Beth asks the seemingly simple question "Do you agree with his point" regarding this post in Joho. The point made is:
But blogging as an enabler of individual voices talking together is (IMO) a great example of Web 1.0. The ability to talk in our own voice about what matters to us and to do so in conversation is exactly what got hundreds of millions of us onto the Web in the first place.
The real point here is that human interaction never ever falls cleanly into any category. Blogs are a great example of how our individual input has a range of societal values or meanings.
Blogs are personal, but the personal is political - in context. Our discussion of how it was great to see the Grand Canyon or sucked to have the flu is merely our sharing our personal lives with whomever we envision our readership to be. In this case, this is "web 1.0" -- meaning it is a single point source of information that is being broadcast to a loosely defined readership.
However, this post builds on a discussion from two other blogs. It is clearly a conversation. It is participatory. It is collaboration. .... But it is not in real time and it is not using a technology specifically created to facilitate this type of communication. A web 2.0 application would be specifically designed to foster, track, broadcast and evaluate the conversation. So my blog is the sick-transition of Web 1.5.
But, if we tack on Technorati, Blogpulse and del.icio.us we get to track and thread the conversation. This lets us see the conversation develop and suddenly we're at Web 1.75.
So we could divide this until we are blue in the face.
The Johovian post goes on to say:
Why does this matter since Web 2.0 is just a made up term? Because if we get muddled and start talking about blogging-as-voice and blogging-as-conversation as 2.0 apps, we'll misunderstand the great impulse behind the Web from the beginning.
Web 2.0 is a made-up term, but it is an important concept. We should not muddle it by claiming everything is. But our need to say 1.5 in the first place shows that Web 2.0 is not a solid concept. You will never have _a_ Web 2.0 app, but you will have an app with Web 2.0 components.
Jim, while I'm still digesting the whole 1.0, 2.0 (and won't 3.0 be here before 2.0 is deployed?) discussion, I appreciate your contribution.
But what freaked me out totally was this sentence: "A web 2.0 application would be specifically designed to foster, track, broadcast and evaluate the conversation." Particularly the part about "evaluation". What on earth are we talking about when we say a computer application is evaluating human collaboration? Computers and the applications that run on them don't know squat about anything. At least none of the systems I work with seem to. So what is a Web2.0 conversation "evaluation"?
It just makes me a bit crazy. And I wonder how to find out what this conversation is about. I'm interested, and I'm curious. I'm also worried.
Bill
Posted by: Bill Anderson | 15 October 2005 at 20:25