In a post at the Social Software Weblog, Barb Dybwad joins the recent round of online discussion of Web 2.0, starting with praise for the relatively simple definitions offered by Richard MacManus and Susan Mernit, which we cited in an earlier IPD post. In addition to her insightful comments, Barb’s post features two helpful graphical depictions, one of which positions a wide range of web services on a grid defined by two axes: “social—individual” and “established/familiar—discovery/serendipity.”
Barb suggests that “remixability and innovation…is the primary key of Web 2.0. The flexibility and modularity of the building blocks of Web 2.0 are lowering the barriers of participation drastically. As more and more people can play while needing less and less knowledge of the technical underpinnings of the tools, the potential for radical innovation increases enormously.”
I think the most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 are new tools that explore the continuum between the personal and the social, and tools that are endowed with a certain flexibility and modularity which enables collaborative remixability — a transformative process in which the information and media we’ve organized and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services.
One of the early lessons that pioneering Web 2.0 services like del.icio.us and Flickr taught us is that information that we organize well for ourselves has a very happy serendipitous side effect, in that it also tends to make that information more useful to other people. The tools of Web 2.0 exist in this interplay between information we organize for ourselves and that which we share with others.
We no longer have time to labor over presenting information in different ways for different contexts, and the technology of open web standards has enabled a far easier repurposing of information. . Here’s the beauty of RSS — publish once, syndicate anywhere.
On the democratizing and decentralizing elements of Web 2.0:
Robert Young elucidates this concept rather well. There is a tension between business and community, and Web 2.0 is pulling hard towards inverting traditional power structures downwards. Companies create the code and the frameworks, but more and more, users are creating the content, the culture, the true value of the systems they inhabit. Wise companies will realize they must be extremely proactive about sharing power and control with their users, because real people investing real time and energy have real emotions, and when angered by perceived loss of control will quite simply take their time and energy elsewhere, leaving empty, valueless code and frameworks — no matter how “functional” or “useful” they may appear in an objective sense. Wise companies will also realize that innovation need not come only from within the walls of the corporation, but will also be coming in droves from their users.
The culture of hackability and DIY is part of this inversion of control. We’re moving away from the days of “one size fits all” and monolithic tools developed to try and please everyone, into an era of user-centric, user-configurable tools — because the tools we’re now using have an architecture of flexibility that allows hyper-customization at the individual level. The long tail is another manifestation of the inversion of control, in which a coalition of small markets is starting to wield a level of control comparable to popularity, hit-driven markets. The rise of the Creative Commons and challenges to intellectual property and copyright are also about the inversion of control, in which individuals and groups are bypassing traditional media rhetoric of ownership and control and creating our own culture in which media has more value, not less, when remixed and recombined. This is successful because the internet has democratized methods of distribution, and we need not wait for “culture” to be handed down from on high by broadcast media. We create culture; we are culture.
Mitch Shapiro at 8:24 PM|Comments(0)
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