The Christchurch branch of the New Zealand Computer Society hosted a session tonight called Web 2.0: Hype or Reality, with Dan Randow of OnlineGroups.net being the lead speaker. After some of Dan’s famous exercises to cultivate social interaction, he started into the topic at hand.

Agenda
Setting the Scene
Key Phenomena
Where To?
Or skip this and watch a couple of videos (see links in the PowerPoint deck)

Setting the Scene
Marshall Mcluhan, “Any technology tends to create a new human environment … Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike” (1962), see marshallmcluhan.com.

Technology changes things, eg, the car changed things a little bit, but not hugely until roads got better. Once the roading infrastructure was developed, we could have suburbs whereby people could live far away from their work. Dan advocates that the Internet is a new way to broadcast information.

“Markets are conversations”, says the author of the Cluetrain Manifesto (2000) … “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, market are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies“.

Three Key Phenomena of Web 2.0

1. Read/Write Web … Technologies that are writable on the Web (blogging, wikis, YouTube) represents a huge transition. About half of the audience use Wikipedia on a regular basis, and at least one found Wikipedia’s restrictive editing policy a pain, especially for putting down alternative views. However, Wikipedia was developed entirely by volunteer authors and editors. Dan showed de.lico.us, a social booking site; see Clay Shirky’s article Ontology is Overrated regarding the power of folksonomy. Dan showed a number of videos from YouTube … Power of Web 2.0 and Day of the The Longtail
2. Social Computing … The ability to bring people together for social interaction, eg, video bloggers on YouTube and video responses. Examples include online collaboration (eg, onlinegroups.net), blogging, Bebo and LinkedIn.
3. Decentralized Computing … a video first … Hak.5 Microshaft Web 2.0 Framework … to provide an example of Web 2.0 being built by small pieces of technology across the Web. A couple of examples were given, eg, bicycle routes that were visualized using Google Maps. Dan showed DabbleDB, for collaborative sharing of structured data, eg, the importing of spreadsheet data to make it collaborative.

It was discussed that there were various early technologies that offered these, including bulletin boards, USENET (NNTP), etc.

Q. Where is all of the information stored?
A. Online. Dan says that he prefers to have his data stored online, because (a) he can use it across computers, and (b) he can’t lose it as easily as can happen vs. losing a computer.

Conclusions

• Don’t look for linear development in Web 2.0. The curve of development is increasing exponentially.
• Thomas Malone on the Future of Work … “IT is reducing the costs of communication to such a low level that it’s now possible for huge numbers of people even in very large organizations to have all the information they need about the big picture to make their own decisions for themselves about what they do rather than waiting for people above them in some hierarchy to tell them what to do.“
• Knowledge Management … it’s the same stuff we’ve been talking about throughout the session.
• What’s the implication of Web 2.0 within the enterprise? I said that “some people are saying that the new Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis can be used within the enterprise, and that they are bettter/cheaper/faster than current offerings. It remains to be seen whether it makes a significant difference to the actual work processes.” Someone else said Microsoft was moving down the Enterprise 2.0 path, with the introduction of SharePoint.