My Web 2.0 Poke, “A Gushing Piece of Love”
Called Out Via TrackBack
After posting yesterday about Baekdal’s post. I got a trackback from here that talked suggested that it was content light and mostly “a gushing piece of love for the actual story”.
The thing is—is that it was the first time that I found someone who mirrored many of my feelings towards Web 2.0, and since I hadn’t really thought much about how to express my gut feelings about Web 2.0, the post was rather light. Now that I have had a few minutes to think about it further, here is the beginnings of my unleashing on Web 2.0
Jump Onto the Cool Train (Drink the Kool-Aid)
I hate hype and more than that I hate vapid hype about technology that serves little more than the people who want to jump onto to the cool train.
It all irks me as does the term “alternative music” and the like. Where people in a field or an industry label something with an adjective and then they become one in the same.
Many people who talk about the diverging ideas and views between the web of the 90s and the web of today does fit in with the idea of the *next* epoch of the web. Dubbing it Web 2.0 is more of a disservice than a help. No one really knows what it means because it is an open concept and not singular attribute.
An Adjective Come Noun
What worries me most is that when the mainstream media starts educating people on the adjective-come-noun, design and adfirms will start rolling out polished-turd 2.0 and call it Web 2.0 and then the ideals that began Web 2.0 will have been forgotten and replaced with overpriced windowdressing.
Will Web 2.0 be the “alternative music” of the 00s? Let me know what you think?
July 10th, 2006 at 10:36 pm
Hmm. I think you misunderstood my comment. I was not criticizing you for not liking a Web 2.0 thing, I was calling out the fact that there was this awful ‘blog trail’ going on with each step not really adding all that much value.
I think we are actually quite like-minded in our 2.0 thinking! Sorry if my posting sounded otherwise…
July 10th, 2006 at 11:27 pm
Skeptic,
I wasn’t at all offended. It just made me have to check my point of view. It actually was a benefit. It made me really think about some of the reasons I have such an issue with such mantra like adoption of terms.
On the point of the blog trail: it is fairly common to see this type of thing. I guess the issue is that all to many people, myself included, chime in on subjects for which they have an underdeveloped opinion. But for many people, myself included again, we post on subjects that we wish to share with their visitors.
July 19th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
I’ve been running into a lot of this today … it leaves me feeling irritated. Can we define “nice” or “fun” precisely? Probably … but philosophizing would certainly wouldn’t be much fun, and I don’t know what’s nice about making such an effort.
I often find that people who are rabidly against relativism to an equal degree reductionist and mechanistic.
Do you really not have any sense of what’s intended by “Web2.0″? Betcha do. As someone who used Lynx (gopher and telnet?) you know what the transition to Web1.0 was like. Mosaic and Netscape (even 0.72a) was the birth of something new. But did that exhaust the possibilities? Hardly.
I say that my mozdawg.blogspot is Web1.0, even though I (finally) got CSS to do what I had been doing with tables. Does CSS and DHTML exhaust Web1.0? I know what I mean when I say that the design I’ve used on that blog is Web1.0 … and I know what I mean when I say I’m working on a truly Web2.0 design for my new homepage, irrespective of arguments about whether it’s AsynchronousJAX or SynchronousJAX.
Dunno Jay, I’m as averse to spin as any, and more than most (I say I got out of IT when rainbow colored smoke took over … poisonous …. sort of similar to the way click-fraud is polluting things today.) but this seems close to cynical, and that’s no antidote.
How about this: because it involves user experience (like the choice of feed-reader?), all what “cognitive ergonomics” grapples with, I think it escapes exhaustive quantification. And yet it can be described, or at least depicted. (BTW this is the problem I’m working on in public policy: how our discourse has come to be wrecked by jingoistic reaction against post-modernism.)
*Phew! Time for a walk in the evening air!*