One of the earliest design inspiration sites I discovered was NetDiver, edited by Carole Guevin. We exchanged a few emails and her site became a regular magical journey through the online world of design.

While out shopping in New Zealand recently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover a billboard outside Auckland’s newest shopping mall which was promoting her site! Vodafone had been running a series of billboards like this. I snapped a shot on my little cellphone camera and thought Carole might like to know, and she’s just posted about it. Oh and a big congratulations: Netdiver is celebrating 10 years online!

Can it really be six years since I first started blogging? In that time there have been so many developments, trends and changes. I still keep in touch with some of the original contacts I made in the world of blogging. A few have since stopped blogging, but a remarkable number have their original blog and continue their routine of sharing their reflections and experiences with the world.

As the blogosphere has grown, niches have separated out much more distinctly than they were in general. You can get lost in a world of blogs for any hobby or interest and spend the day wandering through their communities. I’m pleased to see many companies blogging and changing the face of their interactions with clients. Blogging is being used by advocates for causes - and not just political - and acheiving amazing results. Some bloggers are making vast amounts of money through their writing and savvy SEO + ads models.

Feedreaders helped us keep on top of our favourite blogs, but I also still enjoy the experience of reading a blog in its original form.

Blogging for money has its advantages and disadvantages. Try googling for the latest hairstyles or many other things and you’re often hit with topical blogs with great SEO but so full of ads and no helpful content (or just copied content from other sources) that you’re left to sift through the mess and resort to other sources (”now where’s that latest magazine to flip through for ideas?”).

It comes back to the content and - even more than the content - the relationships formed through that.

But you know all this.

Last year was a difficult one for me but we ended the year on a high note: by travelling the world on a round-the-world ticket. So many places, so many cities. One of the highlights for me was to meet bloggers who I first got to know all those six long years ago via their blogs. It was fantastic to be able to sit down and chat in person completely naturally. They reflect on the experience too: see BD and Darryl’s thoughts.

It’s time for me to write more on this blog again and to offer my thoughts on blogging - six years down the track - and life in general.

I’m a little weary of some of the bells and whistles people are squishing onto their sites these days before even getting to know their audience, or even find their blogging voice. I hope 2008 will see people choose to make smart choices about what not fill their blog with, as much as fill it with.

A Happy New Year to you all!

You may remember I blogged about the concept of a personal+community tag cloud some time ago.. well, finally we have been able to launch an example of this!

New Zealand television website throng.co.nz has today launched a world-first web 2.0 television listings format.

In development for more than two years, the new format replaces the traditional TV guide grid and makes it easier to find what is on at a glance.

Shows are displayed based on what is on now, what starts in the next hour and what is on in prime time tonight. Shows are weighted according to popularity on throng.co.nz.

Members of the website throng.co.nz personalise their listings to highlight their favourite shows and hide ones they’re not interested in.

“We’ve thought long and hard about TV listings and what we’d like them to be. We found traditional listings hard to scan because they’re organised by channel and you can easily miss things. We’ve removed the clutter and made your choice simpler,” says co-founder Regan Cunliffe.

See the new look listings from today at throng.co.nz.

Gareth Furber has just launched PsychAntenna, a directory of psychology-related feeds for his peers. The site is an excellent resource for people who aren’t “Web 2.0″ savvy and those who are - Gareth saves practitioners time by hunting down the best resources and blogs in their field and educating them about RSS and effective use of feeds.

PsychAntenna was put together using Wordpress and some plugins for things like feed previews, tagging and popularity.

I’ve written a number of times before about integrating blogs and forums and the similarities between the two and we recently had the opportunity to add a simple forum to a Wordpress blog over at The Fight.

Everything you see in the forum has been done using Wordpress and the implementation time is actually incredibly quick.

Instead of having to install, configure and maintain a separate piece of software (and integrate the design), just three new theme templates were created: one for the main forum page, one for the threads and one for the comments form.

Logins are handled using the Wordpress login system and comment moderation becomes simple for the administrator - for not very active forums, they can receive all comments via email, use Akismet or other spam protection (in addition on that forum, only registered members may add comments).

In this forum, currently only administrators may add new topics and subtopics - but this can be changed using the different user levels. What’s also quite nice is that the built in search can work across the entire site.

Additional features such as user profiles with contact forms could quickly be added thanks to Wordpress and common contact forum plugins.

Adding a forum like this is certainly not for every site, but should be on your options if you’re after something very simple.