This is simply marvellous. The guy can play neither drums nor piano but he’s a mean video editor.
Apparently, he did the clip to demonstrate his editing skills. Within two weeks he gets a couple of hundred thousands hits and counting. That’s what I call distribution in the networked world.
The Pew Internet Project tried do so with the release of a report titled Riding the Waves of Web 2.0: More than a buzzword, but still not easily defined.
Let’s get a few things clear right off the bat: 1) Web 2.0 does not have anything to do with Internet2: 2) Web 2.0 is not a new and improved internet network operating on a separate backbone: and 3) It is OK if you’ve heard the term and nodded in recognition, without having the faintest idea of what it really means.Let’s get a few things clear right off the bat: 1) Web 2.0 does not have anything to do with Internet2: 2) Web 2.0 is not a new and improved internet network operating on a separate backbone: and 3) It is OK if you’ve heard the term and nodded in recognition, without having the faintest idea of what it really means.
Disagree with 3). The number of people I have met that throw the term around without knowing about Tim O’Reilly’s article What is Web 2.0? is astounding. In a true buzzword fashion they picked up the meme (good) and attached a meaning to it from their context (good with caution) and stared to throw it around in the following fashion (not good):
The report looks at how online activity during the time known as Web 1.0 differed from that of Web 2.0, using data from market research group Hitwise to support its findings. It points out that the most common Internet activity to date is still sending and reading email, even with the popularity of IM, text, and social network site messaging.
Fully 53 percent of adult Internet users sent or read email on a typical day in December 2005—a figure virtually unchanged since 2000 when 52 percent of online adults emailed on a typical day. That’s more than instant messaging, blogging and online shopping combined. To close, the report compares Web 1.0 website community Geocities to Web 2.0 king MySpace. The Geocities model relied on “metaphors of place” while MySpace “anchors presence through metaphors of a person.”
The report states the obvious – Web 2.0, the social web, is about people. And I don’t think that’s going to change, even if the phrase itself gets tired or dies. Last Wednesday at an AOP conference about Content Evolution I saw a presentation by Tim O’Reilly talking about Web 2.0 but without mentioning the phrase much. Web 2.0 is a valid concept in as much as it’s not about the nuts and bolts of the internet but about increased understanding of what the net is capable of and how the various new behavioural patterns emerge.
These patterns can be built on to increase our options. They always enhance our understanding of the online space and occassionally fundamentally influence the way we interact, communicate, create, distribute and ultimately do business. I believe they bring back the way people communicate naturally (the markets are conversations meme). With a hindsight it’s easy to spot the trends as part of Web 1.0 but that’s because they have always been there. The fact is that very few people (notable exceptions are Tim Berners-Lee, the Cluetrain crowd and those who have been there from the start) understand what the internet, let alone the web, is about. Hence the whole dot com era and imposition of half-baked business models on it. Most people who use it don’t necessarily understand the internet. Well, most people who live on earth don’t necessarily understand it in all its aspects and the bigger picture may still elude us.. a very human condition. The internet has become an environment, pervasive and multi-faceted. And as with most environments understanding has never been a pre-condition of its use… as long as you don’t try to control it. Then it has a habit of blowing up in your face.
So, Web 2.0 still makes sense although various unsavoury marketing and media types have made it rather cheesy and ‘over-exposed’.
A commenter on Groklaw confirms something that’s obvious but needs to be spelled out often, especially for the business types who like to box everything in so they can manage and measure it (just don’t get me started) – new technology changes human behaviour, which in turn gives rise to more new technology and more stuff that is even harder to manage and measure. So there:
Multicast is built into IPv6. This means that a broadcast to 1000 people does not use 1000 times the bandwidth required to deliver the data to 1 person. In fact, it requires exactly the same amount of bandwidth as that required to deliver the data to 1 person. At least from the "broadcaster" up to the point where recipients are on different networks. At that point the data is duplicated by the router and sent along both networks. So, on any one network, the bandwidth needed is only that required to deliver the data to a single user.
This means that anybody can broadcast. Cheaply. This could bring about as large a social change as that which occurred when the Internet became popular. If anybody can broadcast, then people will want the freedom to do so, and will want all the flexibility that goes along with it.
For the non-geeks:
IPv6 is short for "Internet Protocol Version 6". IPv6 is the "next generation" protocol designed by the IETF to replace the current version Internet Protocol, IP Version 4 ("IPv4").
via the forth place
Wikipedia is not losing its momentum. First some vital statistics:
Wikipedia, which was launched in 2001, is now the seventeenth-most-popular site on the Internet, generating more traffic daily than MSNBC.com and the online versions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal combined. The number of visitors has been doubling every four months; the site receives as many as fourteen thousand hits per second.
Given how I feel about metrics, I consider something else a sign of Wikipedia’s continuing journey to the mainstream. The comedy show, Colbert report, uses the online collaborative encyclopedia to coin the word Wikiality. And at the same time it highlights how fallacious TV programmes and shows can be with their own interpretation of reality.
On Monday night’s Colbert Report, the defender of truth himself praised Wikipedia for "wikiality", "the reality that exists if you make something up and enough people agree with you". He urged viewers to "find the Wikipedia entry on elephants and create an entry that stated their population had tripled in the last six months, a fact he freely stated to not know if it was "actually true," with his sidebar stating "it isn’t."
But Wikipedia is not a democracy of content at all. Millions of people being able input their version of ‘reality’ may be democratic in the sense of open access. A handful (in internet terms) of editors determining what sticks, with Jimmy Wales as the ultimate arbiter is monarchy. There are two hundred thousand registered users on the English-language site, of whom about thirty-three hundred—fewer than two per cent—are responsible for seventy per cent of the work. So half the story about Wikiality is missing, Mr Colbert, and you could have found this out without your show stunt.
Scores of internet users took Colbert’s bait, repeatedly vandalizing approximately 20 articles on elephants before all being placed under a lock. The move also subsequently caused Wikipedia administrator Tawker to block Stephen Colbert from the website, reportedly to verify his identity.
This is the kind of smarmy entertainment that we came to expect from TV – make it sound and look good, but don’t scratch the surface and, God forbid, make an informed argument. This is MSM for heaven’s sake! If you want unfiltered facts, credibility and a more complex picture, that’s what the web is for!
Alright, I’ll calm down, it’s a comedy show.
New York Post has a thorough article on Wikipedia asking if it can conquer expertise. An odd question as it pre-supposes that expertise doesn’t reside in the wild where Wikipedia can harness it better than let’s say the Britannica. (I refer the honorable reader to the post on self-determination I blogged earlier). I found the social dimension surrounding Wikipedia astounding.
There are Aspergian Wikipedians (seventy-two), bipolar Wikipedians, vegetarian Wikipedians, antivegetarian Wikipedians, existential Wikipedians, pro-Luxembourg Wikipedians, and Wikipedians who don’t like to be categorized. According to a page on the site, an avid interest in Wikipedia has been known to afflict “computer programmers, academics, graduate students, game-show contestants, news junkies, the unemployed, the soon-to-be unemployed and, in general, people with multiple interests and good memories.”
It is openess that gives rise to a greater variety, which encourages emergence of new alternative ways of…. doing things. In the off-line environment, we are governed by various sets of rules, often locked into place and conflicting, with little choice but a radical breaking down before we see a real change. The online underworld has given us an opportunity to watch real alternatives evolve emergently. Because of its unexpectedness and vastness, the internet has been accepted as chaotic and without structures. This is not strictly speaking true – just because you cannot see a structure, it does not mean there isn’t one. It may be one you are not used to and for many that seems hard to imagine.
Curiously, though, mob rule has not led to chaos. Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures.
…
Five robots troll the site for obvious vandalism, searching for obscenities and evidence of mass deletions, reverting text as they go. More egregious violations require human intervention. Essjay recently caught a user who, under one screen name, was replacing sentences with nonsense and deleting whole entries and, under another, correcting the abuses—all in order to boost his edit count. He was banned permanently from the site. Some users who have been caught tampering threaten revenge against the admins who apprehend them. Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats.
So some people take Wikipedia too seriously it seems. Jimmy Wales is ambivalent about the rules and procedures but believes that they are necessary.
Things work well when a group of people know each other, and things break down when it’s a bunch of random people interacting.
There are varied opinions about Wikipedia mentioned in the article and even Eric Raymond, the author of the Cathedral and the Bazaar (that opened my eyes to open-source back in 1990s and apparently inspired Jimmy Wales) says that Wikipedia is full of moonbats. This completes the circle – the Wikipedia’s entry for moonbat records my contribution to its definition. Gotta love the Web.
via Gothamist
Update: CBSNews.com’s Melissa P. McNamara writes about Colbert report show and Wikiality in her column on August 9th.
This conversation between MP3.com founder and CEO Michael Robertson and YouTube CEO Chad Hurley is a classic example of Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 mindset.
10 has a peek inside Microsoft Research and reveals Tom Cruise’s technology today!
Andy Wilson’s Play Anywhere prototype uses a clever combination of a projector, a camera, and a computer to develop what is probably the most intuitive human interface for digital information yet (Minority Report anyone?).
Gotta love the geeks!
via Alex Barnett
I just remembered. I have already had an alpha geek moment over something like this here.
Cory Doctorow, science fiction writer and one of the best known bloggers in the world (Boing Boing) talks about the future, self determination, mobility and copyright.
Cory’s concluding metaphor is about dead trees in a forest. We need to be able to clear a space on the forest floor so interesting life forms can get light and grow. The dead trees are those companies that have gone through the cycle of commoditisation and need to be eliminated to make room for innovation. There is much juicy goodness, my favourites are about self-determination and content.
Self-determination is good. At cellular level… [example about rats being shot at random intervals follows.] How we got progress, democracy, how we get commerce… total determination over your tools [eg computer programer].. no mediation, that layer where nobody’s telling you what you need to know and what you don’t need to know… what’s the pitch for wikipedia – if it’s wrong, fix it. Why do people get hooked on wikipedia because the Britannica may be more correct and exhaustive but you can’t change it, there is no self-determination in the Britannica, once it’s set, it’s fixed and you can’t make a difference to it…
People that lack self-determination have a kind of hierarchy – children, inmates prisoners, slaves – that’s what it looks like when we take away self-determination. Even budhists love self-determination. Because what could be a greater epitome of self-determination than the ability to ignore mere circumstances and decide for yourself what your mental state will be regardless of objective reality around you. That’s how important self-determination is. Of course, Moore’s Law is an outcome of self-determination…
And then Content is king [in the context of network carriers and handset manufacturers and mobile content]…
Even if I sent you to a desert island and said you get to choose – you can take your friends or your records. If you chose yor records, we’d call you a sociopath. These guys [carriers and networks] who are in the busines of selling conversations can’t figure out how much more valuable conversation is than mere content. Right? They are out of their minds!
Love it!
via Loic
I am spending too much time with executive types with a blackberry. This is so true…
Disclosure: I may not have a blackberry but am equally addictedattached to my ‘gooseberry‘.
This article in the FT took my breath away. Sir Martin Sorrell, the chief executive of WPP, has warned media owners must find ways to attract and retain talent and create stand-alone digital divisions in order to compete in the era of internet blogs, open access and online communities. So far so good. He believes that the shortage in human capital would be one of the main challenges facing companies in the future, and successful companies were those that could "find, retain, and incentivise good people". This is because "young people, accustomed to quick response on the internet, were shunning hierarchical organisations where decision-making took a long time."
You saw this in the first web boom and you’re seeing it now… There are significant changes in the attitudes of young people. They would rather work in smaller, less bureaucratic companies.
So Sir Martin’s solution is to acquire or create separate online operations or divisions to run alongside digital operations built on traditional media brands?! Not to break up and streamline the bloated overpaid bureacratic and hierarchical organisations but swallow up smaller companies that seem to have all the new ideas. What’s wrong with making order in your own house? For an industry that’s suppose to advise and sell businesses branding, positioning and ‘creativity’, this attitude is astonishingly benighted.
Sorrell, when addressing an audience of regional newspapers, talked about the "difficulty of competing against websites that destroyed business models". Note the general tems ‘business models’ as if online commerce has brought an end to all business models. The fact that it only brought the media business models to its knees is easily overlooked by media executives with a geocentric view of their own industry. Referring to Craiglist that has been threatening revenues at US city newspapers he asks:
How do you deal with socialistic anarchists?
And goes on to say:
The internet is the most socialistic force you’ve ever seen.
I could hardly believe my eyes, this is almost too good to be true. It makes my derisory comments about the media industry all the more credible if someone in this position is so ignorant about the nature of the internet and online interactions. The fact that the internet is the most open, accessible, free-flowing, innovative and social space known to man complety passed Sir Martin by. I wonder what definition of ’socialistic’ he has in mind… mine equals despotic, politicised, rigid, wastful and ultimately lethal. And we are not even describing the media industry! I am reminded of a joke back in the old socialist days: Do you know what would happen if they introduced socialism in the dessert? They’d have to import sand within three months. But I digress.
Sir Martin also shrewdly observed that "while his agencies and Google were co-existing, the search giant could make life difficult for the advertising industry." I believe the appropriate response is…er, no shit, Sherlock.
For a more ’serious’ point I have to borrow one of Hugh’s cartoons:
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark tells CNET News.com’s Greg Sandoval he’s no "socialistic anarchist".
In the east there is a shark which is larger than all other fish. It
changes into a bird whose wings are like clouds filling the sky. When
this bird moves across the land, it brings a message from Corporate
Headquarters. This message it drops into the midst of the programmers,
like a seagull making its mark upon the beach. Then the bird mounts on
the wind and, with the blue sky at its back, returns home.
The novice programmer stares in wonder at the bird, for he understands
it not. The average programmer dreads the coming of the bird, for he
fears its message. The master programmer continues to work at his
terminal, for he does not know that the bird has come and gone.
rendered by Alec Muffet in a comment on Jackie’s blog.
No comment. Nalts rocks.
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