The blog’s had a great day! I’ve lost my e-mail account, the blog has been down for several hours, and I’ve succesfully mashed up pretty much everything! If you don’t get a response to any of your e-mails, you know why… They haven’t actually come. They won’t come either… Pretty poo, huh?

Please excuse the incredibly large, melodramatic ‘Red X’ too.

NOTE: Google just informed me that there will be a power outage on my blog server at 11AM PST too… Brilliant.

So it seems that bLaugh, the popular blogging cartoon, is currently down. DOOM ON YOU! But this seems to be something pretty major… All of the cartoons, are displaying in IE as ‘little red Xs’, which we all know means only one thing. Hosting problems, or the dreaded ‘Server Maintenance‘ dudes! Well… This does suck. The latest comic out was the ‘Modern Day Bully’, which my daily e-mail from feedburner has pointed out. Else I wouldn’t have realised… Check it! Doomed ‘alt text’, or in IE, a big, fat, red X! By the way, that’s not a hot-link to bLaugh… All images there are down. 404 on the homepage too. Google cache is even having trouble rendering the site, because no external files ‘exist’. It can’t call images or style-sheets up as references, because they simply don’t exist. bLaugh is gone… And we’re hoping it’s only temporary!

Your heard it first at Techzi.

UPDATE: Over 90 minutes later, and still no news from Chris, or any one from the website. We’ll let you know when we hear some buzz.

SORTED: I woke up this morning to find the problem ’sorted’ out. Glad that all that’s been cleared up! Good going Chris, and according to MyBlogLog, you checked out my blog just last night.

These past two or three days, I’ve not had much time for Techzi admittedly. What started off as a wild idea, has really impacted on me, and now I’m taking it as seriously as Techzi. This idea is big. This startup is big. This will be big. If any of you in the magazine/newspaper/printing/publishing industry are interested, let me know who you are, and where you work.

I’m teaming up with some of the biggest names in Blogging for this one. They’re attacking my ideas and contributing themselves, and at the moment, it looks great.

By the way, I should really credit Tony Hung for the b5media logo. Don’t be getting any ideas from it yet either… Nothing official has been said yet. Kinda…

I was going to refrain from blogging this one, till I came across I day when there was nothing to write about. But with iPhones and such, it doesn’t seem that this day will be coming anytime soon, so here it is. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, A Whole Lotta Nothing! Courtesy of bLaugh. As per usual.

One thing that really is annoying me, is the use of the GoDaddy logo everywhere on the bLaugh comics these days. Oh well, I can live with them, if only for the sake of a little bit of fun. But thanks to Google’s magical, mystical choosing powers, they partnered me up with eNom for the registration of Techzi.net - How thoughtful of them.

I’m proud to have a Timo Heuer, a Web 2.0 journalist with us here on Techzi today. You may be seeing a bit mor eof Timo in the coming weeks, along with the relaunch of Techzi, and a few other fresh faces.

I’ve invited Timo in, to ask him to talk in-depth about Web 2.0, him, and Web 2.0 in Germany. I’d imagine the aspects and opinions on the matter would be rather different, but was I right?

Timo. Tell my readers a bit about yourself, and how you got into the exciting Web 2.0 arena.

My name is Timo Heuer and I am a German 15 year old blogger. I think blogging brought me into the Web 2.0 scene, how I call it. I’m very active in the German Web 2.0 scene and know many people - it’s very nice to chat to them. At the moment I’m doing some several things… Of course, I have my weblog (http://heuer.sajonara.de) and I do some journalistic things like writing for the Readers Edition as a citizen journalist. That’s a German project recently sold. And I’m advisor of some Web 2.0 applications: Vagabund.biz for example. It’s a service I call “Social Yellow Pages”. You can write reviews about restaurants, attractions etc. There are strong competitors like Qype in Germany and Yelp international, but I think Vagabund has some cool new functionalities. I call myself a Web 2.0 guy. In the future I hope to do some investments in new start-ups. My only investment right now is an investment fund for new energy.

That’s cool. I asked you here today to talk about Web 2.0, because you’re closer to my age than most of the other Web 2.0 experts out there. As a 15-year old, you must have some pretty different views on Web 2.0, online media and such. What do you think the future of the net lies in?

I have two visions, how the world can look in the future. The first is, that Web 2.0 is only a bubble. An argument against that is, that there are not many companies who go to stock exchange. And the big companies like Google and Yahoo! understand their mistakes in the New Economy and adapt. But there are also some arguments for a bubble Web 2.0. Most of the start-ups don’t have a massive business model, such as YouTube. But if Web 2.0 is not a bubble, and I’m supporter of that statement, we will have a Web 3.0. I think Jajah and Jaxtr and the things they do will be very important in Web 3.0. But also Creative Commons and general Open Source will be very significant for the Web 3.0.

That’s very true. We’ve seen Creative Commons massive effect on the blogosphere. It will most certainly be interesting to see how it shapes in future years. So tell everyone Timo, what blogs do you author, and how long have you been blogging?

I began blogging in April 2006, I think. Maybe earlier, but there are no sources for finding out. My first post was in my native language though. German. I switched to the English language after a few months, and have recently relaunched my blog again in German, closing the old one. I closed the old one…
Furthermore I am at some other weblogs: Readers Edition and Sajonara, both in German.

I gather you’ve given quite a few Web 2.0 speeches in the past. What did you talk about, and can you briefly summarize it all?

The speech you refered is only available on video. It was about tagging and how would it looks like when you’d use it in the reality. It was quite complicated, so I won’t go into it now, but yes. I have given Web 2.0 speeches before, as well as advice services.

What Web 2.0 services are you using now on a regular basis?

Tonnes (full list here). The most common I use though are:
iKarma: http://www.ikarma.com/user/THeuer
Jaiku: http://theuer.jaiku.com/
Last.fm: http://www.last.fm/user/upim/
MyBlogLog: http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/upim/
Sevenload: http://sevenload.de/mitglieder/THeuer
Vagabund: http://www.vagabund.biz/people/THeuer.html
Viddler: http://www.viddler.com/explore/upim/
And many others…

Are there any German start-ups that you think will do well in coming years, and possibly expand further out, into Europe and beyond?

There is XING. It’s like LinkedIn but more popular in Germany. I’m not allowed to make an account there, because I’m too young… But I think it has a great future. Then there is Sevenload, a video sharing site recently available for international. And of course there is Plazes.com, who describle themselfs “Plazes adds physical presence to the web. The Plazes website automatically detects your location and connects you to people and places nearby. See people in your area, discover other locations and follow the whereabouts of your friends.”
I know some other start-ups, but they are not from Germany. One is called Viddler. I think it’s much better than YouTube. In the future it will make you able to add subtitles, although your video is already uploaded. That’s a nice feature.

Yes… I reviewed Viddler a few weeks back. Anyhow. It’s been great to have you here Timo. Thanks for that!

And there you have it. The 15-year old super-kid, Timo Heuer.

They must have known I’d only want the best. (Catch the sarcasm?) The Wordpress team have been busy these past few days, finishing off their Wordpress 2.0.6 release, and finally it’s ready. It’s classed as an ‘Important Release’, meaning that for security reasons, it’s highly advised. So what’s new? According to the WP.org Dev Blog…

* Security fixes, sealing various known bugs.
* HTML quicktags now work in Safari browsers.
* Comments are filtered to prevent them from messing up your blog layout.
* Compatibility with PHP/FastCGI setups.

For developers, there’s a new anti-XSS function called attribute_escape(), and a new filter called “query” which allows you filter any SQL at runtime. (Which is pretty powerful stuff!)

On the WP.org blog, they also announced that this was most likely the last release before WP 2.1 is released. If you’re that desparate for it though, head over to the Beta Zone at WP and see what you can work out with the team there.

A rather funny little comic that I ran into over at bLaugh.

I’m kinda worried that my CV/resume will end up looking something like this by the time I’m 18, and looking for a real world job. But hey, who knows? I might never make it away from my monitor. Within 10 years time, I believe blogging will become a part of our lives so much anyway, it’ll most certainly be a respected career path, and it’s quite possible that University’s will be offering causes and diplomas in ‘Blogging’.

The last 24 hours have completely changed my way of thinking. Lots of incredible things have happened, that have made me think hard about what I’m trying to do with the blog.

I’d been working on a Wordpress layout for the blog for ages, (which is no where near ready!) and I thought that I’d launch a fund so that this blog could move over to Wordpress. I was expecting nothing. Maybe at most $5, or $10. Guess what? $1418 and counting! That’s $401 just while I was sleeping.

I’d like to clear a few things up in this blog post though.

I astonished that tonnes of you think I’m a fraud… A fake. You say I’m not 12! I’m not sure whether to feel pleased at this or angry. I work my butt off, and what do I get? People claiming my Dad wrote all this stuff. Wanna know something? My Dad doesn’t even know what Web 2.0 is! That said, neither do I… Does Web 2.0 have a definitive definition? Okay, he knows about technology, computers, programming and stuff, but I write everything on this blog. I don’t have help writing it. This is all unique content written by me. This is not some “well planned scheme”, a “scam”, a “”. I can’t actually say I blame most of you though. I too would be suspicious.

Why do we need $5000? You’re all asking that. Why $5000? We don’t. We need about $3000 to pay for a couple of years of quality hosting, and a domain name. We need some more money however, to hire some freelancers to have a go over our new Techzi layour I’ve been working on. There are some problems, that for the life of me, I can’t see what they are. Maybe it’s because I’m not an expert at CSS, but I’m stumped, and although my Dad my be an expert in Java, he doesn’t know CSS. He knows XHTML (He taught me!) and Javascript (Which I’ve never even attempted.)

Any excess money, will simply go into any extra costs we may run into. We’d like to buy ourselves some spiffy monitoring software called mint, and we’d like to hold a few competitions on the site, offering monetary prizes, if there’s any money left over at the end.

So why am I not paying with it with my money I earn from blogging on other sites? With the money I earn from working at Profy, and a few other blogs, I’m savign up to buy myself a good new PC. They’re not cheap you know! Anyhow, this blog isn’t just mine anyway, even if I have written 99.6% of the posts here.

Any more questions? This might be suicidal, but here is my e-mail: wilki . david [at] googlemail . com - and please… No spam. No flame rants (I woke up to 64 this morning… Thanks you guys!)

In other news, the leaderboards have been updated. More coming soon. I’ll publish them too.

January 1 - 2007. Wow. I’d just like to start by saying a big happy new year to all of you readers out there, and that it’s nice to have you back, bright and early, readying yourselves for a new year. What are your new years resolutions going to consist of? I’ve not done mine yet, but when I have, I’ll share the ones I think might be interesting enough for you guys to stomach. It’s painful stuff, I know.

2006 was a big year for me though. I got into blogging, Web 2.0, and dug alot deeper into the Internet than I ever thought I’d get. I’ve made some pretty cool friends along the way, and I’d like to begin this year by thanking Colbert Low, for everything he’s done for me. Without him, I wouldn’t be working at Profy, I wouldn’t have made half the contacts I have, and I probably would have ended up ditching this blog as a lost cause a long, long time ago.

But over at Profy, I wrote a review of 2006, and the way Web 2.0 has influenced our lives this past year. It’s no up yet on Profy, but I’ll post a bit of it here. It’s not all of it, and I’ve missed out the bits about media and virality, but I’ll post them at a later date, once the post goes up.

There’s no doubt about it, Web 2.0 has dramatically changed the way all of us interact in our daily lives, whether on the net or off. So what sort of things have we seen in the past year that have really made a massive difference online? Well, Web 2.0 has come out in the masses, flinging open new doors and allowing for mass communities to connect.

Social Networking

The likes of MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Facebook, MyBlogLog, LinkedIn and several other major networking websites have taken the world by storm. There’s no doubt that social networking is very popular, particularly amongst younger people. According to Alexa, MySpace is the world’s 5th most visited website. The thing is, social networking shows no sign of stopping, as within the last three months, MySpace has seen a 9% rise in visitors, that shows no sign of stopping.

But why has it all been so succesful? Well, here, I believe we’re going back to one of the so-called ‘principles’ of Web 2.0. Community, something that social networking relies on. The heart of ’social’, is community.

Social Bookmarking

Many major social networking websites have popped up, but there was no place for people to collectively share their favourite links and articles with the world. This is where social bookmarking came in. Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit are just a handful of the most popular bookmarking options open to people, made popular thanks to their ease of use. Many other startups have launched, aiming to mimic these bigger, more popular websites, all with no avail. Of course, how could I forget Slashdot? Slashdot is slightly different to the others. It’s a moderated system, that only shows the funnest, wackiest, weirdest, geeky, or most interesting technology related news to the masses. These cookmarking websites receive millions of hits each month, and many phrases have been coined to describe the effect that websites feel after being hit with the ‘Digg effect’ (Where a story is promoted to a front page, gets so many hits and crashes a server!) and the ‘Slashdot effect’, in which a story is published, and due to the sheer number of visitors it receives, the server collapses under the enormous strain of serving up a page to hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously.

Start Pages

Netvibes, Pageflakes and Goowy are perhaps the most innovative and popular start pages of the bunch. I personally don’t use a start page, but that’s my own preference. I know that world-wide, they’ve been massively popular, with streaming of feeds & news, instant access to e-mails, search, local weather forecasts, links to social bookmarking sites and more. Ironically as I write this post, Pageflakes is down for maintenance, but they promise to be ‘back within a few hours’.

Within the past month, start pages have expanded dramatically, pushing it ever further into the tangled net that is Web 2.0. Netvibes has become available in Greek, Turkish, Russian, Danish, Ukranian, Polish and Dutch. More new features have been popping up on all new start pages, and they’ve become so easy to use, that anyone can now use them, no specialized account needed.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this at all yet or not, but recently, I grabbed myself a blogging internship with Gadgetell. It was a pleasant surprise to find a good friend of mine, CJCM, was also a blogger there. Here’s my first post for the website…

Grand Illusions have created some very modern, stylish inkless pens, based on methods used as far back as medieval times.

Looking not much different from most other stainless stell pens, the only difference is that instead of the classic pen nib we’ve come to expect, a solid metal one awaits instead. Due to massive demand, the pen is currently out of stock, but more are expected soon. According to the manufacturers, on standard paper, the pen leaves a similar effect to that of a graphite pencil, with one major difference. No smudges, and rubbers don’t stand a chance. With no ink to use up, the pen can supposedly last forever, but after heavy use, I imagine that the metal alloy would wear down eventually. Priced at just $30, the pen is poised to be a major hit. Sourced from PopGadget. By me at Gadgetell.

NOTE: Be on the lookout for another post by me called ‘Lego Mindstorms Get Creative’ which is due to be published on the 30th of December.