I live in the thick of Vancouver where festivals, celebrations and events abound. This year I have taken a keen interest on the different levels of corporate sponsorship each of these events allow, if any at all.

For some organizers and event goers there seems to be a sort of revulsion toward corporate sponsorship. To the point where new “grass roots” satellite events start up paralleling the big corporate sponsored event. An example is the event called “Shame” which is a non sponsored alternative to The Vancouver Pride Parade.

If a sponsor becomes too exclusive to the event it can begin to look like their event and when they start to call the shots on how things should be run, well then I can see the problem. But when 20 different people give you money to be in your parade? What’s the issue here? I’m just not seeing it.

The Vancouver Children’s Festival is proud of non sponsorship. I think it’s a shame. Sponsorship would bring the ticket price down and the level of entertainment up. How many people can cover the cost of going? No wonder it takes place in one of the highest priced neighborhoods in Canada. Letting someone like Canadian Springs Water Company to pay and supply the grounds with free water stations would be a smart way to help cover costs.

The Vancouver Folk Festival is another one for not wanting “The big Corporate Giants” in to help sponsor the event. Or don’t they? I think they call them Festival Partners or some such thing and they choose very carefully who can be a partner. At least they are doing something to help with covering costs and it seems to be working. Still, ticket prices are higher than many other music festival around the globe of this same caliber. For now there is a lot of fun to be had at this even is just outside its back gates.

Web 2.0

A term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

A lot believe Web 2.0 is social networking and that they too can have a Web 2.0 site if it contains enough social networking tools. It’s a bit of a stretch calling web based applications that have more social features like tagging and AJAX, Web 2.0. It’s the same Web as it has been in the 90’s. Sure MySpace and YouTube are hits with 100’s of companies trying to imitate them but as far as the definition goes they are NOT expected to “replace desktop computing applications”.

Social networking is cool and in some cases even important, I like it. But, more people just sit at their screens trying to find a job, someone to hire or someone to date. Shouldn’t it be saving us time and get us out into the world of real time experience? Geocities, a Web 1.0 technology, was doing what MySpace is doing 10 years ago.

Some call blogging Web 2.0 but it’s really just another way of putting content online.If blogging is part of Web 2.0 then this site is up-to-date.

What about the myth that Web 2.0 will dramatically reducing the cost of building great software? Great software is just as hard to make as it was before, whether you use Ruby on Rails or C# or Java, and it costs about the same as well. Is open-source code Web 2.0. Nope. You still have to build something significant on top of all that open-source code you got for free to make it Web 2.0. That still takes work and a lot of money because patching together a bunch of different, sometimes unfinished or buggy, open-source tools into a coherent system to make an application like Google, a true 2.0, is obviously not simple.

Real 2.0 systems were not created in a weekend by 2 guys with a $100 budget. They are almost all large, long-term, efforts that cost real money in time and labor by dozens if not hundreds of coders.

What does this mean to the average business owners out there who believe their site needs to be Web 2.0? To demonstrate let’s look at real life businesses and the buildings that house them. A shopping mall - the entire mall - would be 2.0 when compared to a building that houses a single shop or service. This is not to say one is better than the other - it’s just the way it is. So stop worrying now.

Search Engine Optimization is also known as SEO. No, SEO is not the second in command to the CEO of a company. We’d like to talk a little about SEO because our site is very optimized for search engines. We use WordPress as a platform in which to present our site to the world. WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability and a lot has been written about its SEO including this from its own codex. The Wordpress documentation is by far some of the best out there. The best part is it is free so the only thing our customers really pay for is the design and implementation. However, I digress.

It has come to our attention that because we use software for our site that is so highly search engine optimized, we sometimes get found in Google ahead of the company one might be looking for if we have written about the work we have completed for them. Even with the “Songwriters Sing” Concert in 2 days and all its promotion and listings, Zomzom is on page 2 of Google. A few weeks after the concert and reviews have died down, we might even shoot to the first position. So if you find yourself here by mistake, take a look at the work we did for them here. Again I digress.

We love the look of fancy designer Flash sites. Zomzom has had a Flash site in the past - we had to - we are design people. However, nothing beats easy to use updatability and high SEO. Easy to update sites are a MUST for a business that is busy and wants to let you know about it. SEO, even more so.

So if you want an easy to use site, think of using Wordpress. Need help making it look like something? Contact Zomzom. We also offer Wordpress pre-installed on your server as one option available at our variety of hosing services.