Emerging Technology-Web 2.0 Arrives -By Steven Johnson
DISCOVER Vol. 26 No. 10 October 2005
I like that he spells out what is being talked out: Now consider how a group of poodle experts might use the Web 2.0.
...she subscribes to a virtual clipping service offered by Google News to send her an e-mail alert when one article mentioning "poodle" comes down the wire... using a standard blogging tool like TypePad or Blogger, she posts a quick summary of the review and links to the Amazon page for the book from her blog. [within a few hours, a service called Technorati scans her Web site and notices that she has added a link to a book listed on Amazon. You can think of Technorati as the Google of the blog world, constantly analyzing the latest blog posts for interesting new developments - one feature = frequently updated list of the most talked-about books.] she takes another few seconds to categorize her blog entry , using del.icio.us, which tags it with her content-specific title, like “miniature poodles,” or “dog breeding.” she can also see all the pages that other users have associated with dog breeding. It’s a little like creating a manila folder for a particular topic, and every time you pick it up, you find new articles supplied by strangers all across the Web.
----how different this chain of events is from the traditional Web mode of following simple links between static pages----
one small piece of new information flows through an entire system of reuse and appropriation within hours. some of this information exchange happens on traditional Web pages, but it also leaks out into other applications: e-mail clients, instant-messenger programs.
the initial information value of the review remains: an assessment of a new book, no different from the reviews that appear in traditional publications. as it ventures through the food chain of the new Web, it takes on new forms of value: one service uses it to evaluate the books with the most buzz; another uses it to build a classification schema for the entire Web; another uses it as a way of forming new communities of like-minded people. hmm. buzz, folksonomy- all about like-minded communities, right?
analogy (equivalent? bah) to the difference between a rain forest and a desert: a rain forest is such an efficient system for using energy because there are so many organisms exploiting every tiny niche of the nutrient cycle. we value the diversity of the ecosystem not just as a quaint case of biological multiculturalism but because it so well captures the energy that flows through it.
In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways, and passing them along to other services. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web -- Technorati and del.icio.us both began as small projects created by single programmers. All of which makes this the most exciting time to be on the Web since the glory days in the mid-1990s.