Technology and Business Intersect in places you might not expect ...

Most people, when they hear the phrase "Web 2.0" instantly think of Silicon Valley in California. This is likely followed by another image of geeky high school/college kids sitting in a dorm room/mom's basement banging out code while being surrounded by empty pizza boxes and action figurines. (Wait a second, I just described myself ... !) Either that or they envision some Matrix-esque command center with people sitting surrounded by code spewing machines that can only be deciphered by a select cabal of noteworthy, geeky minds. While some of this imagery may be partially correct, there is more to it than that (isn't there always?)

For starters, there are more than just high school and college kids leading the way with Web 2.0. Web 2.0 was really coined by folks that had been in the industry for a long time, who had grown up with computers when they were young, but were far beyond high school/college years themselves. It was these folks, seasoned, older veterans of both business AND computers that captured the idea of the web, what it could be, and what it was/is becoming and managed to put all that not only into words but also into (potential) money making business plans.

As it is, Web 2.0 harnesses the power of the crowd, the social collective as it exists throughout the internet, today. It is democratic, and that is good (but sometimes very scary, too). In keeping with Democracy, I recently read an article that analyzed investments into Web 2.0 by different regions of the United States and was pleasantly surprised at the conclusion. Who invested the most money in Web 2.0 this year so far? Most people would think that it has to be California/Silicon Valley. I would have thought that, too. However, it turns out that New England led the way for investment in Web 2.0 this year, by a whopping 65 percent over what they had invested in the same sector during all of 2006. Wow, the money current got a little quicker, eh?

Of course, this should really come as no surprise, as the old Yankee noggins are pretty good at making money for themselves. If there's an industry to be exploited, a commodity to be purchased and sold, then they'll find it. That is the United States' mantra as a whole, but I think that whole East Coast mentality in terms of business, not to mention the proximity to Wall Street, certainly adds to things. It is literally their job to find ways to make money, to fund markets and make profit, so it was only a matter of time before they took a good look at Web 2.0, what it is and what it does, and decided to throw some money into the pot.

I see all of this as very positive for the development of Web 2.0 and the Internet writ large. Money helps get ideas off the ground, and it helps improve existing ideas. It inspires competition, which is beneficial for the overall health of any market or industry. Of course, money comes with drawbacks as well. Sometimes it inspires a "feeding frenzy" which is reminiscent of a "race to the bottom" where people invest large sums of money unwisely in companies or an industry as a whole with the belief that there's another sucker behind them in line that will end up paying the tab at the close of the party (anyone remember Pets.com?), so long as they get out first.

I sincerely hope that this influx of funds from heretofore unconventional sources is not a dooming note or death knell for Web 2.0. Personally, I think that with the underpinning philosophies inherent in Web 2.0 (social networking, democracy) this risk is greatly diminished. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope for the best. What's great is that WE as USERS of the internet are part of Web 2.0, so any money that goes into it goes to you in some for or another. Pretty cool, eh?

Worst comes to worst, my knowledge of Matrix-esque streaming code is pretty decent, my parents have a nice basement and I DO love pizza ...

Cool Video About Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is Evolution

Web 2.0 is really amazing. It is changing a lot of things, all based upon how we interact with our computers. In a way, Web 2.0 is making the computer a more fluid extension of the human mind. Now, I know that scares some people, and for good reason. No one wants to be The Borg (well, some people do, but they are usually at conferences with lots of laytex on), but the amount of information and the ways in which we can harness it are necessarily limited by our innate humanity. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. We all need to unplug awhile. Remember, human beings evolved BEFORE the advent of computers. We invented them, and thus we are not necessarily adapted to the needs of a machine. Go figure.

But data is power, right? With this in mind it only makes sense that we should, as a species, manage it the best that we can. I know my tone sounds a little high here, and perhaps a little much, but humanity has struggled with knowledge and how to control and manage it since the first people began to write. As the methods of information and retention evolve (say, from papyrus reeds to paper and then to data on chips) so do the methods for managing it. It has to. In a way -- and again, I apologize for the tone – because writing and human knowledge are born of human minds, it only makes sense that the way they are managed should, too.

Tim O'Reilly, one of the guys heavily responsible for coining the term Web 2.0, wrote up a little “chart” of some things that were representative of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. On the left you'll find the original/Web 1.0 sites/ideas, and their respective evolution after the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. I think it's useful, and I'm going to reproduce it below:


Web 1.0 <---------------------> Web 2.0

DoubleClick ----> Google AdSense

Ofoto ----> Flickr

Akamai ----> BitTorrent

mp3.com ----> Napster

Britannica Online ----> Wikipedia

personal websites ----> blogging

evite ----> upcoming.org and EVDB

domain name speculation ----> search engine optimization

page views ----> cost per click

screen scraping ----> web services

publishing ----> participation

content management systems ----> wikis

directories (taxonomy) ----> tagging ("folksonomy")

stickiness ----> syndication


Much of Web 2.0 doesn't revolve around the old paradigm of something having a hard boundary. Instead, much of Web 2.0 can be thought of a using something akin to a gravitational core. Many times this core can be thought of as a set of principles and/or practices that tie together a number of similar sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles. In other words the Web 2.0 concept is intended to function as a core “set of principles and practices” that apply to common threads and tendencies observed across many different technologies. Some sites will be more adherent to those ideals, and thus you will have varying degrees of distance from the ideological core. Despite this rough guideline, there has been little consensus about where 1.0 ends and 2.0 begins.

(on a side note, I tried to format the list in a really neat table format, but Blogger apparently *doesn't* support tables. What's up with that?!)