... and here I am in Seattle. No great arches. No grand museums, galleries or cathedrals. Only one iconic tower. While Scott and Rebecca have been drinking with SEOs in London and Chunneling it to Paris, Jeff, Matt and I have been sitting in our office, glaring glumly at a Western Washington sky that was blue this morning and is now pissing down with rain. And during this time, I have been going through a bazillion websites for this year's Web 2.0 Awards.

During my trawling, I began to realise that ideas did not only repeat themselves, but entire business models, templates, names and marketing pitches loaded themselves on my monitor over and over again. What once seemed innovative and interesting became fantastically boring very quickly. If faced with another Digg clone, one more online conference room or a whole new army of photo sharing websites, I was going to give up and go change Scott and Rebecca's computers' passwords to the names of obscure French landmarks.


However, before I do that, here's a list of some basic Web 2.0 truths I have learned in the past couple of weeks.

1. When the “About Us” is virtually incomprehensible, it isn’t because I am stupid. It is because the site offers nothing and the marketing team doesn't want to let you know it.
2. All the Adsense in the world won’t pay for a bad idea.
3. People who have recommended a new Web 2.0 Awards category called “Personal Websites” are nominating their blogspot blogs. Avoid reading them.
   
4. The longer the URL, the longer the site takes to load. Why? I don't know. Don't argue with me about this one.
   
5. I can’t read Spanish, Czech, Dutch or German.
6. My computer can’t read Chinese or Japanese so I can’t find out whether or not I can read them either.
7. Did I mention that I don’t understand Italian?
8. Google maps are very cool, but creating a website whose only feature is a Google map is redundant. Someone already did that, and the URL is maps.google.com.
9. If the only thing someone has said in their comments about a site is that it “uses AJAX”, that means that it does nothing else but one small thing, using ajax.
   
10. There is no more room on the internet for photograph sharing websites. The internet is full. All new websites that invite users to share photographs, edit photographs, tag photographs, show where photographs were taken on a Google map or complete any other task including the words "photograph" or "picture" will be disallowed due to the aforementioned fullness of the internet. Don't plug the pipes!
    
11. Beta doesn’t mean anything anymore. People slap it on sites that are in alpha and sites that appear to be complete. I don’t actually think people know what beta even means.
12. There is no need to be remotely creative with a site name. Randomly placed consonants will do. Vowels optional. Pronounceablity not required.

Now I am off to mess with my co-workers computers. Have a wonderful weekend!

PS: Scott and "Becs", it would be best if you brought a book of French phrases to work on Monday. Or Tuesday. Just a heads-up :)