Picked this story up from Buzz Machine. Chevy is the latest of the big corporations trying to get a piece of the Live Web (more affectionately known to the technorati as Web 2.0) The New York Times reports that Chevy has launched a site that allows web users to make their own ads. Splendid. User participation. Excellent. Of course, when you do that sort of thing people are always apt to use the opportunity to criticize. Strangely enough, despite the harsh words from some participants, Chevy’s media company is taking the whole thing in stride.

“We anticipated that there would be critical submissions,” Ms. Tezanos said. “You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it’s part of playing in this space.”

I second Buzz Machine in saying I’m impressed that they get it. Nice to see that the big guys do occasionally play nice.

Yesterday’s post got me thinking. To sum up, computers are getting faster but software is getting bulkier and slower. While that’s probably a fair generalization, in the world of web browsers, there have been several notable exceptions of late. For years, users have had to choose between Netscape and IE, both of which are notably large for a web browser and not particularly quick at rendering pages. (I’m not linking to either of them, good reader, because I do not endorse them) However, Apple’s Safari was one of the first browsers to come along that bucked this trend, being quick, largely bug-free and very fast. Now for the PC and Mac, Firefox is causing quite a storm. In its recent spate of a massive number of downloads, it has only gained 1% of the marketshare but a million downloads on its first day of release is something to pay attention to. Read more…