The system built for Travel Smith Limited, based in the South East, required more than 400 hours of complex programming over a period of 6 months. This was needed to ensure that a range of back end systems could work together seamlessly to assist those booking holidays on the Channel Islands.

Built by St. Agnes based, UKnetweb, the new system allows customers accessing travelsmith.co.uk to book flights and accommodation through the one site building on their previous success in arranging accommodation and ferry travel for customers throughout the UK.

Although flight booking systems of this kind often appear relatively simple to the consumer using them, they involve a range of highly complex programming languages to ensure that the different parts involved in the process work together to generate the required results.

“Many people could be forgiven for thinking that the site is pretty simple, after all, that’s how the customer should see it. However, behind the scenes we have to ensure that thousands of processes work hand in hand to deliver the service they expect.” Says Toby Parkins, UKnetweb’s Managing Director.

“As a company we focus on these kind of projects which other companies find difficult. Knowing that nothing is impossible we work to establish new ways of doing things and have become nationally renowned for a number of European internet firsts.” He continued.

The Travel Smith system is not the first project of this complexity undertaken by UKnetweb, past projects have included a national sales system for genealogy store, Parish Chest and a mobile application for brand leader, Nokia.

Anyone looking to develop their own booking system, or other complex web development can contact the company at their offices on 01872 555933 or visit the company’s website at www.uknetweb.com

The entry looks at how sites like Wikipedia and Digg, which purport to be web democracies actually work more like an oligarchy, where a small segment of users are responsible for the majority of content and the sites general direction.

Where I find problems with Wilson’s view starts in his title. It is clear that there may be an argument to show that sites such as Digg and Wikipedia are in the control of a select bunch of users. However, these users have not been selected, appointed or employed but have risen through the ranks (so to speak) through active participation, knowledge and the support of other users.

The whole principle of the so called ‘Web 2.0′, Crowdsourcing and the Read / Write web is that it offers open access to the collective commons. It seems only natural to me that those who put the most in would naturally achieve a higher degree of ability to affect changes across those sites operating in this way.

As such the title used in Wilson’ s blog, describing ‘Web 2.0 democracy’ as a ‘myth’, does not really seem accurate or fair.

I believe that the Web 2.0 phenomenon may not be perfect and is in fact still at a relatively early stage. Where I see that it offers many advantages over the web as it existed until this time, is in the open ability for most, regardless of technical knowledge or ability to participate in a creative commons un-bound by mainstream corporate concerns, financial restrictions or censorship.

It is difficult to apply terms such as ‘democracy‘ to such a subject when countless sites struggle to provide an accurate definition of exactly what it is. If we take the literal meaning listed by About.com as ‘the will of the people’ then can anyone really argue that Web 2.0 is anything but democratic, after all, are we not all free to participate as we choose to do so.

Never one to miss an opportunity to test a new web application, I created a group for members of the network and referral organisation, the BNI, and joined a local business network created by friend, Alan Jones, for business people in the South West (UK).

So will sites such as Ning lead to the creation of ‘nethoods’, a trend prediction from Trend Watchers extraordinaire – Trendwatching.com, where smaller networks are likely to focus on small real life suburbs, villages or even streets as people search to merge life on and offline?

If you have your own social network why not include it in a comment on this blog? I have.
Visit BNI

My role within the company is to research emerging technologies, liaise with clients and potential clients, and manage some of the projects coming in.

I have started this blog to share some of our work with the world and help businesses locally or further afield tap into the many new tools emerging on the web. I will post as often as I can with links to great sites, information or tools for those interested in the internet, other emerging technologies or growing their business.I want to start by adding the following slideshow (available for download) which was a presentation we prepared for our local Chamber of Commerce featuring hundreds of embedded links to more info.

I am keen to hear any thoughts you have and welcome anyone to get in touch. You can find me on Skype, Facebook or Plaxo. (Click here for links through ‘About Aren’)

Aren