... it is the skin that forms on the top of the soup of the collective consciousness

November 14, 2005 12:10 PM

What is Web 2.0?The air for the next bubble? Infosphermekinalization? Badgers? Register readers chime in on the hype. Complete with pie charts and tag clouds.
posted by whatnot (55 comments total)

6% javascript worms. Heh.

I think it's mostly a way to sell books.
posted by delmoi at 12:15 PM on November 14, 2005

You know, back in the day people were coming up with genuinely new stuff. The web, search engines, IM, webmail, etc. Stuff that was genuinely new or at least presented in a really easy way. I remember getting excited about DHTML back in high school, which would have been 1998 or so. Of course the browsers were all incompatible so it was kind of a waste, but still, it was there.

Now it's just like, people are taking things that already exist, giving them a name, and then selling a lot of books (and getting a lot of VC funding, I guess). Blogs, podcasts, AJAX, Web 2.0. it's all so meaningless.
posted by delmoi at 12:19 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 Validator
posted by Armitage Shanks at 12:21 PM on November 14, 2005

Good article, mostly because I learned how to install Linux on a dead badger.
posted by Wolfdog at 12:22 PM on November 14, 2005

I agree with delmoi totally. Everything web related was new and exciting. Most people couldn't run it on their god-awful browsers but it was cool and neat. The only thing Web 2.0 seems to be about is the corporatization (not that it's a bad thing) of the web. The Internet has been incredibly stagnate in the last several years. Perhaps if anything Web 2.0 will compel companies to upgrade their infrastructure to allow for gigabit bandwidth and beyond -- opening up new opportunities for new technologies.
posted by geoff. at 12:23 PM on November 14, 2005

Yeah, okay, the whole concept of a "Web 2.0" can be a bit silly, but the d.Construct conference that just happened in Brighton, in which a number of people discussed Web 2.0 seemed rather interesting.

Or, at least, to me. Because I couldn't afford to go. *dramatic sigh*
posted by Katemonkey at 12:24 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is dumb.
I have a hard enough time explaining the current internet to people at my job.
I don't need the strokey-beards in the corner office emailing me about this "whole web 2.0 business".
posted by Baby_Balrog at 12:25 PM on November 14, 2005

I love the Register. Home of the BOFH.
posted by nofundy at 12:25 PM on November 14, 2005

From Armitage's link: "We may be at that Web 3.11 for Workgroups sweetspot right about now." Classic...
posted by runkelfinker at 12:28 PM on November 14, 2005

Regardless of whether Web2.0 is good or bad (or just a term), there seem to be a whole lot of people putting in a whole lot of time and effort to knock it down a few pegs.

I guess that means it's at least got some sort of traction.
posted by tpl1212 at 12:32 PM on November 14, 2005

There wasn't even grudging admiration for a project that collected $1.6 million in attendance fees from people for something that even the organizers couldn't explain. This is the lucrative foundation for a small church - and "collective intelligence" is nothing if not faith-based.

Zing!
posted by prostyle at 12:33 PM on November 14, 2005

This FPP is so passé.
posted by Firas at 12:45 PM on November 14, 2005 [1 favorite]

Hi-larious!
posted by carter at 12:47 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is a lot of developers getting excited that DHTML is finally getting enough adoption for them to do cool UI without imagemaps.

They do some neat things. They do things that make using complex web sites easier.

What they DO with these new tools might be exciting, but the tools are nothing earth-shattering, IMO. It's propeller-beanie driven prehype.
posted by verb at 12:58 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is a lot of developers getting excited that DHTML is finally getting enough adoption for them to do cool UI without imagemaps.

No no no, that's just AJAX. AJAX is a part of web 2.0, just like the web is a part of the internet. But web 2.0 is so much more then that, it includes del.icio.us! and wikipedia! and blogs!
posted by delmoi at 1:10 PM on November 14, 2005

I agree with the sentiment that "Web 2.0" is basically the repackaging of a lot of stuff that has already existed, but I don't look at it so much from a "corporatization" standpoint as that the tools to deliver these technologies have finally taken hold to the point that it's viable to put them in "everyday" applications rather than specialized apps that would require a plug-in, upgrade, or alternate browser.

Perhaps if anything Web 2.0 will compel companies to upgrade their infrastructure to allow for gigabit bandwidth and beyond -- opening up new opportunities for new technologies.

Absolutely. Now that all the "cool stuff from 1998" is becoming mainstream, real innovators will be forced to once again... innovate.

This is really not much different from the advent of WYSIWYG HTML editing, which turned making web pages from some kind of arcane art into a tool that more people could use, which instantly raised the bar for sites beyond "Here's my homepage!!!!!"
posted by mkultra at 1:15 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is taking what you're doing effortlessly now and making it 10x more complicated, requiring a java-backed application server, and spending yourself silly on hosting costs for no appreciable reason.
posted by clevershark at 1:15 PM on November 14, 2005

I'm not totally into poo-pooing web2.0 at the moment, but it's true that there doesn't seem to be as much truly new stuff as in 1998. Back then browsers were adding major functionality month by month and that's definitely slowed.

I think of web2.0 as adding a social aspect to existing technology. So yeah, you could have built delicious in 1999 and there were things that did just that (backflip and clip2 come to mind), but a major innovation at delicious was harnessing the community to show most popular, shared tags, other people pointing to the same URL, etc.
posted by mathowie at 1:27 PM on November 14, 2005

While I dont buy into "Web 2.0", as someone who has developed a few AJAX applications, it is neat technology. Things that weren't possible before are very possible now and in the realm of user-friendliness. Will it change the web? Not really and definately not anytime soon, it is a pain in the ass right now to code, but I'm sure that'll go away soon enough...
posted by SirOmega at 1:27 PM on November 14, 2005

Vaguely related insult spiked with invectives! Misleading half-truth with unsubstantiated viewpoint. Ad-hominum attack?

Seriously though, I don't know about this "the web has been stagnant" business. Coming from working on a University webpage where we were forced to design for NN4.0 well into the new century, this whole evolutionary leap in internet literacy is quite exciting.

Sure, alot of this stuff is old news. But what isn't old news is the ways in which people are applying it, and the ways in which other people are using it.
posted by chason at 1:30 PM on November 14, 2005

matthowie said: I think of web2.0 as adding a social aspect to existing technology.

Exactly. It isn't about the technology. It's about taking the interweb from the hands of geeks only and making it something real people can use. Plus user created content and online communities. And as far as bubble talk about Web 2.0 is concerned - the problem isn't what is the focus of the bubble, but rather the speculative investing by profit whores inflating the value of related stocks. Just like the last milleniums stock market bubble and this one's real estate bubble.
posted by rzklkng at 1:46 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 smells better.
posted by owillis at 2:33 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is:

blogs (formerly known as homepages)
AJAX (formerly known as JavaScript)
ruby (formerly known as perl)
Social Software / "User Created Content" (formerly known as BBS's)

The really great thing about it is that updating your skillset is as easy as opening up your resume in Word and doing a search and replace for the above terms. Awesome-0!
posted by dvdgee at 3:29 PM on November 14, 2005

I agree with the way mathowie characterized it.

This is sort of how I understand* the concept(?) of Web 2.0...Yahoo originally classified all websites according to what category that some group of people at the company decided where to put it. Now, to use the del.icio.us and Flickr examples, we the people decide how to classify the information and have more control over the content. Much more democratic, isn't it?

*Taking the real people perspective as opposed to the geek perspective a la rzklkng above.
posted by jaronson at 3:35 PM on November 14, 2005

The web is just a fad...it'll pass. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Move along.
posted by dangerman at 3:37 PM on November 14, 2005

I agree with the way mathowie characterized it.
...and rzklkng
posted by jaronson at 3:38 PM on November 14, 2005

Exactly. It isn't about the technology. It's about taking the interweb from the hands of geeks only and making it something real people can use.

LOL. It's more like the reverse then anything. "Real People" have been online for decades. You think the hundreds of millions of people who came online in the late 90's were all "geeks"? And now with magical mumbo jumbo the small minority of "normal people" will be able to appreciate it?

Whatever.

By the way, check out the wikipedia article. Starts off with

This article may be confusing for some readers, and should be edited to enhance clarity.
Please improve the article, or discuss the issue on the talk page.

Heh. Also:

The term was coined by Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media brainstorming with Craig Cline of MediaLive to develop ideas for a conference that they could jointly host. Dougherty suggested that the Web was in a renaissance, with changing rules and evolving business models. Dougherty gave examples — "DoubleClick was Web 1.0; Google AdSense is Web 2.0. Ofoto is Web 1.0; Flickr is Web 2.0." — rather than definitions. He recruited John Battelle for a business perspective, and O'Reilly Media, Battelle, and MediaLive launched the first Web 2.0 Conference in October 2004. The second annual conference was held in October 2005.

See, I told you it was all just a conspiracy to sell books (and host confrences).
posted by delmoi at 3:46 PM on November 14, 2005

Your favorite buzzword sucks.
posted by dhartung at 3:57 PM on November 14, 2005

two point naught indeed!
posted by blue_beetle at 4:13 PM on November 14, 2005

Everyone is desperately floundering about, trying to come up with the "Next Big Thing" by rehashing what's already out there but using better press.
posted by nightchrome at 5:50 PM on November 14, 2005

mathowie: I think of web2.0 as adding a social aspect to existing technology.

Well, what's frustrating about this whole web2.0 thing is that some of us have been doing this for quite some time now, and recognizing the hype that has been attached to this whole "social computing." One of my favorite quotes that addresses the problem comes from John Carrol three years before Web2.0 was coined. (pdf)

I believe the popularity of the term reflects a desire on the part of many HCI professionals to participate in and contribute to more meaningful social interchange. But the term is also clearly now just a buzzword; the collection of people who have recently ordered a pair of socks from the same website is a rather impoverished example of community. (emphasis added)

It wasn't as if people needed html to develop emergent knowledge that turned out to be more that its designers intended. It's not that innovation is spinning faster and faster, it's just that everyone claims to reinvent the wheel on shorter and shorter time spans. The MMORPG people have their own amnesia going on pretending that everything changed with Ultima and Everquest.

I've decided the title of my first non-fiction book is going to be something like, Between neo-Luddism and techno-utopianism, because I think both sides to this debate are making some sweeping and unwarranted claims about the impact of all this shiny new technology on human behavior.

rzklkng: It's about taking the interweb from the hands of geeks only and making it something real people can use.

Fueled of course by shiny new buzzwords like "interweb."
posted by KirkJobSluder at 6:10 PM on November 14, 2005

Speaking of all things 2.0, look at Digg vs. Slashdot. Look at how quickly Digg caught up to and (today, at least as far as Alexa is concerned) surpassed it. Examine the "power" (in a statistical sense) of the digg-effect. Do you think it's the whitespace asthetic? The fact it's Kevin Rose? The new influx of VC money? Copious use of AJAX?

No. It's because the community brings more value to the coverage of the story than the handful of editors at /.
posted by rzklkng at 6:10 PM on November 14, 2005

KirkJobSluder, you're not most people. Why does everyone need to take the optimism out of something that may turn out to be really wonderful by applying simple reductionist "it's all been done before" yammering? And the bastardization of the human language, like the overuse of "community" doesn't devalue the concept. If those sock buyers read reviews of said socks, contribute their own reviews, and run a blog and forum about socks on the side, then they are a community, aren't they?
posted by rzklkng at 6:15 PM on November 14, 2005

dvdgee nailed it.

There is nothing new here. Nothing.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 6:25 PM on November 14, 2005

The most disappointing thing about AJAX is that it's built on JavaScript, a "language" that lacks any and all of the attributes that I would typically look for in a programming language.

Yeah, I'm going to get really excited about programming in C++'s retarded cousin. Oh, and I get to write different versions of the same code so that it'll support different browsers? Yaaaay!
posted by afroblanca at 6:29 PM on November 14, 2005

Social Software / "User Created Content" (formerly known as BBS's)

... as a sidenote, I miss BBSes!

(good thing MeFi is here to fill the void)
posted by afroblanca at 6:31 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is designing sites that break on older browsers (like the ones I have to use at work), fragmenting the work-anywhere nature of the web and then saying "we have to concentrate our resources" to excuse yourself. 1409837 signals, I'm looking at you.
posted by bonaldi at 6:41 PM on November 14, 2005

Web 2.0 is made of diced carrots and tomato skins.
posted by whatnot at 7:01 PM on November 14, 2005

rzklkng: you're not most people.

I never claimed to be "most people." But when O'Reilly is talking Web 2.0, he's talking as a tech publisher to an audience of programmers and content developers.

But I think there is this rather odd perception that prior to, say, 2000 the people participating in BBSs, usenet and mailing lists were a geek monoculture? My first "internet community" experience was back in '89 involving a bulletin board for helpdesk staff that was abandoned and coopted by a motley crew of undergrads with radically different ideologies, majors, and views on life.

Why does everyone need to take the optimism out of something that may turn out to be really wonderful by applying simple reductionist "it's all been done before" yammering?

Why does your optimism depend on the illusion that this is some incredibly new thing that no one has ever done before? And how is it "reductionist" to point out that many of these things have relationships and histories that go back 10 years, and in some cases even 20 years? Or that these Web 2.0 people might learn from 10-20 years of best and worst practices?

If those sock buyers read reviews of said socks, contribute their own reviews, and run a blog and forum about socks on the side, then they are a community, aren't they?

It depends. Communities have a history, language and norms of behavior. If that sock catalog fosters a group of users who develop a history, language, and norms of behavior, then it certainly might qualify as a community. But I think that using the "community" word without having some kinds of qualifications that include history, language and norms is deceptive advertising.

In the last 16 years, I've spent a lot of time, money, sweat, and in a few cases, tears trying to build community. While the overuse of the term doesn't devalue my concept, it does make it hard to talk when I'm saying something along the lines of Community of Practice and you are saying, people who buy socks from a website.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:10 PM on November 14, 2005

But I think there is this rather odd perception that prior to, say, 2000 the people participating in BBSs, usenet and mailing lists were a geek monoculture?

I concur. I cut my teeth on the early-to-mid-90's BBS scene (314 fo' evah!) and I would venture to say that the actual "geeks" (and by that I mean programmers, technologists, etc.) were in the minority.

Most of us were just teenagers whose parents had a computer with a modem for one reason or another. Sadly, the world dropped BBSes like a hot potato in the mid-to-late 90's.

However, by the time I got to the Internet, the actualy "geeks" were once again in the minority. Hell, to this day, it still seems like there are more capitalists then "geeks" on the web.

And of the actual "geeks" on the web, I would still say that only a minority of us fit the stereotype. Most of us have lives and such outside of the technological realm.
posted by afroblanca at 7:22 PM on November 14, 2005

And for me, what I would find to be impressive, (and much overdue) would be for a Web 2.0 to be talked about in terms of language, history, norms, leadership, and social contracts, rather than scripting languages, user interfaces, and data visualization.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:36 PM on November 14, 2005

Speaking of all things 2.0, look at Digg vs. Slashdot. Look at how quickly Digg caught up to and (today, at least as far as Alexa is concerned) surpassed it. Examine the "power" (in a statistical sense) of the digg-effect. Do you think it's the whitespace asthetic? The fact it's Kevin Rose? The new influx of VC money? Copious use of AJAX?

No. It's because the community brings more value to the coverage of the story than the handful of editors at /.

So digg is web2, and slashdot isn't? That's odd, because I just spent my five mod points on slashdot today. Could it be that the fact digg outpaced slashdot is that Rob Malda is a fucking idiot?

I'll give you a hint. Rob Malda is a fucking idiot.

Slashdot has always "leveraged the community", web2.0 style for almost a decade. Community moderation is nothing new at all. Digg does it right, and slashdot does it wrong. That has nothing to do with "web2.0" and everything to do with the relative Intelegence of the proprietors.

Rusty from Kuro5hin did the same thing in 1999, and didn't become as popular as digg.com because his website's community went pathological. Hell, slashdot, k5 and even metafilter are good examples of how "leveraging the community" can blow up in your face. You're trying to leverage a Mob. If you're smart, it'll work. If you're not, it won't. A Mob is much more difficult to control then a CPU.
posted by delmoi at 9:39 PM on November 14, 2005

rzklkng: if you're so hopped up on web2 kool-aid perhaps you can tell us specifically what web2.0 actually is?

Give us the necessary and sufficient conditions that define web2.0 websites. Tell us what f(x) is where f(x)=1 where x is a web2.0 site and f(x)=0 where x is not a web2.0 site.

Do for us what wikipedia can't, give us a true definition.
posted by delmoi at 9:41 PM on November 14, 2005

Wow, this sucks. Web 2.0 IS a buzzword. And yes, everything in a rehash of old ideas...that's the human experience, isn't it...we can't imagine new things that we don't already have concepts of.

Look, the hate towards Web 2.0 seems to be from older web people who fear that a new influx of money and people will make it go mainstream and suck. Maybe it will, and maybe it won't. The point is, community doesn't exist in a vacuum. Matt made this site, and the community is fluid and changes. The focus changes based on what's going on outside, but the culture, for the most part, remains the same. It's affected by internal and external factors. Or maybe it's the fear of tech being tagged with (the possible) economic ruin from the next burst bubble.

The early fractional web, let's say 0.1 might have been anything from cave walls, bathroom stalls, and newspapers and printing presses. From-one-to-many, top down hierarchial (sp?).

Web 1.0 beta was ARPANET and it's various closed system descendents, USENET, BBS, and the like. Full release candidate Web 1.0 included email. Web 1.5 might have been the graphical browser and the world wide web, alongside with IRC. Web 1.6 might have been the very first non-usenet/bbs forums, the FARKs, MeFi's, etc. Web 1.7 might have been having the ability to make sites using MSWord, Netscape Composer, etc., alongside with the ability to personalize content, and the beginning of the differentiation of push-versus-pull content. Web 1.8-1.9 would encompass the diversifying of mediums and uses, from P2P, through webcams, CHAT, etc.

The BIG DEAL with Web 1.x was that it removed middlemen...from manufacturer to customer, or that it levelled the playing field in many transactions by making info available that previously was off limits. Think automobile invoices to medical information.

So what's Web 2.0?

Let me stop real quick...sometimes, I think people in this community (MeFi) and others don't appreciate the influence that they have as cultural leaders on the web. Look at the similarities people have (in interests), the passions, the skills and experiences. You, WE, set the trends. In many/most cases some of you are the architects of hte infrastructures, the authors of the protocols, the designers who st the tones for the aesthetics, or those that do the cultural ruminations and philosophical heavy lifting for what the web will be (EFF, Creative Commons, BoingBoing people, Jarvis, etc.) The web is what it is because there are people who are the Alphas online who set the norms. They are the filter through which the web develops. Some people may perceive that Web 2.0 is a threat to that...It might be, might not. I like K5 for the same reason as I like MeFi...I come for the links but stay for the comments. That's Web 2.0, and in that regard, /. is too.

Web 2.0 is a removal of the barriers to content and community creation. Where website creation before required knowledge of HTML, an authoring suite, and hosting, now can be done with a browser and a blogspot account. Online photography required the same - along with a $1000 camera. Explode that out with the iPod and the various audio suites, Flash, Video, Opensource software, podcasts, etc. So were moving to an era of the prosumer, or one where the "con" in consumer means "content".

That's what web 2.0 is...it's not technology and protocols, it's people. Web 2.0 is infrastructure, the community is what uses it, and the culture is the product of it. Web 2.0 is the moving of "the web" from "a thing" to "a place".
posted by rzklkng at 7:04 AM on November 15, 2005

In other words, Web 2.0 is just "the web" growing in popularity to the point where it gets noticed by the kind of people who can use the word "prosumer" with a straight face.
posted by sfenders at 7:19 AM on November 15, 2005

Look, the hate towards Web 2.0 seems to be from older web people who fear that a new influx of money and people will make it go mainstream and suck.

If you seriously think the web isn't 'mainstream' right now, you're so detached from reality that having a meaningful discussion would be impossible.

Web 1.0 beta was ARPANET and it's various closed system descendents, USENET, BBS, and the like. Full release candidate Web 1.0 included email. Web 1.5 might have been the graphical browser and the world wide web

So before "Web 1.5" the web didn't even include the, um, web? I'm sure Tim Burners Lee would be surprised.

It seems like you're using the term 'web' to denote, like, the entire internet (or even all human communication). And that there is going to be some major, society wide change between 2002 and 2005. That change already happened, in the 1990s.


Web 2.0 is a removal of the barriers to content and community creation. Where website creation before required knowledge of HTML, an authoring suite, and hosting, now can be done with a browser and a blogspot account. Online photography required the same - along with a $1000 camera. Explode that out with the iPod and the various audio suites, Flash, Video, Opensource software, podcasts, etc. So were moving to an era of the prosumer, or one where the "con" in consumer means "content".

That's what web 2.0 is...it's not technology and protocols, it's people. Web 2.0 is infrastructure, the community is what uses it, and the culture is the product of it. Web 2.0 is the moving of "the web" from "a thing" to "a place".


See, all of that stuff just sounds like the breathless hyperbole they printed in wired in the 1990s, a decade ago. There's no substantive thing you're saying that hasn't been said about the internet every year for the past 15 years. (or ten, at least). Except now you're saying all the old stuff that did change the world actually sucked and this new stuff really will change the world.
posted by delmoi at 7:20 AM on November 15, 2005

delmoi, I'm not really sure why your outrage meter is pegged over this. Yes, let's not argue semantics, prior to the "World Wide Web", I should have referred to anything prior to Web 1.5 as Internet X.X. My humblest regrets.

Guess what, EVERYTHING that's happening on the internet, even during the "breathless hyperbole" is old news. People printed up newsletters, made scrapbooks, sold door-to-door, everything people do online was being done on a slower and more local scale in one form or another for millenia. And it's foolish to say that the web in 1995 is the same as it is now.

Saying that the web is changing doesn't diminish or devalue anything that already was done - if anything, the past is the foundation.

So delmoi, why the hate?
posted by rzklkng at 7:36 AM on November 15, 2005

If all that breathless hyperbole motivates a few young/naive/optimistic individuals to actually put something cool together, rather than just stew in disillusionment, I'm all for it.

Cynicism is, like, SO Generation X.
posted by solipse at 7:44 AM on November 15, 2005

Can't say I care one way or another about what it is called, or even what defines it. I do care about this cheerleading to the extent that it leads to standards compliance, open ended APIs for various web services, and an even deeper integration of web-oriented perspectives with the broader culture.

The technology behind it is nothing new but support for this tech is becoming ubiquitous—in part because it is becoming okay to leave non-compliant clients behind. Creating open-ended APIs fosters community development along the lines of what happens in Open Source projects—eg taking what Google Maps' API gives you and creating a pedometer. We all stand on the shoulders of giants so the more giants there are, the higher we raise the pie (to murder a metaphor). Maybe none of this is earth-shattering but it does bring more people into the fold, so to speak. IMO, emmergent phenomena are predicated on the underlying causes reaching some threshold. Web2.0, what ever it might be, looks like a social movement working toward the kind of pipe dreams Wired of 10 years ago published. Will it be the thing that gets us there, if that is even possible? I dunno, but I guess I see this like the BASF commercials. Web2.0 doesn't bring us anything special in and of itself, it just makes what we have more useful.
posted by Fezboy! at 8:01 AM on November 15, 2005

"Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn’t have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core." [Tim O'Reilly].

"Gravity so strong that even light and good ideas cannot escape" [Go Flock Yourself -- a new blog seeking to burst any and all Web 2.0 bubbles.]
posted by ericb at 8:27 AM on November 15, 2005

That's what web 2.0 is...[...] it's people.

Whereas Web 1.0 was all about herons?
posted by cillit bang at 9:01 AM on November 15, 2005

Say what you want, but the hype seems like its at the right temperature to me. I love that the popularity of the term AJAX allows me to suggest doing all kinds of things that before clients were afraid to, because they had to support users on 3.0 browsers.
posted by xammerboy at 1:20 PM on November 15, 2005

rzklkng: Look, the hate towards Web 2.0 seems to be from older web people who fear that a new influx of money and people will make it go mainstream and suck.

Well, not really. What I see is a lot of people throwing money at the "technology" side of the convergence and assuming that the "social" will just fall into place given the right flashy client-side scriptable API and user interface elements. IME and in the published experience of people who have been doing this over the last 20 years, sometimes you get lucky, but frequently you don't.

In other words, I think "Web 2.0" is more of the same. Lots of people coming up with great and new interfaces and failing to realize that great interfaces do not build great communities.

So, you are concerned with the big public portals, community blogs, and podcasts. I'm concerned with how this stuff gets applied by organizations in private. I'm concerned with the corporate knowledge bases, online communities of practice, and collaborative courseware. And perhaps I'm just a bit too honest in regards to spending people's money to keep my mouth shut when Web 2.0 boosters claim that AJAX will create community.

Saying that the web is changing doesn't diminish or devalue anything that already was done - if anything, the past is the foundation.

But if O'Reilly simply said, "the web is changing" he wouldn't be able to make money producing conferences and selling books!

Of course "the web is changing." That does not justify the hype.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:18 PM on November 15, 2005

Or to sum up, what I'm afraid of is seeing for the next 10 years is what we've seen over the last 10 years: millions of dollars spent on workplace and classroom technology that end up having no observable result, or turn out worse than corresponding "low-tech" interventions.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 3:51 PM on November 15, 2005

It's about taking the interweb from the hands of geeks only

three letters, one acronym:

AOL.

on another note, that John Carrol quote is absolutely wonderful. said exactly what i was trying to formulate in my head.
posted by poweredbybeard at 8:47 PM on November 15, 2005