With the summer silly season in full swing, our thoughts have turned to why Web 2.0 has started to get a bad press. Has it reached the point where the cynics are now beginning to outnumber the true believers?
We're particularly amused by wonderchicken's excellent Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator at emptybottle.org. The man has shown true genius in building a simple Web 2.0 vocab masher-upper, in order to randomly generate great-sounding Web 2.0 applications, like:
- beta-test podcasting communities
- design long-tail mashups
- create embedded folksonomies
- reinvent blogging wikis
- syndicate social tagclouds
- remix rich-client life-hacks
- disintermediate rss-capable synergies
Arch cynic Andrew Orlowski also takes the mickey on The Register, using a very Web 0 HTML "mailto:" command to get readers to vote on what Web 2.0 is made up of – answers range from Badger's Paws to JavaScript Worms. Utter El Reg rubbish, but of course beautifully crafted.
The Wikipedia entry reminds us that Web 2.0 does owe a lot to O'Reilly Media and MediaLive, who had a big hand in events and books that effectively invented the phrase to market a "second coming" for the web.
Currently the Criticism section of the Wikipedia entry on Web 2.0 is proving a battleground between defenders of the faith and their detractors. Generous servings of [citation needed] tags are appearing on any statement of criticism.
The entry notes that Josh Kopelman estimates that Web 2.0 is exciting only for 53,651 people – the number of subscribers to Techcrunch, a weblog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new internet products and companies.
Could the Web 2.0 tide be turning?
Here's one I prepared earlier:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.presshere.com/buzz.html
Bobby - way out of date. Techcrunch subscribers are up to around 94K on a week day. Mike Arrington's raking it in.
ReplyDeleteThe debate now is whether there is such a ting as Enterprise 2.0. It was on Wikipedia, now it's gone. Duh?
Yes, but, no, but... It may be 94K but they sure seem to be generating a lot of Web 2.0 heat without necessarily monetising it and making all that effort pay.
ReplyDeleteWell Dennis, you're just going to have to wait for the trees to be chopped down, mashed up, bleached, pressed, ready for my Enterprise 2.0 words to be lovingly laid down. Then, and only then, will you be able to read them.
ReplyDeleteI could have blogged about it, but I had a column to write!
Tim Berners-Lee has also added his voice to the growing list of dissidents who are dismissing all this Web 2.0 nonsense as marketing piffle. Here's a quote from an IBM podcast I found at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/berners-lee_disses_web20.php
BERNERS-LEE: "Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along."
I thought it worthy of revisiting this after umm...12 days.
ReplyDeleteEnterprise 2.0 came and went, and then came back and was up for deletion twice in wikipedia and is now a keeper.
Mike Arrington is said to be raking $60-70K/month. Not bad for a 1 man band and his dog. Plus BusinessWeek reported he raked $50K fomr a single event. Monetizing? He's already there methinks.
What;s interesting is the speed at which things change right now - faster than i've seen in all the years I've been lurking around this business.