July 11, 2006

imagine if web 2.0 had happened first

vanished6378.jpg
[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.

11 Responses to “imagine if web 2.0 had happened first”

  1. WAAAAYYY to close to hime that one!

  2. Agreed. And could we avoid crea­ting a new word and just call it humanisation?

  3. 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?!!!

  4. 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.

  5. Kathy Sierra says:

    John­nie: using exis­ting words is so Web 1.0.

  6. Matt Propst says:

    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!

  7. David Armano says:

    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.

  8. All this talk cele­bra­ting things human reminds me of some current mic­ro­soft cam­paign. That can’t be right.

  9. Mack Collier says:

    “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.

  10. Jim Gleeson says:

    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?

  11. Venkat says:

    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.