'Cross The Breeze

I went to a Web 2.0 seminar yesterday, organised by I-Merge. It was an interesting afternoon, with presentations from I-Merge & McKinsey, talking about how the evolution of the web. And whereas everything around the naming of this evolution – web 2.0 – just sounds as the next best buzz talk, I do like the actual wave or phase in the internet evolution.

And that said, I feel like the evolution going on today is no different than past evolutions we’ve seen the last 10 years. What is clear though is that the popularity of the internet is getting bigger and bigger and so is the attention for those new evolutions. Naming it 2.0 and as such also defining what has been web 1.0 is like comparing the internet to classical software, where typically you need to wait months or years between new releases of new versions. And ain’t that the main difference between software and the web?

Apart from the fact that people start noticing and enjoying everything around social networking, networked applications and networks of intelligence/information it’s maybe not so new as one might think. It reminds me of Moviecritic.com where you could rate movies you had seen and likeminds recommended movies you would probably like. That’s typically a web 2.0 project although we’re talking 1997 here! And how do you think the Smartscreen solution (Hotmail‘s anti-spam) works? Hotmails users flag spam when they get it in their inbox and this community as such creates a dynamic anti-spam solution (supported by software techniques).

The internet has always been in constant evolution. One day it was “content is king” and the next it was “content is king, but distribution is queen”. Smallband vs. broadband, static vs. dynamic, standalone vs. convergence, content management, peer to peer, … exciting business, exciting times for sure.

Web 2.0, Life 2.0, Brands 2.0, … it doesn’t stop these last couple of weeks. Every day you read posts on the internet about this next generation everything, like the change that’s hapening today is bigger than any change ever happened before. When we check out Wikipedia on the subject we can find that we’re at the second phase of Development of the internet. Basically it’s through this web 2.0 that we also learn about what should have been web 1.0 and even web 1.5!

There are clearly 2 opinions about all this next gen internet, and I belong to those who think all this web 2.0 is nothing more than a slogan, a buzzword to try to capture an ongoing evolution on the internet. There’s a good post of Russell Shaw on the Zdnet blog. Marketing did the trick, try a websearch on web 2.0 and you’ll be amazed on all you can find. The web always has been about a logical evolution, about ups & downs, about great new innovators & high user engagement.

Let’s call it a day and just keep on working on this evolution… to be able to look back after a couple of years when somebody comes up with web 3.0 to start all over again.

[Richard McManus on Read/Write Web]

In The Netherlands the interactive agency Clockwork is organising the Working Day Without Internet on December 9th. Reason for this is that we tend to do all communications by mail & IM, even with a colleague sitting 5 feet away, instead of the face to face relationships. I agree that we all ways of communications have their own good & bad aspects and that we have to keep that in mind. I agree that not all communication should be done by email or IM, just as well as it makes no sense to walk the 10 feet to your colleague anytime you have something to tell her/him. And this is something we should all pay attention to.

Organising a day without internet however is not what I see as the solution. The extra fun part in this action is that they (Clockwork – the interactive agency) are using send-to-a-friend, RSS, … and other interactive online options to get people to join. Isn’t it weird you’re using emailing tools to ask people to stop emailing for a day?