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Friday, April 27, 2007
Does web 2.0 suck?
A top 10 list of why web 2.0 isn't all it's cracked up to be, from Charlie, a non-Vermonter, at a blog called, This is going to be BIG!.
An interesting conversation, particularly #9:
A lot of powerful people don't participate. How many VC's out there fund widget companies without having a blog or a MySpace profile? Any Sony bloggers out there? What about brand managers that want to do Second Life campaigns without ever having been inside. How about my elected representatives? They get out there and kiss babies during election time, but how many blogging elected officials are there? (And not watered down campaign blogs... actual blogs written by the actual people.) We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid.
Just wanted to put this idea out there to encourage discussion.
April 27, 2007 at 01:21 PM in Media/Keeping an eye on the competition | Permalink
Comments
To some degree it does not matter if the powers that be aren't 'listening'. To some degree it is always this way, like minded people tending to circle up. But the increasing erosion of the public realm is makes this more of a problem. Blogged a bit on this but don't know how to do tracebacks, here is the link
Posted by: OtherWill | Apr 27, 2007 9:30:00 PM
Venture capitalists and Sony VPs and "brand managers" are not bellwethers of culture and they're typically not young. The reason political candidates don't write their own blogs is because they're too busy being candidates.
The thing that makes web 2.0 stick (as opposed to the dot com days of web 1.0) is that it's really useful for anyone that bothers to dive in. Those folks might not be personally blogging and playing second life, but I bet they use Amazon and Wikipedia and Craigslist.
This sounds like fad-bashing to me, and while I agree that there are a lot of fads on the net, overall, the impact of web 2.0 on our culture has been and will continue to be tremendous.
We could do great things if we weren't so segregated into a small group of people punch drunk on Kool Aid and a great deal of people who've never even heard of Kool Aid.
The people who are "drunk on kool aid" are the early adopters that throw around terms like "web 2.0," buut the people who "have never even heard of kool aid" still mostly know what it is -- the useful internet. It's Amazon and ebay and IMDb and Wikipedia and Google. Just because they're not hip to Twitter doesn't mean they're completely out of the loop.
Posted by: Bill Simmon | Apr 28, 2007 12:13:39 PM
I fully agree w/ bill about the Fad bashing - this is the first internet wave that i've experienced and found truely exciting; The web is such a vast world of information, and at the core of the Web 2.0 movement is the ability to collect, decypher and catagorize this information in ways we never could before. Yes there is always room for improvement, but on a whole i think the web is becoming more and more user and content driven, and that is always good.
Posted by: Tanner | May 2, 2007 3:33:19 PM
Mr. Simmon put it better than I could have. I don't think this type of "fad bashing" is the most constructive way to begin a discussion. It is often just a form of link bait - as in, a way to drum up traffic. A "bashing" also tends to be somewhat polarizing in nature, and thus can limit the depth of the conversation. Perhaps a better way to begin might be to try and define the topic and go from there.
However with such a large and amorphous subject, it can help to narrow the conversation and look at a subset of the larger topic. For example, speaking of Web 2.0 and the useful internet, OtherWill raises a good point. Where are the Trackbacks on 7d blogs? Are they turned off for a reason (i.e. spam)? Have you weighed those reasons against the benefits of the service? Personally, I find that conducting an in-depth conversation via blog comments can be like corresponding with someone (using stamps and paper envelopes - remember those?) by writing on cocktail napkins as opposed to 8x11 sheets of paper.
In addition to facilitating deeper discussion (you don't feel like you have to fit everything on a napkin), Trackbacks can help your readers see where others have referenced your post, without having to search on services like Technorati. This makes for a more robust conversation, and a more useful "web" of conversation.
This is not to say a comments-only setup is ineffective. Limiting discussion to comments can be just another way to structure conversation. There is certainly some discussion out there regarding the effectiveness of the Trackback as a tool. In any case, it seems worthy of another look, if not a conversation.
Posted by: Justin Henry | May 6, 2007 2:53:34 PM
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