I’m currently in Austin, rolling with the South by Southwest interactive festival, and yesterday I chanced upon a session about the mobile web. It was quite enlightening.

I had no idea how many active mobile internet users there are. I forget the exact figures, but it’s only just shy of the number of desktop internet users (ie, around 1 billion). The speaker, Brian Fling from Blue Flavor, gave a really great talk about preparing for the mobile web, so great in fact, that it inspired me to give it a try.

Nervous now has a mobile internet site, with a handful of contact details.

The .mobi’s ready mobile validation tool is an excellent way to check up on your mobile content, and includes a couple of popular phone displays. We score a 5 out of 5.

Good stuff. Off the Rails meetup this evening, which should be awesome. There is more on my nodemons.com blog.

If you haven’t heard then you soon will, there’s a new kid on the block, it’s called microformats. Rather than try and explain what they are, I’ll quote the microformat people:

“Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).”

So why should we care? Well, we think microformats are great and could very easily make your and my life a lot easier, moving us one step closer to the semantic web.

So what’s this got to do with nervous? Well, some of us have a pretty good knowledge of all things bio-tech and think that microformats could revolutionise the way that people work with genomes. So enter bioformats.org

Don’t go rushing over there just yet (unless you fancy a look at our new logo), but we plan to introduce the concept of microformats to the biological community, and we’re pretty darn excitied about it. Watch this space…

I’m worried. Not really worried, just a little concerned shall we say. Things seem to be going great over at Zero to Hero, getting close to 350 now and more people by the day are telling us their zeros and heros. That’s great. And the really encouraging thing is the relative number of zeros to heros, summarised very nicely by geth this morning:

“geth is rocking the number of ‘heros’ maintaining a healthly lead over the number of ‘zeros’, thereby reaffirming the feeling i have that life is, generally, alright.”

and he’s right, as I type there are 147 zeros and 196 heros. So, on average more people are heroing than zeroing and that’s probably the way it should be.

But here’s the problem, I have more zeros than heros. I’ve spent the last few days trying desperately to ‘up’ my number of heros to get some balance but I’m still ‘in the green’ overall.

Does this make me a bad person?

I’ve just pushed an update to our latest web project Zero to Hero. The number of comments for each passion is now shown in a little bubble on the home page, so you can keep an eye on what folks are chattering about from there. Super fresh.

People have been zero-ing and hero-ing for a few days now, and I’m loving what is being adding to the site. Some of my favourites: laura’s shoes she can’t afford, sally’s egg white phobia, and a somewhat backhanded compliment from my mother.

To join in, sign up for free.

Today we’re introducing Zero to Hero, a site that lets you share what’s currently lighting your fire, or putting it out. We’re currently rocking the “imminent’ iLife announcement, Ze Frank, and somewhat egotistically, our our ‘mad skillz’. Arfon assures me that the young kids still say that.

So come on in, the water’s fr-fr-fr-fresh!

So Matt and I have decided it’s about time that nervous had a voice on the great www. There’s no huge plan as to what the content here will be, but you can expect to hear from us on our latest/greatest ideas, what we’re currently working on at nervous, things we love, things we hate and how to generally avoid an excessive build up of brain crack.