LifeInSearch.com

Posting has been light lately, but I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce you to a sweet new site I discovered last week. Unless you’ve been on a serious bender for the last year or so, you must have heard all the buzz on the interweb about social media and the next generation internet. Web 2.0 became the 900lb gorilla of buzzwords, and VC firms broke out their chequebooks for the first time since the dot com crash of the late 90’s.

If you’re not familiar with any of these sites (honestly, where have you been?), be sure to check out the Web 2.0 Awards over at SEOMoz. More than likely, you are familiar with sites like Facebook and YouTube. While there are differing opinions on the distinguishing characteristics of Web 2.0 sites, they all invariably include some form of online collaboration and sharing. Web 2.0 is the transformation of the internet from network into platform, in conjuction with the rebirth of old media as new media. My favourite element of Web 2.0 has got to be the sexy lexicon of technobabble buzzwords; long tail, mash-up, podcast, folksonomy,tagging, taxonomy, ajax, soap, clouds, bookmarks, diggs, ect, ect, ect.

Web 2.0 “tipped” when Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. purchased MySpace in July of 2005. You have to check out the Alexa stats for MySpace, and be sure to sort by three years. That spike is a beautiful thing, indeed! Even though *everyone* is fleeing MySpace for Facebook, it is still in the enviable position of being one of the highest traffiked sites online today. On the topic of Facebook, I have a few observations to post sometime soon; be sure to check it out bitches. When News Corp. moved on MySpace, a lot of people (especially in the investment community) started to pay attention.

Every other start-up in the Web 2.0/Social Media space benefitted directly from the newfound investor confidence in new media. Was this the beginning of dot com boom 2.0? Without a doubt! Then along came came a cool video site called YouTube. Has anyone out there ever heard about it? Not long ago, Google bought them for something like 1.6 Billion dollars! Anyways…I didn’t intend for this to become a brief history of Web 2.0.

The site I was meaning to write about a paragraph ago is called Virb. When I discovered it one of my favourite bands, Bloc Party, was profiiled on the homepage. I have to admit, I was sold right away. It’s like MySpace for hipsters! If you’re a music fan, you should really check it out. It’s a little bit Last.fm, a little bit MySpace, and a whole lotta Web 2.0 sexiness. They even let you rename your profile URL If any of you heed my advice and decide check it out, let me know what you think in the comments below. Virb is the Werd!