Friday, February 16, 2007

Where are we now?

Web 2 point what? In about 100 blog posts I have covered so many aspects for the "new web" that I think I have become disoriented. O'Reilly coined the phrase, probably invented most of it to promote a whole new breed of web ventures for all we know, and now we find ourselves surrounded by it!
So where does that leave us? I really want to know? Certainly we are somewhere past the 1990's, but where. If Sony came up with a whole series of new TV's and other gadgets, would we call that Sony 2.0? Maybe we should devise a new terminology to simply say "new" or improved or different than before.
Is the web different than before though? I am not so sure that it is people. I love the user generated stuff sure, but just how much of the web is user generated and is it any good for anything? I get this image of a sheep herder watching 1000 sheep scurry around in a pasture, knowing full well that they are about to be sheared, and telling them: "good sheep, keep going you are doing great!"
There is no discounting the tons of user created videos, blogs, chats, forums and endless arrays or creative license. However, if all this content just leads to more web content, what are we accomplishing? These are questions I want my readers to answer. I would like for people to think a little bit about this. It is okay if you just want to comment by giving me the finger to get rid of some adolescent angst, I don't mine. It is a blog after all, but just for once I would like to feel the presence of something more than an abbreviated wb, np, wtf, afk or other dehumanizing brevity of contact. Do you feel me folks?
Please have at it then :)