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Speaking of media cluelessness in regard to Web 2.0....

I wrote something by accident on my blog today that I've reflected on and gotten attached to, a way of explaining, sort of, what's really happening with old media, new media, and the folks who ride about in "horseless carriages" in between the two worlds.

Because I've grown so fond of my accidental metaphor as the day wore on, I decided to share it with you, to see what folks here think of it.

Chris

Link: Chris Boese's Weblog: Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money".

Nick Denton decides to run away from "stupid money"

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

While I am certainly NOT one to think that Nick Denton is the online equivalent of Warren Buffett (heavens, no!), nor do I necessarily think he "gets" interactivity and grassroots media in a real sense (I'd still put him firmly in the "horseless carriage" category), I do have a great deal of interest in the article below.

First, holding my finger up into the wind, I am interested to hear that the "party" is back on. I wasn't too fond of the dot.com bubble "party" of the late 1990s, and my biggest complaint about it was how "stupid money" went around chasing after other "stupid money" in the form of venture capital and angels who didn't read business plans, dispensed with P/E ratios, and worst of all, had NO understanding of the larger concepts governing Internet communities and online interactive spaces.

They were carpet-baggers, in other words, and dumb carpet-baggers at that. And they were so full of themselves, they threw a big party of excess and actually believed it would never end, oblivious that the world of real people online went happily on without them.

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Think about what Web 2.0 means.

What does it mean for me? Maybe I'm half a bubble off here, but Web 2.0 for me means one major step closer to the Semantic Web (the Semantic Web, in my mind's eye, will be driven by AI), with XML- and tag-driven meta-information creating spaces for higher-level "smart content," or content that knows its own name, knows things about itself, can parse itself, and knows how to fit itself into larger contexts. Oh, and all these relationships are formed by many-to-many communication links or conversations, forming and reforming dynamically, on the fly. It's been called an "ecosystem."

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Just think about ways to visualize cyberspace, and think about how relationships can be represented so that items don't exist in space, all by their lonesome, but rather, are defined by their relationships to each other in a vast web of ongoing dialogues and conversations.

Or better yet, visualize a busy parlor with people clustered around, talking here and there in groups. Some of the people there are related, even second cousins twice removed. Some are married. Some are friends. Some are having secret affairs no one knows about. And most importantly, SOME drove in on horseless carriages from this big auditorium a few blocks away, where the only folks allowed to talk had to wait for a turn to get up on stage and hold forth with a microphone and a PA system.

You can tell the ones who drove in their horseless carriages over to our parlor here, because they walk into the room and ignore everyone else, and they just START TALKING IN VERY LOUD VOICES.

Some of the small conversations are disrupted by these obnoxious people, but others are not. This does not daunt the loud-talkers. They raise their voices more. They want everyone to pay attention to them exclusively, even if they kill off the party in the parlor in the meantime. That really doesn't bother them, because enough of the disrupted conversations will be lured into the loud-talkers' orbits, and those people (sheep) can be persuaded that what the parlor really NEEDS is a stage, and maybe, oh, you know, a PA system...

Got that image in your head? OK, now go read about Nick Denton below, and remember, he's no Warren Buffett, and not even a Tarot card reader.

Web 2.0 lives in the parlor, and turning the parlor into an auditorium is NOT Web 2.0. IMHO. The people who have this compelling need to turn it into an auditorium will just take a powder when their audience goes away, jump in their horseless carriages, and ride off in search of another busy parlor to disrupt.

Link: A Blog Mogul Turns Bearish on Blogs - New York Times.

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