Verne Kopytoff has a "What's Web 2.0?" article in today's SF Chronicle, and in general it's a fine primer on the concept, neither too credulous nor too cranky. I particularly liked this quote from Dave Winer, which Kopytoff pulled from Winer's Scripting News:
Web 2.0 is a way for certain marketing people to claim they invented stuff that they didn't invent, without actually claiming they invented it.
Although Kopytoff doesn't include the full quote in the Chron, Winer's original post goes on to say:
[Web 2.0 is] the kind of double-talk marketing guys love.
In a sense people are right when they say it's another bubble. It's dishonest like the bubble was. Yet the technologies they're hyping are honest.
Winer's full quote gets at the essence of Web 2.0: a marketing buzzword that nevertheless represents something real. I understand Winer's resentment of marketing bullshit and appreciate his ability to cut to the heart of the matter, but some buzzwords which start out as pure marketing-driven hype gain traction because they effectively translate technical issues for non-geeks like me. Of course, they're subject to abuse by unscrupulous flacks, but that doesn't make the terms themselves illegitimate. (For more on buzzwords, Tim Oren had some interesting thoughts on the useful purposes they serve, which I excerpted last year.)
But Kopytoff goes astray when he backhands Wikipedia:
The reputation of Web 2.0 was recently sullied by Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by volunteers. Held up as a shining example of Web 2.0, it suffered a scandal after one of those amateur contributors rewrote history by accusing a former government official of being involved in the Kennedy assassinations. [emphasis mine]
Scandal? Really? That strikes me as absurd. Crackpots screw around with Wikipedia entries every day. That's the price of having an open system which anyone can edit--it's not called Wikipedia for nothing. But errors are typically corrected within minutes. And debates will rage over controversial and highly politicized topics where a definitive answer can't be found, but that's as true within Wikipedia and other user-supported systems as it is anywhere.
This isn't a scandal--it isn't even a story. It's the way Web 2.0 (sorry, Dave) works. It's the wisdom of crowds. By allowing everyone--no matter what their authority or credentials (or lack of same)--to contribute to the intellectual marketplace that is the Web, we guarantee the system's fluidity and maximize accuracy at the macro level. Of course we sacrifice accuracy at the micro level--with no editorial apparatus constraining the system, anything you read at any given moment could be total bullshit. But in a free, open and fluid intellectual market, bad ideas will eventually be driven out by better ones--and sooner rather than later.
Perhaps it's not surprising that a newspaper article completely misses this point, but it is sad. I love newspapers, and I don't want to see them die--I want to see them adapt and thrive. I'm hopeful that publishers and journalists--the smart ones, anyway--will find a way to do that.
