Doc Searls and Robert Scoble opened Reboot 7. By good fortune, I caught up with both of them a number of times over the days I was in Copenhagen and I'm delighted that Doc Searls has now posted this about Web 2.0:
So, since Web 2.0 is a hot concept, let's lock our new understanding to that meme. For that, I propose a goal: Make Web 2.0 the best possible commons for supporting free markets and free culture.
Here's a stab at it.
As I explained in a series of talks (Les Blogs, reboot7, Personal Democracy Forum and Syndicate, to name just four), we understand and speak about the Web in terms of four different metaphors. Those metaphors describe four very different Webs:
- When we say we "move" something called "content" through a "medium", addressing or "feeding" or "enclosing" it for "delivery" to "consumers" or "end users", we are saying the Web is a shipping system.
- When we "architect," "design," "construct" and "build" things called "sites" with "addresses" and "locations" (sometimes in a "commons") that get "visits" from "traffic," we're saying the Web is real estate.
- When we "write" and "author" things called "pages" of "hypertext" that we "post" or "publish" so others can "browse" them, we're saying the Web is a library of journals. Since we tend to group publishing with speech, the Web we talk about here is a place for expression.
- When we say we "perform," and we want our "audience" to have an "experience," we are saying the Web is a theater, or a place where entertainment takes place.
Doc links to a couple of sources (that I hadn't come across before) which are really illuminating about Web 2.0: mediatope's 'a cumulative Web 2.0 definition' and Richard MacManus' 'Web 2.0 Definition and Tagging' (his weblog, Read/Write Web, is clearly one worth watching). Via Richard MacManus I got to Adam Rifkin's 'Weblications'. The latter is very, very helpful:
… from desktop applications running on single-machines that helped individuals with productivity through word processing and spreadsheets and email, to enterprise applications in corporate data centers that helped workgroups and companies with productivity through automating business processes... and now to collaborative applications available to anyone from anywhere on the Internet, leveraging an increasingly-connected and ever-faster world. The web is the platform that subsumes the others.
… I have the feeling that we've turned a corner, and that more "only obvious in hindsight" web-based application tricks will be developed in the years to come -- thereby solidifying The Web As A Platform and continuing the spread of The Web Way as more users become True Believers who won't give up their web-based applications no matter how hard the "fat, rich client" camps try. As Joyce Park has said to me, "simplicity is its own revelation." It feels as if the world has had tremendous convergence on the thoughts in this post in 2004, and as a result the future looks very bright for The Web Way.
Doc concludes:
The two keys are free markets and free speech. These are concepts about which conservatives and progressives agree. They are also essential to the persistence of the Net we love and understand as a place that's built to support both.
That's why I say here that the metaphors we need to unite are 2 and 3: place and publishing.
If we make clear that Web 2.0 is about free markets AND free culture, we'll win a lot more arguments about both.
