Wednesday, September 19, 2012; 12:16:03 PM Eastern
Un-Web 2.0
- You've heard of unconferences. They take the idea of a conference and flip it around. Instead of having speakers on stage, the speakers are in what used to be called the audience.
- The term has been hijacked to mean something much softer, that the planning of the conference is deferred to the day of the conference. But the speeches are still speeches. The audience asks questions. The experts are on stage. Zzzz.
- But the original concept, pioneered at BloggerCon and the term coined by Len Pryor, was deeply disruptive. And it mirrored what blogging was doing to journalism.
- Un-Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0 as BloggerCon was to RegularOldCon. And as blogging is to journalism. The source and the destination become one. :-)
- So Web 2.0 was nice, as training wheels for the next steps in the future web. A two-way medium. The people who pioneered Web 2.0 are to be congratulated and thanked. But now it's time to Un it. :-)
- Because Web 2.0, while it started out as a freedom-inspiring thing, has been coalescing to being a dangerous form of locking-in the user's data so it can be applied to a corporate business model. We all know the dangers of this. It robs platforms of their openness. It makes moving data around impossible. And it makes creating hybrid systems impossible. It's not a very web-like direction for something that's inspired by the web.
- If the Web is Small Pieces Loosely Joined, Web 2.0 is Small Pieces Trapped In A Silo.
- Hat-tip to David Weinberger for the term.
- In Un-Web 2.0 you get full control of your data, and the services just get pointers to it, or copies of it. The originals live with you. Pointers are much preferable to copies because then you can keep updating the content after it has been incorporated in someone else's content tree.
- Food for thought. :-)