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Wishing I Was At The Web 2.0 Conference

I am a sad little cowpoke today, because my colleagues Tom Claburn and Aaron Ricadela get to go to the Web 2.0 conference next week and I don't. I will instead feel sorry for myself, sit in the garden and eat worms ... and read Tom's and Aaron's articles eagerly as they come in. I only discovered the Web 2.0 phenomenon recently. I'd heard the phrase for years, but ignored it because it struck me as one of those annoying little buzzphrases that the net-heads come up with. The net-heads are almost as bad as marketing people for coming up with buzzphrases. The net-heads gave us the word "blog," which resembles a sound that your mother would slap you for if you made it at the dinner table. But my eyes were opened by a conference call a few weeks ago, put on by O'Reilly Media, the sponsors of the Web 2.0 conference. (We podcast the call here) The first couple of minutes were deadly dull, but then things picked up rapidly. Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of the company, explained that the idea for Web 2.0 was born around the time of the dotcom bust. "Many technologies have their full flowering after a bust," he said. The personal computer industry went through a similar boom-and-bust cycle in the early 80s, and many people back then said the personal computer was just a fad. Companies that survived and prospered after the dotcom bust, including Yahoo, Google, Amazon.com and EBay, weren't just smarter than the companies that went bust. Their business model was fundamentally different. In the Web 1.0, the user was consuming content created by someone else. In Web 2.0, the content is created by the user. 1.0 is an "architecture of consumption," and read-only," the Web 2.0 is "architecture of participation," O'Reilly said. On the old Web, the user is the audience, in the new Web, the user is participant.

"In Web 1.0, everybody was trying to build 'walled gardens,' find ways to keep sites 'sticky,' keep people in," O'Reilly said. The Web 2.0 is about pushing content--and users--out to find, explore and organize interesting and useful things elsewhere on the Web. For example, the Flickr photo-sharing sites provides a platform to allow users to publish photos to other sites.

Now, at this point in the podcast I'm getting very excited, because I'd written about this stuff a few weeks earlier. I called it "user-created content". I said: "You want to know where the big money is coming from on the Internet nowadays? Look in the mirror. Online businesses are increasingly finding revenue in capturing content from users like you. Companies are making money by providing tools and services that let you write stuff, take pictures, organize your information, and publish it to the Web." I cited as examples: blogs and the companies that make the software and services to publish blogs; photo-sharing services like Flickr, community-bookmarking services like del.icio.us, online organization services like Backpack, and social-networking services like LinkedIn and Orkut.

I didn't consciously realize that O'Reilly and a lot of other people were thinking along the same lines, but it's not really surprising. Sometimes ideas are just in the air.

Another component of Web 2.0 is the "Long Tail," where merchants make money online with products for which demand is too small to be carried by brick-and-mortar stores. EBay sells products for every microscopic niche you can imagine. Google brought that mentality to advertising using AdSense, allowing tiny little Web sites to carry advertisements by making signing up for the AdSense network a self-service process.

The Web 2.0 philosophy extends into the software industry, by providing software as a service over the Web. Google tries out new features without a revenue model, by posting new services to the Web. If users like the service, they figure out a way to build a business out of it, O'Reilly said.

That model leaves companies like Microsoft, which churns out huge, monolithic software apps every couple of years, struggling, O'Reilly said.

Then, with a magisterial sweep of his hand, O'Reilly categorized multi-billion-dollar Internet companies by whether they fit into the 2.0 model. Google, he said, is definitely a 2.0 company, they built their business on cataloging how users cross-linked sites on the Web.

Yahoo, he said, is a 1.0 company that understands that 2.0 is the next big thing, and they're scrambling to fit the new world without breaking their business model. "It's a rigorous company when it comes down to business model, they don't do things unless they can make money, which is the opposite of Google, which makes something and then sees if the business model exists," O'Reilly said. Yahoo bought Flickr as much for the Web 2.0 expertise of its creators as for its existing technology.

America Online was a pioneering Web 1.0 company in the mid-90s, but never really fully embraced they Web. They have a long way to go to catch up.

Here at InformationWeek we've been struggling with what this all means for us and other online journalism. The traditional journalism process is a mix of 1.0 and 2.0. For the past century, journalism has consisted of a participatory element, which is very Web 2.0-ish, where the journalist synthesizes comments and information from everyone involved in the story. Journalism is also like Web 1.0, in that the journalist then writes up an article, which is consumed by the reader acting as audience. We're currently working on a site redesign and a few new projects which should liven up InformationWeek online and make it more useful and interesting to our community of readers and participants, and we'd like to apply some of the best principles of Web 2.0 to what we're doing. We've already got three easy ideas: Improving the discussion technology for the blogs and discussion forums, and improving RSS feeds. We're working on them, along with some other things we're not ready to talk about yet. Got any of your own ideas? Let us know.

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