July 11, 2006
imagine if web 2.0 had happened first

[This cartoon, one of my favorites was drawn in 1998, at the height of Dotcom.]
Web 1.0 [aka Dotcom] was about the corporatisation and monetisation of the web.
Web 2.0 [aka the Blogosphere] is about the humanification of the web.
So you wonder why blogs are important? Humanification. So now you know.
Funny, imagine if Web 2.0 had happened first, before Dotcom. Humanification before Corporatisation. Imagine all the pain we would’ve been spared.
[Link: Scoble talks more about this.] “The Next Web is The Human Web”.
Funny, didn’t About.com spend over a hundred million dollars trying to put this very same idea into practice, back in the late 1990’s? Remember their ad camaign, “The Human Internet”?
Education is expensive.
[Bonus Link:] “Coke boldly goes where every other clueless control-hungry company has gone before.” Rock on.








WAAAAYYY to close to hime that one!
Agreed. And could we avoid creating a new word and just call it humanisation?
What would we theorise over?! Are you saying that boo.com WOULDN’T have gone bust and that the funds would have gone to clear 3rd world debt 10 years ago?!!!
I’m coming across a number of companies that survived the dot bomb era who are saying that today’s convergence of technologies around social computing have validated what they were trying to do way back when. The difference is accessibility — largely through the fact we have (relatively) sophisticated systems at almost give away prices that previously would have cost an arm, a leg and most vital parts in between. That makes sense to me.
Johnnie: using existing words is so Web 1.0.
If Web 2.0 had happened first, and the web was “humanized”, and assuming you couldn’t change history, and the dot com bust still occured.…
everyone would realize “Damn, she wasn’t lying, it’s true that no one cares about what I think, say, or feel.”
We’d be a world full of unfeeling drones, creating static webpages ushering in the web 1.0 static lifestyle.
EEK! the stuff of nightmares!
If Web 2.0 happened in back in 1998 the bubble burst would have been 10X more violent, spectacular and ridiculous. We needed the lessons of 1.0 to prepare us for the richness of 2.0 (which is much bigger than the blogoshphere)
We’re all wiser and better individuals with the dreaded boom behind us — and that’s why 2.0 will have a better chance of fulfilling the hype. That’s just my opinion…having been fortunate enough to keep my job throughout the whole mess.
All this talk celebrating things human reminds me of some current microsoft campaign. That can’t be right.
“We needed the lessons of 1.0 to prepare us for the richness of 2.0 (which is much bigger than the blogoshphere)”
Hammer meets nail.
Thing is, I really don’t like people who have the need to label everything. Humanization? Personification? Humanification? just another buzzword, just another “fresh spin” on something that is already there.
To say that web 2.0 is any less after money than the previous version is like saying that the alternative movement is no less mainstream than the mainstream movement. Or to say that record companies used to be about the music and now they are about the money. Says who?
We talk about humanification of the web. But what about humanification of software development process itself.
Object orientation has not achieved that. Because we have not yet worried about the relations between natural language and information models in a systematic way.