It’s refreshing to see people like Stowe Boyd take a serious look at where Web 2.0 is heading these days with an relatively open mind, though there are still plenty (Chris Pirillo) of others (Matthew Gertner) keeping it constructive or at least keeping it in perspective (David Hornik).
Stowe, head of the intriguing Corante (the world’s first blog media company), has recently decided to embark on an exciting exploration of the visionary people trying to build the future of the Web. While Stowe may have some minor details of Web 2.0 askew, he overall has a brilliant plan to start a video production titled New Visionaries: Rebooting the Web. Stowe has been in contact with a bunch of the key folks who have been embarking on Web 2.0 services lately including “Catarina Fake and Stuart Butterfield of Flickr, Dave Sifry of Technorati, Jason Fried of 37Signals, and Felix Petersen of Plazes.com, to mention just a few.”
What’s interesting to me is that Stowe specifically calls out this quote from Stephen Johnson’s excellent Discover magazine article on Web 2.0 that was inspirational to him: “The result is the equivalent of a massive software upgrade for the entire Web, what some commentators have taken to calling Web 2.0. Essentially, the Web is shifting from an international library of interlinked pages to an information ecosystem, where data circulate like nutrients in a rain forest.”
These are very good high level descriptions of the phenomenon, even if they would cause Web 2.0 purists to squirm a bit. But the essential details are correct and accessible in a way that the diagram above, clear as it is, ultimately is not unless you are a Web technologist.
This is something I struggle with often, how to explain Web 2.0 to non-technical people, the ones who ultimately must embrace, become enmeshed in, and sustain the Web 2.0 information and participation ecosystem. Furthermore, I’ve managed to get just about every one of my friends and family hooked on Flickr, for example, but not be able to explain Web 2.0 to them in a way they could repeat. It was this viral propagation of Flickr adoption within my social circle that was one of my first a-ha moments with Web 2.0. This was when I realized something was different. Even my 70-year old mother, who before could barely use e-mail, was now voraciously browsing pictures and going through all the tags in my Flickr picture collection. You really have to see Web 2.0 to understand it.
So, while I labor away on the work I am creating here trying explain Web 2.0 to folks that want to build it, it will probably end up being folks like Stowe Boyd that end up bringing a larger understanding of Web 2.0 to all the people that will actually use it, by showing it to them. I wish him luck and I’ll be posting updates of his work as it becomes available.
