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February 5, 2007
Rethink
From Armed Liberal, check out Michael Wesch's impressive — what? Presentation? Movie? Artwork? — on Web 2.0. It happens that I'm not usually captured by the latest computer buzzwords, because my entry into the Internet was in the Spring of 1988, when not only did the web not exist, but its precursor (gopher) did not exist either. With that background, I often see the new buzzwords as old concepts repackaged. SOA? It's just the concept of services — like your web server or FTP server or mail server — where the interface is on port 80 (the web port) and is defined by description files rather than by a pre-agreed protocol. Useful, yes, but hardly earth-shattering in either concept or execution; I'd be happier to see more businesses get the first level of reuse right than to see more businesses jump on SOA — the payback is higher, and most companies haven't gotten to the level of code reuse across projects in the same group, never mind recycling of code and entities at an enterprise level.
In a way, web 2.0 is like that: it's a buzzword for a collection of web services and sites that really are rehashes of things already there. In a way.
But there is more to it than that, because it has always been the case that increasing the number of people capable of sharing information, and the amount of information they are able to share, changes the world. And web 2.0, stripped of the hype and boiled down to the common elements that tie these various sites and services together, is about one thing only: making it possible for everyone to share any information at all, any time, to anyone, without a mediator, a priest, a government official, an editor, a reviewer or anyone else in the way. That is the promise of web 2.0: universality of conversation, creation, art, life.
Now there I go sounding like the various hype-driven tech press organizations. But seriously, that is a non-trivial change. When I was a child, if someone had an idea, their capacity to share it was limited to people who knew them. Maybe a few would have type-written newsletters, perhaps for a school or company, in which they could share their idea. Even fewer, less than one in one hundred, would have the ability to get an idea consistently into the local newspaper, even as a letter to the editor (because there were so many, and such little space to print them). No more than one in a thousand — probably no more than one in one hundred thousand — could get their idea onto the radio, or on TV, or even in a book. The cost of sharing information was high; the speed was low. The barriers to entry, then, were such that relatively few ideas could be widely and quickly shared.
With web 2.0 — a buzzword I still hate — some professor in a relatively minor college has an idea, creates an expression of that idea, and it gets picked up by a guy in Canada, where it is seen by a blogger from Winds of Change, where I see it, and now you see it here. Moreover, at any or every step of the way, the idea and its expression could be passed verbatim, without notable chance of error, or modified into something completely new. I could, for example, take the idea, and make a different presentation, perhaps in the hated Powerpoint. Or I could snip the video apart and put in my own images and ideas to change the emphasis. You can do that, too. Everyone can.
I'm not one for hype, but sometimes it is justified.
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