Social web is about improvement, not innovation
Hold on to your routers, folks - everything on the web is changing (again). A press release from marketing firm All About Brands explains:
"Barely has Web 2.0 established itself than digital strategists are looking at how to make the next leap to Web 3.0 - and the victims of change will be the big publishers, some of whom may vanish with some rapidity."
Vanish with rapidity, eh? Sounds painful. I mean, vanishing is bad enough - but with rapidity? Yikes.
John Straw, digital strategist at All About Brands, basically says you ain't seen nothing yet: "With Web 3.0, everyone becomes a publisher of content with the nett result that many traditional publishing businesses simply being drowned by the crowd of amateur publishers."
He has a point, actually - search for something on the interweb and it is often difficult to see the useful wood from the dead trees; everyone has an opinion and everyone is search optimising their content.
Such developments mean traditional publishers are often fighting against a wave of free content. But most media outlets are attempting to surf the wave, so to speak.
Computing, for example, encourages industry experts to blog and for technology users to debate the content as part of a wider community. The Telegraph goes a step further, allowing readers to start a my.telegraph blog, join debates and bookmark articles. More features, says the web site, will be added soon.
Finding an easy and successful middle ground between editorial and reader content is no easy task. And All About Brands' John Straw refers to EPIC 2014/2015, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson's dystopian vision for the future of the web and its effect on journalism.
Changes are undoubtedly afoot. But whether such changes will manifest as yet another "Web.0" is debatable. Surely everything is just part of a greater web that is continually evolving?
To paraphrase Larry David, we're talking about improvement, rather than innovation.
Further reading
- Next generation social networking
- Finding useful Web 2.0 and social networking tools
- Web 2.0: Your business needs a strategy now
- Social networking creates waste and exclusion
- Facebook? LinkedIn? Social networking is rubbish
- Web 2.0 technologies = five hours of depression
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The bits of the TV news I used to look forward to least were the parts when after covering a story in detail with a team of experts they would send an OB unit out into the street to interview members of the public. Regardless of subject, the responses were ALWAYS either "I think it's disgusting" or "I think it's wonderful", depending on whether the news was good or bad. This was a very popular approach from the 70s through to the late 90s, but thankfully they no longer bother, presumably having realised just how little the man in the street brings to a story that subject matter experts haven't already covered.
Is this what the democratised news services of Web 3.0 are going to be like?
Ian Hendry
www.wecando.biz
Posted by: Ian Hendry | Tuesday, 08 April 2008 at 08:02 PM