Web 2.0: High Concept, Low Impedance
posted Friday, 30 September 2005
A lot of this week's blog cycles were spent by people trying to define what Web 2.0 is, or debating whether it's worth defining. Contributors all over the blogosphere gave it the old college try while others thew up their hands in despair or horror. As for my personal take, without resorting to buzzwords myself, is that Web 2.0 is a powerful set of ideas that are so effective I believe they will happen by themselves from sheer market forces if nothing else, and without help from the Web 2.0 digerati. Here's why...
For most people, the usefulness of studying Web 2.0 lies in realizing the value in the concepts. We can consciously leverage them already to take better advantage of our daily work on the Web. And for some others it will be a useful set of ideas and practices for building new Web 2.0-friendly places. If all these Web 2.0 concepts are right, creating places with radical trust, high value participation mechanisms, user control of data, collaboration, and information sharing is a good thing and consciously understanding this will hasten all those good things. Either way, the conceptual label is useful shorthand and allows the concept itself to evolve underneath it.
So Web 2.0 is going to happen, and reading everyone's work this week makes me think I know some reasons why. Web 2.0 adds value because of the lower cognitive and intrinsic cost of many of its ingredients when compared to traditional approaches to both using and building the Web. We've all used Web 1.0 sites, and we'll never forget them, though we don't want to use them again. They were just lonely places with meager, aging content and no way to determine if what you see is good or bad. There are no add-ons to improve their experiences nor can their closed designs support them. There aren't alternate ways to customize their content, or even help shape them and get a sense of ownership and accomplishment. It's this daily lower cost/higher value piece that is why things like tagging are much better that categorization, that shared information is more valuable than unshared information, and user participation pulls in communities and aggregates value while user solitude does not. And so on. Web 2.0 will happen and be sustained because it provides higher value to its users, not (just) because it's uber-cool this year.
This implies that it's indeed useful to define what Web 2.0 means to us today, even just to know it when we see it, and to become a discerning consumer of it. At the moment though, even appreciating Web 2.0 is an a effort requiring no small amount of breadth and scope, and it's surprisingly hard work. And so there's no point worrying about making everyone happy about the definition at the moment. I can tell you now, they won't be. But most everyone will learn from the attempt. And I think that's the real point.
In any case, a lot of digital ink was spilled on Web 2.0 definition and discussion since Monday. Let's go over the most recent highlights most may not have seen yet:
- Barb Dybwad's Approaching a definition of Web 2.0. A+ for effort, a quite insightful piece of work along with some nice Web 2.0 visualizations. Best quote: "The long tail is another manifestation of inversion of control."
- Rich Ziade's diatribe Let's Waste a Few Days And Sit Around To Try To Define "Web 2.0". Lots of effort, but not really constructive. Fun reading though. He's right about the noise level too.
- Jono's interesting, wide-angle take on the topic, Web 2.0 - some beta thoughts. Well-written insights from a Web 2.0 group talk led by Dan Perkel, Jono had some Web 2.0 comments on Wednesday you might not have seen elsewhere, particularly about the speed and scale of innovation required of Web 2.0 practitioners.
- Paul Mooney's nice on-the-scene Web 2.0 post today on the cusp of the now completely sold-out second Web 2.0 conference. Good quote: "This year, we're taking Web 2.0 further, focusing not just on declaring the platform, but showing where the innovation is happening and what we might expect in the coming year."
- Dan Brown posted Yet Another Web 2.0 Diagram, saying wisely "perhaps we need to strip a way the things that are consequences of the core principle, not the principle itself.".
- For a completely different view, read Martin Belam's thoughts on how even forward thinking organizations like the BBC are going to struggle mightily with Web 2.0, even though they know they must embrace progress to evolve and survive. Think what Web 2.0 news sites like Digg can and probably will do to traditional news media. One example, participation mechanisms that represent sharing to us often look like stealing to them. Anyway, an interesting examination of Web 2.0 meeting the real world.
I think it's meaningful discussions like the latter that will end up being most valuable. While we can pundit our way around the blogosphere talking our heads off about Web 2.0, it's by grappling issues coming out of actual work creating Web 2.0 places that will inform us the most. That doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun to try to figure it out, but remember, it's participation in all its forms that makes Web 2.0 real. And so that does include talking about it.
More next week as we continue our posts on demystifying Web 2.0 and as the Web 2.0 conference begins.
Technorati: blogoposium1, web2.0links: del.icio.us
Well, I took the bait and posted my own (click on the URL for this entry)
"What is Web 2.0" extrapolation. I just graduated with my masters degree,
and read a lot about complexity, connectionism, information theory, etc, so
my approach was more from that angle.
