It's technically New Years Eve where I am, as I write this. I haven't done much blogging over the past week, because I've been re-charging my batteries and making plans for 2006. In this post I reflect on the year that's past and tell you a bit about my plans for R/WW in 2006.
A year ago I set myself a goal to convert my hard work on Read/WriteWeb into real-world success, particularly career wise. The fact I was able to quit my day job in August and then earn a living as a self-employed Web Consultant -- I think that means I achieved that goal. Plus I visited America, a place I've long dreamed about, for the first time in October and met many of the people I'd gotten to know via blogging. At the start of 2005, Read/WriteWeb had around 500 RSS subscribers. Just before the xmas holidays I'd reached a shade under 8,000. Not quite the level of growth Techcrunch has enjoyed, but not too shabby ;-)
Since this is a personal post and all but the first 500 of my subscribers has by now tuned out ;-)... let me take this opportunity to thank some people. Marc Canter was the first person to give me ongoing work. Marc's the first at a lot of things, so keep an eye out for DLAs and Broadband Mechanics in '06. Susan Mernit has given me a lot of interesting work this year, which has kept me on my toes and sharpened my skillset. I've also done work for Rojo, Nooked, Aqute Research, ZDNet (blogging), New Zealand National Library, Idealog, O'Reilly Media. Also a huge thanks to R/WW's sponsors this year.
In 2005 I met a number of amazing bloggers in person. Too many to mention, so I won't even try to list them all! But a special shout-out to my Web 2.0 Workgroup co-founders Mike Arrington and Frederico Oliveira. Also I owe a big thanks to Havi Hoffman and Elizabeth Osder from Yahoo, who introduced me to the good people of Yahoo and showed me around the campus in October. Finally I must mention the spicy noodles dinner with Mike, Fred, Gabe and the one and only Dave Winer. An evening to remember.
More travel beckons in 2006. I'm coming to Seattle at the end of January for Microsoft Search Champs. Also Ben Barren is trying to entice me across to Melbourne, to help him kick-start online media in Australia. So it'll be interesting to see how it all pans out career and life wise next year.
I'm planning to ramp up Read/WriteWeb in 2006, focusing on the intersection of Web technology and media. I really want to make R/WW a thoroughly professional site, where you can come to get the latest news and views relating to Web-based media. Just as one year ago I was excited by the possibilities of Web 2.0 (the Web as platform), now I'm excited by what I expect will be a huge year in 2006 for digital media. It's building on the Web as platform, taking it to the next level.
I like to be one step ahead of trends, so expect big things from Read/WriteWeb next year. Happy new year everybody!
William Slawski has compiled two very useful lists of acquisitions, first by Google and now by Yahoo (see also The Guardian's list). I'll add the third, Microsoft's acquisitions as listed on their corporate site. From 2003 on:
Nov. 3, 2005: FolderShare
Nov. 3, 2005: media-streams.com AG
Aug. 30, 2005: Teleo Inc.
Jul. 20, 2005: FrontBridge Technologies
Mar. 10, 2005: Groove Networks Inc.
Feb. 8, 2005: Sybari Software Inc.
December 16, 2004: GIANT Company Software
April 26, 2004: ActiveViews
April 30, 2003: PlaceWare
Feb. 19, 2003: Connectix
The crucial one there was Groove, which Microsoft acquired on March 2005. It seems to have acted as a catalyst for their 'software as a service' strategy - Groove CEO and now Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie has been a leading light in that. Microsoft's acquisitions history suggests they strip off the technologies and human assets from their acquisitions and put them into Microsoft products. Not dissimilar to what Yahoo and Google do nowadays too.
I'd say Yahoo's key acquisitions over the past few years have been Overture (search), Oddpost (email), Ludicorp/Flickr (social software street cred). You can definitely see a pattern to all of Yahoo's purchases, because they usually get eventually re-branded and folded into the Yahoo business as part of their wide and deep product line. Overture products for instance are now Yahoo! Search products. Oddpost has morphed into Yahoo's Gmail competitor, the new-look AJAX-driven Yahoo! Mail. And Flickr's presence is being felt across the board, in products such as My Web 2.0 and Yahoo 360.
Google is a bit harder to figure out, because as Adam Rifkin noted a couple of months ago, Google tends to buy "small, creative, engineering-driven teams with no-bullshit cultures and interesting products and/or innovative technologies". Maybe the difference comes down to semiotics, as Ben Barren wrote:
"Yahoo's M+A semiotics read : fun, jagged, dangerous in the same way a rollercoast ride is; delicious, flickr, konfabulator (sadly renamed) Google's scrip semiotics are more complex, obtuse, asexual + asynchronous : Android, Akwan, Urchin, Keyhole."
Whatever the outcome of all these acquisitions, expect more to come in 2006. Already people are talking about a Microsoft/Newsgator deal, Yahoo/Netflix, Yahoo/CNET, Yahoo/TiVo. And what about Google/Feedburner? (a shock pick suggested to me by one of my correspondents).
On 9 January 2005, I published the first of my Web 2.0 Weekly Wrap-ups. When I launched it I described it as "a weekly summary of news and views relating to Web 2.0 (Web as platform)." I pumped out one a week for the rest of 2005. In many ways I viewed the Wrap-Up as the anchor for my blog.
Currently the Weekly Wrap-Up is on a break - as I enjoy the New Zealand summer weather, mow the lawns, quaff coronas, spend quality time, do maintenance on R/WW's design, strategize for 2006 and watch the cricket. So this is a good opportunity to look back at the highlights of the Weekly Wrap-Up in 2005. I'm not sure what form it will take in '06, but it served me well in '05.
Here's a list of one highlight chosen from each Weekly Wrap-Up throughout the year. In a way it tells the story of the whole Web 2.0 meme, as it rolled out and eventually drove some of us to distraction. Time Magazine better hurry up and put Web 2.0 on their cover...
2-8 January
2005: Six Apart acquires LiveJournal
9-15 January:
Feedburner releases statistics for RSS Aggregator market share
16-22 January:
Lawyer Martin Schwimmer opened up a can of worms with his request (granted) to have his
RSS feed removed from Bloglines.
30 Jan-6 Feb: a
sensationalistic headlines special. Top story: Bloglines Shocker! Butler Buys Master of
the Blog Universe!
7-13 Feb:
43Things gets both positive and negative publicity from Salon.com in the space of 24
hours.
14-20 Feb: NY
Times Buys About.com.
21-27 Feb: an
Oscars special. Best New Web App Approach That Isn't Really New = AJAX!
28 Feb - 6 Mar:
"If Web 2.0 was a school classroom, then Yahoo would be the teacher's pet right
now."
7-13 Mar:
Microsoft's Start.com
21-27 Mar:
"So... what was new at Yahoo this week?"
28 Mar - 3 Apr:
del.icio.us gets funding
4-10 Apr:
"Advertising within an RSS feed is a sensitive issue and it's a case of softly softly for
publishers, but I do think we're turning a corner."
11-17 Apr:
Rupert Murdoch's Sermon From The Mount
18-24 Apr:
Mobile Web 2.Woe
25 Apr - 1 May:
"This week Google released two major updates to their online advertising services, which
account for 97% of Google's revenue."
2-8 May: Sirius
Satellite Radio Inc. launching a podcasting show, to be hosted by ex-MTV star Adam
Curry.
9-15 May:
Greasemonkey gives power to power users
16-22 May:
Google factory Tour: "New? Google Personalized Homepage, Google Earth (a satellite
mapping service), AdSense for Feeds, language translations."
23-29 May:
Techie Post of the Week: chmod 777 web
30 May - 5
June: RSS Ripoff Merchants
6-12 June:
Introducing... New apps on the block
13-19 June:
International Special
20-26 June:
"The biggest story of the week, probably even the year, was Microsoft's bearhug embrace
of RSS."
27 June - 3
July: Thoughts on Yahoo! My Web 2.0
4-10 July:
London bombings
11-17 July: RSS
Growing Up So Fast
18-24 July:
News Corp bought MySpace - implications
25-31 July:
Ajax Backlash
1-7 August:
Hype 2.0
8-14 August: "A
lot of interest this week in how the label 'RSS' is being usurped by 'feeds' or 'Web
feeds'."
15-21 August:
Flock and Wordpress.com released.
22-28 August:
Google releases Google Talk.
29 Aug - 4 Sep:
Social tools help in Katrina Hurricane
5-11 Sep: "News
this week that Microsoft is releasing a set of developer APIs for four MSN properties:
MSN Virtual Earth, MSN Messenger, Start.com and MSN Search."
12-18 Sep: eBay
confirmed its acquisition of Skype for between $2.6 - 4.1 billion.
19-25 Sep:
"This week saw a big increase in blog posts about Web 2.0, probably because of the
upcoming Web 2.0 conference."
26 Sep - 2 Oct:
"A lot of online trees were felled this week to write about what Web 2.0 means."
3-9 October:
Web 2.0 Conference Special
10-16 Oct:
Susan Mernit quote: "The Valley is humming with activity and with what some say is
acquisition fever, but is often the happy sounds of geeks being creative."
17-23 Oct:
"This was the week when the Web 2.0 Naysayers reached a crescendo of cynicism and even
bile."
24-30 Oct: Big
3 news...
31 Oct - 6 Nov:
Microsoft Live wrap-up
7 - 13 Nov:
"There's something about the Web 2.0 meme that drives people into either passionate,
sometimes bubble-icious behavior - or enrages them into cyncial, often foul-mouthed
rants. There's not much middle ground."
14-20 Nov:
Google Base - the good, the bad and the ugly
26 Nov - 2 Dec:
Yahoo integrates RSS into Yahoo! Mail and their alerts service.
3 - 9 Dec: Open
up your media, the Lightnet revolution is here.
10 - 16 Dec:
Yahoo buys del.icio.us
Last year about this time I did a post celebrating the best Web companies of 2004. I was planning on doing a mega version of that this year, extending it to software and services. But then Dion came up with his excellent list of best Web software of '05, as close to definitive as you'll get. So I'm going to focus once again on companies and innovators - the people behind the products and services.
Best Web Bigco of 2005: Yahoo!
Last year I thought Google was the best bigco, with Amazon a close runner-up. As I wrote last year: "2004 for Google saw the release of Gmail, Orkut and Google Desktop Search, the popularization of AdSense, and an IPO." Pretty hard to top that. So it was curious that this year Google didn't fire as many convincing shots. They still had successes, notably Google Maps and the all-encompassing Adsense and Adwords. But they had a number of underwhelming products launches too: Google Talk, the RSS Reader, Personalized Homepage, even the potentially big classifieds offering Google Base was a fizzer (as a product).
Amazon had a quiet innovation year by their standards, but they reminded us of their presence right at the end with two thought-provoking launches: Mechanical Turk and Alexa web services.
So if Google and Amazon didn't make the grade this year, who did? Two big companies stood out for me: Yahoo! and Microsoft.
You may be surprised at the latter choice - Microsoft a Web company? But in 2005 Microsoft has embraced the Web as a development platform in a big way. In late June they announced RSS integration in Vista, the next Windows OS. Then in November came an extension to RSS called Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE). This was followed by The Live Era announcements - Windows Live and Office Live. Their catchphrase was 'software as a service' and the release of so-called leaked documents by Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie confirmed that Microsoft is meeting the Web challenge head-on.
However the most impressive Web company this year has got to be Yahoo. Ever since they introduced RSS into the MyYahoo portal in 2004, I've been following them closely. This year Yahoo acquired 3 of the trendiest Web services: Flickr (my best LittleCo in 2004), del.icio.us (my runner-up last year!) and konfabulator. As my post earlier this week illustrated, Yahoo has integrated RSS into a whole suite of products: from mobile, to news, to podcasts, to email. They also released Yahoo 360 (a social networking platform), My Web 2.0 (a relatively unsuccessful imitation of del.icio.us), a Podcasting service, Yahoo Shoposphere, ... too many things to mention or link to! They're also still the world's top website. Yep, Yahoo! is the Best Web Bigco of 2005 and I defy anyone to argue with that.
Best Web LittleCo of 2005: 37Signals
As I mentioned above, last year I gave this to Ludicorp - the then independent company
that created Flickr (now of course owned by Yahoo). There are a lot of 'smaller'
companies that continue to battle away in the shadow of the big companies - not all of
them trying to cash out to the bigcos either. Ones that spring to my mind are Feedburner,
Technorati, Feedster, 43Things.com, Topix.net, Findory, Odeo, Broadband Mechanics,
WebJay, Jotspot, Six Apart, PubSub, Rojo, Newsgator, MySpace, Facebook, Gawker, zvents,
Flock, Blogbridge, Chandler, Firefox, Adaptive Path, Spanning Partners, SocialText... I
could go on all night and I apologize to those I missed mentioning.
But the one LittleCo that really stood out in the Web world in 2005, based on the buzz it created for itself and its almost slavish 'less is more' design philosophy, was 37Signals. Their flagship product is Basecamp, a web-based project management product. Their other claim to fame is Ruby on Rails, an open source web development framework created by 37Signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson. Ruby on Rails got rave reviews from developers throughout 2005 and at one point it seemed like every 'cool' Web startup was using Rails!
The other thing I have to admire about 37Signals is the community of people they've created around their products and philosophies, centered at the Signal vs Noise weblog. The number of comments they get on that weblog is phenomenal. Love 'em or hate 'em, 37Signals shows that a little Web company can still have a big impact.
Most Promising Web Company/Innovator: Memeorandum & Digg.com
Last year I gave this award to Feedburner, which I said "burst onto the scene in 2004 with the one essential service that bloggers were missing - a way to track RSS statistics." They haven't let me down in 2005, continuing to innovate and becoming the best RSS Publishing service around.
When I think about what will be the big products and services in 2006, I look (as I did last year) to RSS services and also next-generation search services. There's a real need for search services that can not only aggregate the vast amount of content on the Web - but effectively filter and organize that content based on individual preferences. There are some promising companies tackling this big problem: Rojo, Findory, Newsgator, PubSub, Topix.net, digg.com.
One innovator - not a company but a single person, as it often is when starting out - came up with a great solution in 2005 that captured the imagination of many people. Gabe Rivera's memeorandum bowled me over when he first showed me the beta in September this year. It very quickly became one of the few sites I continually visit, to check out the latest technology news. It's not perfect and I think Gabe would be the first to admit that, but the mix of clustering and aggregation is IMHO currently second-to-none. It's a hint at what I hope to see more of in 2006. If Gabe adds personalization to the mix, well...
Digg.com is also an extremely promising service. It's already overtaken Slashdot in many regards, but what impresses me is the vision of the digg developers for future enhancements. In a BusinessWeek interview, the founders spoke of their plans to make digg customizable:
"One of the things we're already developing is making digg as customizable to the user as possible. You may want to create your own version based on certain interests or create category views that allow you to see those interests. There are lots of different ways we plan on presenting the data."
They also mentioned opening up data with APIs and making digg "a little bit smarter".
Memeorandum and digg.com: two services to keep an eye on in 2006.
Summary
2005 has been a great year for web-based companies/innovators and we've seen a few surprises too. The dip in form of Google and Amazon, Microsoft coming to the party big-time, Yahoo streaking ahead of them all and set to challenge the big media companies, Feedburner moving into item-level feed management late this year (a sign of things to come in '06), 37Signals being an exemplar of how to run a small Web business, memeorandum and digg.com blowing us away with their innovation.
I hope 2006 continues to roll out great Web products and services. I can't wait to see which companies make it big in '06!
After
my phone-throwing incident earlier this week, I think I've calmed down enough
now to do the equivalent of going
on the Letterman show and saying sorry to anyone I offended. My friend Mike Arrington called
me a traitor and others baled me up about what I wrote. My position hasn't
changed, but I think I can do a better job of explaining myself. So let me try and
clarify my position on Web 2.0.
1. I won't be entering into any more debates about what is or isn't Web 2.0. It's a dead issue, as far as I'm concerned.
2. I will try my very best to refrain from using buzzwords, including the term 'Web 2.0' itself.
3. I won't throw any more phones.
Here's my main reason why:
The term has become too overblown and nebulous - and is holding us all back. We're too focused on debating its meaning and fighting off the cynics, to make real progress with the actual technologies. But to be clear, I will continue to write about the technologies and impact of this current era of the Web. I am still a card-carrying member of the Web 2.0 Workgroup. I still run a ZDNet blog called Web 2.0 Explorer. I am still writing a book about designing networked applications. The main change, which I referred to in my original post, is that my blog Read/WriteWeb will become more focused on media-related Web technologies. Nothing else has changed, except I won't be playing buzzword bingo anymore.
This isn't a 'You're either for us or against us' scenario, as Mike put it. Or me leaving the Irish Mafia for the Italians, as Ben Barren put it. There are no black and white Bushisms in my world. This is a 'What will get me writing about the value of the Web again, rather than debating schmucks and semantics?' scenario. This is my declaration that the Web 2.0 debate is dead and it's time for us all to move on.
Capiche?
- Dan Gillmor is building a non-profit 'Center for Citizen Media', moving on from his previous (for-profit) project called Bayosphere. [via SiliconBeat]
- The much-anticipated Pegasus News has released their first product, a music and entertainment news site called TexasGigs. It started as a music blog by Cindy Chaffin in 2002 - Chaffin will continue to be the chief editor in the new Pegasus operation. It's interesting that TexasGigs keeps its blogger-created brand, rather than adopting the Pegasus News style (whatever that turns out to be).
Steve Outing on Poynter remarked:
"A key characteristic of the Pegasus model is to have people like Chaffin drive the site, while soliciting citizen submissions and offering lots of opportunities for user interaction. It's very different from some other citJ sites like those of Backfence.com, which simply offers local citizens an easy way to post articles and photos without a highly visible editor driving things from the core."
- Speaking of Backfence.com, Jay Rosen sent me a link a week or two ago to an article on his site PressThink about Backfence. Liz George wrote the article. She runs a similar site called Baristanet, but with a different model. She said the issue with Backfence is that it's not creating much interest from 'citizen journalists': "...how will Backfence drum up more users to produce the content if there’s so little there to draw users?"
Finding that balance between professional editors and 'citizens' who contribute content is crucial in these ventures, it seems. I don't have all the answers, so it'll be interesting to watch how the above ventures progress. I do like that Pegasus News decided to run with the unique brand that Cindy Chaffin built up with TexasGigs.
This image from a Scott Gatz presentation sums it up:
2005 was about introducing RSS to the products listed in Scott's picture. 2006 will surely be about how to organize all those RSS feeds, for mainstream people in particular.
Feedster has named Read/WriteWeb one of their Feeds of the Year. Their summary of my blog is pretty funny, given the controversy over the past few days. Russell Shaw, whose post was the final straw which led me to declaring myself fed up with all the Web 2.0 hype and debate, was one of the judges!
Talk about coincidence. A couple of days ago on my ZDNet blog, I wrote a post that I titled Web 2.0? It Doesn't Exist. The theme of my post was that the designation "Web 2.0" for many new Web applications is overgeneralized, implies a commonality that is not there, and is, above all, a marketing-driven contrivance. Now, coming in at #13 in our countdown is Read/Write Web- a feed by Richard MacManus, one of the popularizers of the Web 2.0 concept. Just yesterday, Richard swore off the designation after he read my post. I promise you, I judged this feed before this all went down. The main thing is, though, that Richard still believes in the underlying technologies of what some would call "Web 2.0." Guess what- I do too .-- Russ.
Dana, though, has his own take. That's totally cool. I value diversity of thought.
Judge Dana Blankenhorn-"A great blog for Web 2.0 fans, covering both tech and business issues, with good links. Well written, decently presented, highlights his own ZDNet blog Few people leave comments, though. Maybe because the feed is excellent."Judge Betsy Richter doesn't have any comment, but if there was a "Web 1.0" and is a "Web 2.0," I'd say that Betsy, who was the founding editor of Excite.com when it was "exciting," is equally at home in both worlds.
Thanks Russ, Dana, Betsy and Feedster. I'm honoured that you chose me.
p.s. Dana brings up a good point - why don't I get more comments? Maybe it's my attitude ;-)
I've published a post on ZDNet that details how the Web was used for good in 2005, in very bad situations. It was actually something I wrote for the book I'm working on with Joshua Porter, but it will almost certainly not be used (due to the book having a design focus). So I thought I'd share it with you now, because I learned a lot researching that extract.
The most emotionally affecting memories of 2005 were the two huge natural disasters that struck the world - and how people responded to them. In this post I will review how the Web was utilized by thousands of people to help and to deal with those tragedies.
The Tsunami
When a magnitude 9.0 earthquake caused huge tsunami waves to hit coastal areas of south and east Asia in late December 2004, the public response was one of shock and then emergency assistance on a global scale. It quickly became apparent that the Web was being used in response to the disaster in three main ways:
1) as a constantly updated source of news about the disaster;
2) as a way for ordinary people to respond emotionally;
3) and probably most importantly, to organize aid efforts. [Full story on ZDNet...]
Well my declaration that Web 2.0 is dead set the cat amongst the pigeons. Let me give a bit of background...
I've been thinking for a while now about re-focusing Read/WriteWeb onto more media-related Web technologies. Many of the things I'm interested in are being done by Yahoo!, which by now is generally recognized as a media company. Web-based media assignments make up the bulk of my freelance work, for various companies in Silicon Valley. So for the sake of my career it makes sense to re-focus Read/WriteWeb onto Web media.
So that's one factor. Another is of course the hype and cynicism around the term 'Web 2.0'. I've been writing about Web 2.0 for well over a year now, much longer than any other blog out there that proclaims itself to be about Web 2.0. I thoroughly enjoyed it, up till about a month after the Web 2.0 Conference in 2005. But in the last couple of months, the enjoyment has gone. Part of the reason is the number of cowboys and critics that have entered the 'discussions'. Most of the attraction of blogging for me is in having great discussions with other people passionate about the Web. What I've been dealing with lately is responding to, or (when I'm in a more sensible mood) filtering out, people who most certainly AREN'T passionate about the Web. It's literally draining the energy out of me and making blogging an unpleasant experience. I never thought I would say that. So I knew I had to change something.
But why turn my back on Web 2.0? Well let me just clarify that what I'm turning my back on is the actual term 'Web 2.0' - not the technologies and definitely not the social changes we're seeing in this current era of the Web. Personally I want to focus back on the Web technologies, rather than arguing about what is or isn't 'Web 2.0'. I love the Web and always will (overly sensitive and heart-on-sleeve person that I am). But it's the core concepts of the Web that I'm interested in and what I want to focus on. If you want to continue to attack or defend 'Web 2.0', then be my guest. Just don't expect me to participate in that any more.
I want to respond to a few people that I respect. I've gotten to know a lot of great people over the past year and Mike Arrington has been one of them. He's a bit annoyed by my outburst, going so far as to invoke Kyle from Southpark. Mike wrote:
"Look at Flickr. Look at Delicious. Look at Riya. And 1,000 more. My God, how dare you tell me that someting amazing and new, completely new, hasn’t happened on the web. Web 2.0 isn’t about wikipedia definitions and neatly wrapped bundles of functionality that non-innovators can use to understand what’s going on. It’s about the web coming out of a nuclear winter and bursting forth in a fit of chaotic growth. It’s about hope and love and getting ridiculously wealthy by ignoring the wisdom of those around you who say “your idea, it sucks”.
Don’t be so eager to tear down this castle in the sky. It may not be so easy to build it yet again.
:-)"
The mistake I've made over the past year is getting too obsessed by definitions - the Wikipedia one and others. Mike never fell into that trap and so he is 100% correct to say that it isn't about definitions. We are in a new era of excitement about the Web and that is, I guess, as close to anything the definition of Web 2.0. That's fine, but I just don't want to blog about the excitement (or otherwise) of this thing called 'Web 2.0' anymore. That's all I'm saying. It's time for me to get back to writing about what I love about the Web.
I've always respected Dave Winer and just lately I've had to deal with some of the same kind of vicious vilification he's had to endure for years (it's probably been ten times as worse for Dave). Here's what he wrote in response to Russel Shaw's piece:
"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."
I love that last sentence: "Yet the technologies they're hyping are honest." Exactly, that's what it's all about. Thank you Dave.
Dion Hinchcliffe also wrote an interesting post in response to mine. He wrote:
"Unfortunately, folks like Russell Shaw (author of the ZDNet article mentioned above), seem to think that Web 2.0 is an attempt to describe something enitrely new. It doesn't. As Tim O'Reilly made clear in his seminal description of Web 2.0 earlier this year, it represents the ideas that actually worked in the first generation of the Web. The arguments that folks like Shaw use, like saying that Web 2.0 is too big an umbrella, and represents unrelated concepts, and is nothing new, shows how uninformed even the experts are. And also represents a poor job by the folks that discuss it publicly (though the Web 2.0 Workgroup is certainly trying.) Unfortunately, all of this creates a distorted and incomplete view that is then propogated by the mainstream press, making it worse."
I think this actually reinforces my point: Web 2.0 as an umbrella term has become too problematic a term. It's simply not worth arguing about any more, in my view. Let's just get back to making and using great Web software.
Don't get me wrong. Web 2.0 was great while it lasted - and it still is a great name for a conference. But it's time for me personally to move on and focus on the real value in the Web today. Which for me means leaving behind the Wikipedia definition of Web 2.0 and all the peripheral garbage from cowboys and critics.
To the people wondering what this means to the Web 2.0 Workgroup or my ZDNet blog Web 2.0 Explorer. As I commented in the last post, those will continue. It doesn't bother me that they're called Web 2.0 Workgroup and Explorer. It's just the whole debacle around defining Web 2.0, all the buzzwords, all the cynicism, the personal attacks, etc - that I've had enough of.
I'll continue to explore Web technology, nothing has changed or will change in that respect. Here's to 2006!
