The Register, ZD Net and PC Pro have all discovered a month-old transcript of an podcast featuring Tim Berners Lee made by IBM and published stories about it within a day of each other. Read/Write web published on the story over a week ago on August 22nd. Is this what they call ‘social news’?
Anyway, they’re delighted that Sir Tim layed into Web 2.0 about it not being the computing revolution that it’s cracked up to be:
I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.
The expression ‘Web 2.0′ was unfortunate. It makes a promise that it’s unlikely to deliver on — a web that’s twice as good, or fixed. If the other Tim, O’Reilly, had stuck to the expression ‘Infoware’, people wouldn’t get nearly so upset about the subject. He told me: “I started talking about ‘infoware’, which is much the same thing [as Web 2.0], at the same conference [Linux Kongress, May 1997] that Eric Raymond started talking about The Cathedral and the Bazaar.”
If Web 2.0 has jumped the shark, then it’s because people find the expression either embarrassing or inviting of mockery. There have been a bunch of startups with fancy interfaces and questionable business models: that doesn’t make for a computing revolution. However, the things that these companies are heralding, what it really stands for — social software, online collaboration, social media, many-to-many communications — aren’t going to go away. As they become mainstream, their importance will start to have the sort of effects that might one day earn a 2.0 label.
And it looks like that’s happening. Check out Google’s new category addition on its news site (pictured).
Share this post:
I wonder what Sir Tim thinks of Web 3.0? (too drunk to laugh)
Is he gonna hate me for coming up with it (for his Semantic Web brainchild) ?
He is from my hood after all (or at least my ex hood [that’s MIT in Cambridge, MA, for the semantically challenged]) so I should be slightly cocnerned.
I’ll attempt spray paint “Web 3.0 is here!” in giant red letters on the ice-covered Charles River (separating MIT from Boston) sometime in January 07.
Any grafiti artists out there?
Marc