Rafael Alvarado on 2009-03-26
My definition is better: http://transducer.ontoligent.com/archives/8
This link has been bookmarked by 41 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 Mar 2009, by Alex Ambrose.
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23 Apr 09
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15 Apr 09
howard erreyWhat Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09
By Bruce Sterling EmailMarch 01, 2009 | 4:33:42 AM
*By the garbled reportage, I'd be guessing some of those kiwis were having trouble with my accent. Here are the verbatim remarks.
THE BRIEF BUT GLORIOUS LIFE OF WEB 2.0, AND WHAT COMES AFTER
Bruce Sterling, Wellington, Feb 2009
So, thanks for having me cross half the planet to be here.
So, just before I left Italy, I was reading an art book. About 1902, because we futurists do that. And it had this comment in it by Walter Pater that reminded me of your problems.
Walter Pater was a critic and an artist of Art Nouveau. There was a burst of Art Nouveau in Turin in 1902 -- because what Arts and Crafts always needed was some rich industrialists. Rich factory owners were the guys who bought those elaborate handmade homes and the romantic paintings of the Lady of Shalott. Fantastic anti-industrial structures were financed by heavy industry.
I know that sounds ironic or even sarcastic, but it isn't. Creative energies are liberated by oxymorons, by breakdowns in definitions. The Muse comes out when you look sidelong, over your shoulder.
So Walter Pater was a critic, like me, so of course he's complaining. The Italians in 1902 don't understand the original doctrines of the PreRaphaelites and Ruskin and William Morris! That's his beef. The Italians just think that Art Nouveau has a lot of curvy lines in it, and it's got something to do with nude women and vegetables! They're just seizing on the superficial appearances! In Italy they call that stuff "Flower Style."
And that's your problem, too, here in New Zealand. Far from the action here at the antipodes, you people, you just don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API! Out here at the end of the earth, you think it's all about drop shadows and the gradients and a tag cloud, and a startup name with a Capital R in the middle of it!
And that's absolute -
26 Mar 09
Rafael AlvaradoThis reminds me of the early 1980s, when punk and new wave had become so thoroughly mainstreamed, that rich Argentine women were getting their hair down in spikes, and wore tight, leopard skin patterned skirts. I made me think of something I called the torus of culture, a cycling donut where the margins cycle into the center and then change again.
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Creative energies are liberated by oxymorons, by breakdowns in definitions.
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So Walter Pater was a critic, like me, so of course he's complaining. The Italians in 1902 don't understand the original doctrines of the PreRaphaelites and Ruskin and William Morris! That's his beef. The Italians just think that Art Nouveau has a lot of curvy lines in it, and it's got something to do with nude women and vegetables! They're just seizing on the superficial appearances! In Italy they call that stuff "Flower Style."
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"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation,' and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
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Lisa M LaneThe Information Superhighway is long dead -- it was killed by Web 1.0. And web 2.0 kills web 1.0.
Actually, you don't simply kill those earlier paradigms. What you do is turn them into components, then make the components into platforms, then place more -
25 Mar 09
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Creative people are unconsciously attracted by the parts that make no sense. And Web 2.0 was full of those.
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things in it that pretended to be ideas, but were not ideas at all: they were attitudes
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A sentence is a verbal construction meant to express a complete thought. This congelation that Tim O'Reilly constructed, that is not a complete thought. It's a network in permanent beta.
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This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world. It's alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.
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"The cloud as platform." That is insanely great. Right? You can't build a "platform" on a "cloud!" That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!
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luckily, we have computers in banking now. That means Moore's law is gonna save us! Instead of it being really obvious who owes what to whom, we can have a fluid, formless ownership structure that's always in permanent beta. As long as we keep moving forward, adding attractive new features, the situation is booming!
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Web 2.0 is supposed to be business. This isn't a public utility or a public service, like the old model of an Information Superhighway established for the public good.
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it's turtles all the way down
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"Tagging not taxonomy." Okay, I love folksonomy, but I don't think it's gone very far. There have been books written about how ambient searchability through folksonomy destroys the need for any solid taxonomy. Not really. The reality is that we don't have a choice, because we have no conceivable taxonomy that can catalog the avalanche of stuff on the Web.
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JavaScript is the duct tape of the Web. Why? Because you can do anything with it. It's not the steel girders of the web, it's not the laws of physics of the web. Javascript is beloved of web hackers because it's an ultimate kludge material that can stick anything to anything. It's a cloud, a web, a highway, a platform and a floor wax. Guys with attitude use JavaScript.
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Before the 1990s, nobody had any "business revolutions." People in trade are supposed to be very into long-term contracts, a stable regulatory environment, risk management, and predictable returns to stockholders. Revolutions don't advance those things. Revolutions annihilate those things. Is that "businesslike"? By whose standards?
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I just wonder what kind of rattletrap duct-taped mayhem is disguised under a smooth oxymoron like "collective intelligence."
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the people whose granular bits of input are aggregated by Google are not a "collective." They're not a community. They never talk to each other. They've got basically zero influence on what Google chooses to do with their mouseclicks. What's "collective" about that?
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I really think it's the original sin of geekdom, a kind of geek thought-crime, to think that just because you yourself can think algorithmically, and impose some of that on a machine, that this is "intelligence." That is not intelligence. That is rules-based machine behavior. It's code being executed. It's a powerful thing, it's a beautiful thing, but to call that "intelligence" is dehumanizing. You should stop that. It does not make you look high-tech, advanced, and cool. It makes you look delusionary.
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I'd definitely like some better term for "collective intelligence," something a little less streamlined and metaphysical. Maybe something like "primeval meme ooze" or "semi-autonomous data propagation." Even some Kevin Kelly style "neobiological out of control emergent architectures." Because those weird new structures are here, they're growing fast, we depend on them for mission-critical acts, and we're not gonna get rid of them any more than we can get rid of termite mounds.
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Web 2.0 guys: they've got their laptops with whimsical stickers, the tattoos, the startup T-shirts, the brainy-glasses -- you can tell them from the general population at a glance. They're a true creative subculture, not a counterculture exactly -- but in their number, their relationship to the population, quite like the Arts and Crafts people from a hundred years ago.
Arts and Crafts people, they had a lot of bad ideas -- much worse ideas than Tim O'Reilly's ideas. It wouldn't bother me any if Tim O'Reilly was Governor of California -- he couldn't be any weirder than that guy they've got already. Arts and Crafts people gave it their best shot, they were in earnest -- but everything they thought they knew about reality was blown to pieces by the First World War.
After that misfortune, there were still plenty of creative people surviving. Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists -- and man, they all despised Arts and Crafts. Everything about Art Nouveau that was sexy and sensual and liberating and flower-like, man, that stank in their nostrils. They thought that Art Nouveau people were like moronic children.
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in the past eighteen months, 24 months, we've seen ubiquity initiatives from Nokia, Cisco, General Electric, IBM... Microsoft even, Jesus, Microsoft, the place where innovative ideas go to die.
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what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.
The web has to stop being a meringue frosting on the top of business, this make-do melange of mashups and abstraction layers.
Web 2.0 goes away. Its work is done. The thing I always loved best about Web 2.0 was its implicit expiration date. It really took guts to say that: well, we've got a bunch of cool initiatives here, and we know they're not gonna last very long. It's not Utopia, it's not a New World Order, it's just a brave attempt to sweep up the ashes of the burst Internet Bubble and build something big and fast with the small burnt-up bits that were loosely joined.
That showed more maturity than Web 1.0. It was visionary, it was inspiring, but there were fewer moon rockets flying out of its head.
"Gosh, we're really sorry that we accidentally ruined the NASDAQ." We're Internet business people, but maybe we should spend less of our time stock-kiting. The Web's a communications medium -- how 'bout working on the computer interface, so that people can really communicate?
That effort was time well spent. Really.
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The poorest people in the world love cellphones.
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Digital culture, I knew it well. It died -- young, fast and pretty. It's all about network culture now.
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There's gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it's not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It's the whole world into transition toward something we don't even have proper words for.
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The Transition Web is a culture model. If it's gonna work, it's got to replace things that we used to pay for with things that we just plain use.
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Not every Internet address was a dotcom. In fact, dotcoms showed up pretty late in the day, and they were not exactly welcome. There were dot-orgs, dot edus, dot nets, dot govs, and dot localities.
Once upon a time there were lots of social enterprises that lived outside the market; social movements, political parties, mutual aid societies, philanthropies. Churches, criminal organizations -- you're bound to see plenty of both of those in a transition... Labor unions... not little ones, but big ones like Solidarity in Poland; dissident organizations, not hobby activists, big dissent, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
Armies, national guards. Rescue operations. Global non-governmental organizations. Davos Forums, Bilderberg guys.
Retired people. The old people can't hold down jobs in the market. Man, there's a lot of 'em. Billions. What are our old people supposed to do with themselves? Websurf, I'm thinking. They're wise, they're knowledgeable, they're generous by nature; the 21st century is destined to be an old people's century. Even the Chinese, Mexicans, Brazilians will be old. Can't the web make some use of them, all that wisdom and talent, outside the market?
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I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I'm bored with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.
The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.
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23 Mar 09
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hat's the key Web 2.0 insight: "the web as a platform."
Okay, "webs" are not "platforms." I know you're used to that idea after five years, but consider taking the word "web" out, and using the newer sexy term, "cloud." "The cloud as platform." That is insanely great. Right? You can't build a "platform" on a "cloud!" That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!
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Then there's AJAX. Okay, I freakin' love AJAX. Jesse James Garrett is a benefactor of mankind. I thank God for this man and his willingness to look sympathetically at users and the hell they experience. People use AJAX instead of evil static web pages, and people literally weep with joy.
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But what is AJAX, exactly? It's not an acronym. It doesn't really stand for "Asynchronous Java and XTML." XTML itself is an acronym -- you can't make an acronym out of an acronym! You peel that label off and AJAX is revealed as a whole web of stuff.
AJAX is standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS.
AJAX is also dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model.
AJAX is also data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
AJASX is also asynchronous data retrieval using XML-http request.
With JavaScript binding everything -
Sun's JavaScript, the binder of AJAX, is the core of the Web 2.0 rich user experience.
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"Collective credit-card fraud intelligence" -- that is collective intelligence, too. "Collective security-vulnerabilities intelligence" -- that's powerful, it's incredibly fast, it's not built by any one guy in particular, and it causes billions of dollars of commercial damage and endless hours of harassment and fear to computer users.
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16 Mar 09
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John Traversa great and funny and lengthy description of why web 2.0 is the future, or something like it.
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15 Mar 09
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12 Mar 09
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08 Mar 09
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After a while you have to wonder if it's worth it -- the money model, I mean. Is finance worth the cost of being involved with the finance? The web smashed stocks. Global banking blew up all over the planet all at once... Not a single country anywhere with a viable economic policy under globalization. Is there a message here?
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Once upon a time there were lots of social enterprises that lived outside the market; social movements, political parties, mutual aid societies, philanthropies. Churches, criminal organizations -- you're bound to see plenty of both of those in a transition... Labor unions... not little ones, but big ones like Solidarity in Poland; dissident organizations, not hobby activists, big dissent, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
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I'm not gonna tell you what to do. I'm an artist, I'm not running for office and I don't want any of your money. Just talk among yourselves. Grow up to the size of your challenges. Bang out some code, build some platforms you don't have to duct-tape any more, make more opportunities than you can grab for your little selves, and let's get after living real lives.
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07 Mar 09
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Nouveau
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acronym
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Nouveau
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garbled
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verbatim
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Nouveau
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Nouveau
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elaborate
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oxymorons
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ironic or even sarcastic
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DELIBERATELY
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vague.
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portals.
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portal
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California tech guru
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maven
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paradigms
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fretful
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metaphor
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ambient
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acronym
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acronym!
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deceit
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whining
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05 Mar 09
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Adriana LukasThis has just been elevated to my Pantheon of 'must read' pieces. :)
web2.0 internet socialmedia technology trends future history culture wired ajax change brucesterling business delicious
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04 Mar 09
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"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation,' and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
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And that's your problem, too, here in New Zealand. Far from the action here at the antipodes, you people, you just don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API! Out here at the end of the earth, you think it's all about drop shadows and the gradients and a tag cloud, and a startup name with a Capital R in the middle of it!
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Now, I wouldn't want to claim that Web 2.0 is as frail as the financial system -- the financial system that supported it and made it possible! But Web 2.0 is directly built on top of finance. Web 2.0 is supposed to be business.
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The reality is that we don't have a choice, because we have no conceivable taxonomy that can catalog the avalanche of stuff on the Web. We have no army of human clerks remotely able to tackle that work. We don't even have permanent reference sites where we can put data so that we can taxonomize it.
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Let's suppose there's a change of attitude within Amazon; they're going broke, they're desperate, the stock price has cratered, and they really have to turn the screws on their users and contributors. Then what happens?
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You might want to talk to some publishers and booksellers about the nature of their own relationship with Amazon. They don't use nice terms like "user and contributor." They use terms like "collapse, crash, driven out of business."
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So I'd definitely like some better term for "collective intelligence," something a little less streamlined and metaphysical. Maybe something like "primeval meme ooze" or "semi-autonomous data propagation." Even some Kevin Kelly style "neobiological out of control emergent architectures." Because those weird new structures are here, they're growing fast, we depend on them for mission-critical acts, and we're not gonna get rid of them any more than we can get rid of termite mounds.
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So I think what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other.
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In Web 2.0, if you were monetizable, it meant you got bought out by the majors. "We stole back our revolution and we sold ourselves to Yahoo."
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You gotta squeeze a penny out of every pixel because the owners are broke. But if you do that to your users, they will vaporize, because they're broke too, just like you; of course they're gonna migrate to stuff that's free.
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In the Transition Web, if you're monetizable, it means that you get attacked.
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I regret the suffering, I know it’s big trouble -- but it promises massive change and a massive change was inevitable. The way we ran the world was wrong.
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03 Mar 09
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don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API!
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Web 2.0 is Wikipedia, while web 1.0 is Britannica Online.
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Web 2.0 is FlickR, while web 1.0 is Ofoto
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Web 2.0 is search engines and Web 1.0 is portals
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O'Reilly!
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"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation,' and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
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Web 2.0 Meme Map.
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This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world.
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Let's look at a few of these Web 2.0 principles and practices.
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"Tagging not taxonomy."
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The reality is that we don't have a choice, because we have no conceivable taxonomy that can catalog the avalanche of stuff on the Web
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"An attitude, not a technology."
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AJAX is standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS.
AJAX is also dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model.
AJAX is also data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
AJASX is also asynchronous data retrieval using XML-http request.
With JavaScript binding everything. -
That sounds kind of alarming... because Sun's JavaScript, the binder of AJAX, is the core of the Web 2.0 rich user experience.
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Blogs -- "participation not publishing."
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Most things we call "blogs" are not "weblogs" any more.
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So -- what does tomorrow's web look like? Well, the official version would be ubiquity.
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But it's too early for that to be the next stage of the web. We got nice cellphones, which are ubiquity in practice, we got GPS, geolocativity, but too much of the hardware just isn't there yet. The batteries aren't there, the bandwidth is not there, RFID does not work well at all, and there aren't any ubiquity pure-play companies.
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The "digital divide
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Half the planet has never made a phone call.
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What are our old people supposed to do with themselves? Websurf, I'm thinking.
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Well, any action is better than whining
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ang out some code, build some platforms you don't have to duct-tape any more
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The future is unwritten
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ed with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch.
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02 Mar 09
Martin Lindner"The cloud as platform." That is insanely great.... Nobody could have tried that before, because that sounds like a magic Ponzi scheme. But luckily, we have computers in banking now. That means Moore's law is gonna save us! Instead of it being really obvi
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Matt Kramer*By the garbled reportage, I'd be guessing some of those kiwis were having trouble with my accent. Here are the verbatim remarks.
THE BRIEF BUT GLORIOUS LIFE OF WEB 2.0, AND WHAT COMES AFTER
Bruce Sterling, Wellington, Feb 2009
So, thanks for having me cross half the planet to be here.
So, just before I left Italy, I was reading an art book. About 1902, because we futurists do that. And it had this comment in it by Walter Pater that reminded me of your problems.
Walter Pater was a critic and an artist of Art Nouveau. There was a burst of Art Nouveau in Turin in 1902 -- because what Arts and Crafts always needed was some rich industrialists. Rich factory owners were the guys who bought those elaborate handmade homes and the romantic paintings of the Lady of Shalott. Fantastic anti-industrial structures were financed by heavy industry.
I know that sounds ironic or even sarcastic, but it isn't. Creative energies are liberated by oxymorons, by breakdowns in definitions. The Muse comes out when you look sidelong, over your shoulder.
So Walter Pater was a critic, like me, so of course he's complaining. The Italians in 1902 don't understand the original doctrines of the PreRaphaelites and Ruskin and William Morris! That's his beef. The Italians just think that Art Nouveau has a lot of curvy lines in it, and it's got something to do with nude women and vegetables! They're just seizing on the superficial appearances! In Italy they call that stuff "Flower Style."
And that's your problem, too, here in New Zealand. Far from the action here at the antipodes, you people, you just don't get it about the original principles of Web 2.0! Too often, you've got no architecture of participation, sometimes you don't have an open API! Out here at the end of the earth, you think it's all about drop shadows and the gradients and a tag cloud, and a startup name with a Capital R in the middle of it!
And that's absolutely the way of the world... nothing any critic can do about it. People do make mistakes, they interpret things wron -
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I respect Web 2.0. I sincerely think it was a great success. Art Nouveau was not a success -- it had basic concepts that were seriously wrongheaded. Whereas Web 2.0 had useful, sound ideas that were creatively vague.
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It also had things in it that pretended to be ideas, but were not ideas at all: they were attitudes.
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Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation,' and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.
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Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core. You can visualize Web 2.0 as a set of principles and practices that tie together a veritable solar system of sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles, at a varying distance from that core.
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Tagging not taxonomy
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An attitude, not a technology
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AJAX is standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS.
AJAX is also dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model.
AJAX is also data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
AJASX is also asynchronous data retrieval using XML-http request.
With JavaScript binding everything
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Leigh Blackall*By the garbled reportage, I'd be guessing some of those kiwis were having trouble with my accent. Here are the verbatim remarks.
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Andrew LongThe title says it all. Brilliant, hilarious, intense and long. Read it.
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01 Mar 09
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Moshe ChasidBruce Sterling did his best to rip the concept of Web 2.0 to shreds
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"Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an 'architecture of participation,' and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences."
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Public Stiky Notes
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