The idea of user-generated, ranked and organized content is the obsession d'jour among both start-ups and incumbent portal sites. Digg goes mainstream; Netscape clones Digg; Yahoo does a Wikipedia twist with Answers; social bookmarking site del.icio.us spawns sites like Kaboodle, Plum and Prefound. All of these functionalities will clearly soon find themselves embedded into mainstream portals, but how important will they be in the long-term?
Jaron Lanier (father of virtual reality, Discover magazine columnist, technology philosopher nonpareil) had an interesting essay in the online magazine Edge last month: Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism. He begins with an amusing anecdote about how someone kept adding "filmmaker" to his Wikipedia biography; as Jaron made exactly one small film long ago and doesn't consider himself to be a filmmaker, he took it out -- but the well-meaning contributor kept putting it back in. (Now that Jaron has written about it, "filmmaker" finally seems to be removed from the bio.)
He goes on from this to challenge some of the "wisdom of crowds" thinking that underlies many of the social ranking, tagging and pointing sites, ultimately suggesting that without some sort of evaluative, value-driven framework, many of these systems end up producing the lowest-common-denominator output. It's a far too complex argument to summarize here, and the Edge site also includes some very thoughtful rebuttal, so it's worth a serious read.
What does this mean for the current Web 2.0 goldrush and the portals? Continue reading....
I'd argue that we're already seeing some of these lowest-common-denominator issues arise. Take Digg, for example -- even before its latest version, the earliest Digg enthusiasts were already complaining that its technology focus was being diluted and (horrors!) it was turning into Fark. Beyond that, it's well-known that coordinated groups of users can (and do) regularly manipulate Digg ratings. Or look at MySpace, whose corporate owners are spending more and more time and money trying to keep it from spinning into a place known more for porn stars, sexual predators and unwisely publicized teen exploits than a true community of users.
This isn't to say that user generated and/or tagged, ranked and pointed content isn't important--it's clearly as much a part of the Internet as "professionally" produced or mediated content. But like most new developments on the Web, it's currently being seen as a far bigger piece of the puzzle than it actually is.
So what's the next piece of the puzzle? I think it's the rediscovery of the value of professionally-produced content. Several commentators, for example, have recently noted that the entire blogosphere basically exists on the substrate of the traditional media outlets that do the actual (and often expensive) reporting. The blogosphere, along with Google, Yahoos and all the other aggregators, pointers, rankers and taggers, are thriving on the Internet; the traditional media are not. Sooner or later, I suspect that the content owners are going to exercise their property rights a little more aggressively, and begin to make it more difficult for that huge layer of companies that generate ad revenues off their links.
In terms of the portals we watch here, MSN has long created some original content, and AOL and Yahoo are beginning the process as well. (AOL, of course, also has the Time Warner family from which to draw content). Google, so far, seems the least interested in original content and arguably has done the most to alienate content owners, through both minor gaffes (Google News) and major actions (the Google Library Project). It will be most interesting to see how these various DNAs play out if content once again becomes king in Web 3.0.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
6-26-2006 @ 3:36PM
AJ said...
I am a computer programmer. I have been programming computers for over twenty years. I am so tired of these meaningless catch phrases like Web 2.0. It is a complete and utter marketing ploy. Dynamic content is not new, user added and regulated content is not new, the technologies employed are not even "new". A good analogy is the style industry re-introducing bell bottoms and calling them the next great thing. Personally any CEO who uses the catch phrase "Web x.x" should be fired immediately by the board of directors for incompetence.
6-26-2006 @ 4:10PM
R said...
"Web 2.0" is not just about AJAX; it's about wide-scale social networking/socially created content/crowdsourcing.
6-26-2006 @ 4:12PM
Robert said...
Personally I never go to digg's homepage to look for technology articles. I use http://tail-f.net/ which aggregates many technology news sites into one portal (including digg). If a story looks interesting I'll check it out no matter what source it came from. It also has a single RSS feed that includes the articles from all the sites. I never go to slashdot, digg, wired, etc homepages any more because I can get to them all in one place.
6-26-2006 @ 4:14PM
Mike Kelley said...
"Beyond that, it's well-known that coordinated groups of users can (and do) regularly manipulate Digg ratings."
You really undermine your authoritative voice when your "source" is that something is "well-known." Even if that were true (and that's a BIG if), the whole point of Digg is that it self-polices.
On the other hand, here you have an AOL-hosted blog. It's a well-known fact that AOL owns the Netscape brand, and is doing its best as Johnny Come Lately routine as a Digg clone.
It's not nice to throw dirt, especially when the best you can do is parrot what "everybody" must know.
6-26-2006 @ 4:27PM
sarah gilbert said...
"really undermine your authoritative voice when your "source" is that something is "well-known." Even if that were true (and that's a BIG if), the whole point of Digg is that it self-polices."
I totally disagree, Mike, especially as Weblogs, Inc. has routinely been accused of gaming Digg. Here's one source, with lots of good data: http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/12/27/gaming-digg/
6-26-2006 @ 5:12PM
bobby said...
"So what's the next piece of the puzzle? I think it's the rediscovery of the value of professionally-produced content. Several commentators, for example, have recently noted that the entire blogosphere basically exists on the substrate of the traditional media outlets that do the actual (and often expensive) reporting."
Maybe we, the "mere users," would find professionally-produced content more valuable if it less often consisted of the regurgitation of PR nonsense.
6-26-2006 @ 7:00PM
Frodo Baggins said...
Yes, "the wisdom of crowds" is an annoyingly popular catch phrase these days. When did crowds become so wise? Wasn't it a crowd that told Pontius Pilate to free the serial murderer Barabus and crucify Jesus Christ? Wasn't it a crowd that burned Watts chanting "Burn baby burn!"? Didn't a crowd elect George W. Bush twice (or at least once)?
Web 2.0 seems likely to me to end up in the same place as Web 1.0, in a big speculative bubble filled with a few Mark Cubans and a lot of investors getting smoked.