Jeffrey Zeldman bashes Web 2.0:
Steven, a young web wiz, has just celebrated his bar mitzvah. He received a dozen gifts and must write a dozen thank-you notes. Being webbish, he creates an on-line “Thank-You Note Generator.” Steven shows the site to his friends, who show it to their friends, and soon the site is getting traffic from recipients of all sorts of gifts, not just bar mitzvah stuff.
If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.
But if Steven used AJAX and Ruby on Rails, Yahoo will pay millions and Tim O’Reilly will beg him to keynote.
It’s good to see professionals like him standing up and telling the truth, just as David Sless did.
I don’t usually quote myself, but for your convience, here is my respond I postet at ALA:
You can say that again, Jeffrey. Thank you.
Before AJAX, RoR and all this other ‘new’ stuff hit earth, I made up my mind and coined the times we experience right now the time of Self Publishing. Before, the web was a very technical thing only a few could master. Nowadays it takes you 2 minutes and an e-mail address to get a site going and start publishing.
THIS is what Web 2.0 is too me.
All the technical stuff, this ain’t Web 2.0. These are just tools. (And as the saying goes, a fool with a tool is still a fool.) Mighty tools, ok, but still they remain tools. Web 2.0 is not about the technology it is build with, but what the people can do using services created using these tools.
I know web geeks tend to see everything from a technical point of view. But that’s not enough. What is it that attracts thousand of people at Flickr or YouTube or myspace? They don’t give a damn about AJAX, JSON, XML, RoR and whatever fancy acronyms we geeks come up with. They care about content, about the possibilites they have.
Anyway. All this, even this discussion, ain’t new. It will pop up again and again when something ‘new’ hits earth.
Still with me? You must be really interested in this topic, so go ahead and read my post about Self Publishing ;)