Snip from a report I filed today for Wired News:
The cycle is so predictable, it's almost a natural law: Every new internet movement popular enough to generate buzz also generates a backlash. This time, the debate revolves around the cracks that are starting to appear in Web 2.0, a term coined by O'Reilly Media Vice President Dale Dougherty to describe a post-dot-com generation of sites and services that use the web as a platform — things like Flickr, BitTorrent, tagging and RSS syndication.
While there's no strict agreement on exactly what Web 2.0 is, much of it involves public participation and contributions from the commons. Web 2.0 is very open, but all that openness has its downside: When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer.
These days, peed-in beer is everywhere. Blogs begat splogs — junk diaries filled with keyword-rich text to lure traffic for ad revenue.
Google's PageRank is unfairly skewed by profit-driven search engine optimizers. And experiments in participatory media attract goatses as quickly as they do legitimate entries, like the Los Angeles Times' experimental wiki, which was pulled after it was defaced. Earlier tech innovations — Usenet, BBSes, free e-mail systems, even the open-source software movement — have long faced similar challenges. And many have buckled under the pressure.
Link.
Among the reader responses received today:
I read [this] article and I found it a good read, except that your inclusion of Nick Carr's comment: "A lot of participatory media is mediocre" was too much to bear. This sort of message is shit, if you'll pardon the expression, and his argument that people are turning to the Web because it's free (and despite its mediocrity) is wrong. People turn to where the value is. Every time. Why else would someone pay $18.00 for a Make magazine?
And worse, the quote is elitist. Carr's elitism distracts from the main ideal of participatory media: to make everyone part of the conversation. As democracy is to politics participatory media is to the Web.
Will everyone who participates have a great, insightful point? No, of course not. Will there be spam? Yes, of course there will. But I'm sure Nick Carr's days aren't filled with miracle after miracle, either.
The "mediocre" argument really gets me going, though, because it's anti-people. People are messy, illogical, and mediocre, and that's beautiful. Damn beautiful.
Sincerely, Joshua Porter
Not long ago, Wired News began including a reader comment feature directly on the story pages. More discussion here.
Those in a hurry to cash in on Web 2.0 buzz may enjoy this "Web 2.0 business model" auto-generator: Link. (Thanks, Jim Basman)
