The one good thing about this recession is that I can actually walk around and get my Christmas shopping done in relative peace. But it is a little alarming to see most shops offering 20% off and yet still find shopping centres quiet.

As a strange form of torture at work, Sky News is broadcast all over the place and offer repeated and constant coverage of the financial crisis (NB: Why CNN find it hard to cover – can also be applied to Sky News). In fact the press has been doom and gloom about the economy for some time now, with some making comments about the Web 2.0 bubble bursting. We all know that between the rising fuel and food costs and the house prices sinking things are pretty gloomy right now.

Wesabe charts personal finances. 

However I am interested in what role the web will have in helping us deal with this. We’ve had recessions before, but like American elections I don’t think we’ve had one where the web will play such a significant role, especially in how we cope with it. Firstly there is our connection to the internet both emotively and economically; while fuel bills sore the cost of broadband costs continue to fall, also we feel the internet is essential and not a luxury we can cut to save costs. So we aren’t going to us the web less now.

We already know that the internet has made us more informed consumers, thanks to price comparison sites and communities offering advice. But now most of us are feeling the pressure to have more control over our finances, so what tools can the web offer us to help us manage our financial affairs? There are some good free tools that offer some helpful budgeting and financial management services, here are some for the UK:

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Writing letters to Santa has changed over the years... normally about this time of year I have to vet my Amazon wishlist and co-ordinate with my family via http://www.alliwantforchristmas.com/ to swap wishlists. The site works, but it's done nothing new in the four years I've been using it, at best it offers some possible sites you might find the item you are looking for. The advantage it offers over Amazon's service is that you aren't tied to one retailer and you can offer a link to the best place to buy an item.

There is a new site in town with appropriate Web 2.0 name too; Wishli.st is a site created for the UK market. It has some great unique features, but also some critical downfalls. It breaks the mold by allowing micro-payments towards gifts on your wishlist, so you can pick the things you really want and allow your friends and family to chip in until you have the funds to buy the item outright. The shortfall is that items have to be chosen fromand puchased at a limited list of retailers, meaning you can't find the cheapest on the market and you are restricted on the items you can actually choose.

The existing retail partnerships are predominantly with the websites like Firebox and I want one of those, sites that are aimed at people buying presents, the problem is the stuff they sell tends to be lowcost or at least fun and frivolous with a wide target audience, rather than the kind of items you want to add to a wishlist i.e. specific and specialist items that often relate to a hobby or an interest - where you need that expert existing knowledge to know which item is appropriate. I don't see the point in adding stuff from Firebox; pretty much all their stock is passable and fun, thats the point, but none of it is stuff I really want - it's the stuff i'd buy someone if they didn't have a wishlist.

The micro-payments concept is a good one, but for the idea to succeed they need remove the dependancy on retailers to allow it's use for niche markets. A Web 2.0 app that ignores the Long Tail needs to reconsider it's approach.

Today I made a trip to DeMontford University to attend their one day conference on the Future of Creative Technology. The morning kicked off with a technology workshop with Jerry Fishenden from Microsoft. He seemed to have a bit of an agenda to push Surface, which seemed unnecessary given the audience, but he did demonstrate something I hadn't seen from Microsoft Research, that allowed 2D space to be plotted into navigable 3D space, in this case Modern art works. But there was no information given on how the data was extrapolated or an envisioned uses of it were. It lacked the crowd computing factor of Photosynth as it used a single image source.

There was a discussion around institutions versus individuals; with the idea of individuals walking away from luddite institutions to setup their own businesses. However I felt this view was rather naïve. It waswas also suggested that institutions are broken, with no offers on how to "fix them". I don't necessarily disagree, but I don't think it achieves anything to point fingers and run off.

This conference was different from any other I had been to, in that the twitter stream was projected on the wall during the conversation, resulting a two tier take on what was going on, both my own responses to what was being said and also an interpritation of what was going on from the audience as a whole. 

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Although it was over a fortnight ago I still want to write about the Game City 3 event that occurred in Nottingham. It was a three day event, but I was only able to attend on the last day. It is great to events like this organised outside of London.

While I enjoyed the event and I’m glad I attended, overall I’m not sure the event was as well organised as last years. The website made it hard to find some of the important information regarding the event and emails of inquiry were not replied to. The pricing structure changed from last year, previously tickets were bought for individual events, so you picked and chose which of the events that cost you were interested in and filled the gaps with the free stuff, of which there was plenty. This year is was like a more conventional conference in that you bought a ticket for the whole day, and this gave you access to all the events. The advantage of this is that there was a more consistent audience for all the events, but it wasn’t clear which events needed to be paid for and when events were cancelled there was no compensation or even notification. Thankfully the students that were there helping to run the event were helpful and friendly to make up for the lack of organisation.

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Recommendation has always played a significant role in purchasing decisions. This is why customer service is so important; because you knew if someone had an exceptionally good/bad experience that they would be in the pub that evening telling all their friends. So along comes the internet and suddenly that highly vocal individual can be shouting your praises/damnation to a much wider audience and much quicker. Even if the individual involved doesn’t contribute to a blog, the internet and technology means we are much more connected through means such as text message, instant messenger, Twitter, Facebook etc; meaning we have a much wider circle of influence.

It is much easier to maintain relationships with people over greater distances in time and space than ever before, as we aggregate our relationships and syndicate our own personal status. So now we can share with a much wider circle our opinions, as they relate to a product or service, or politics. Facebook is particularly interesting in this context because it is viral by design, pushing out your actions across your network and vice versa.

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