar/ blackberry/ laptop
- Basecamp for myself, and the startup – all sync’d by rss
- Gcalsync to pull Google Calendar into Blackberry
- full access to files over internet using passwords, and software tokens.
- result: I can see everything, and talk to everyone on either laptop or blackberry, without limitation. No intranet issues.

New world much better!

Other than that, I still have my Cingular 8125 connected to my corporate Microsoft Exchange Server. We still use all of the pay-for softare (Microsoft).

My start-up uses existing online tools like basecamp, Google Groups, to enhance our communication.

So, for me, not much of a change, but still a slight impact.

I think you both raise a good point, possibly indirectly, that ‘corporate entities’ are engraved in the same old way (Outlook / Exchange, for example). I wonder how long this will be the case?

Once again, many thanks!

Matt