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Web 2.0 - eCommunism is coming

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 4:40 am
by Gambler
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly ... eb-20.html

This is scary. It reminds me of "Busimess @ the Speed of Thought", only this one is written by Tim O'Reilly, not Bill Gates.

Hey, since nobody gives a damn about things like individuality and personality, why don't we skip all those intruductory steps altogether? All we need to do is combine the minds of all humans into a single information matrix. (I hope my Vacuum Flowers reference will not be lost in vain.) Yeah, it's that simple.

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 5:39 am
by Jenk
In the future people will go to work and plugin, literally, and then be put into an induced coma whilst the system uses their brains for computing power.

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:01 am
by m3mn0n
I find his opening line rather interesting because it's historically incorrect.

"The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001"

NASDAQ Chart
Image

ANYWAY...

That's an interesting read. I've not read much about "Web 2.0" until that and it's cool to know what people were actually referring to in the dozens of articles I've heard it mentioned in.

It gets ya thinking, I wonder what Web 6.0 will be like? :wink:

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:51 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Web 6.0 - whatever is set up when the Cylons arrive and wipe out humanity...;)

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 7:57 am
by timvw
Imho it's yet another hype in the hope to get some managers enthousiast and make lots of money... Waiting for web3.0 where things will be really shiny and usable... :)

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:00 am
by Charles256
man.that article is too long this early in the morning...summary anyone? :-D

Re: Web 2.0

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:26 am
by Roja
Gambler wrote:This is scary.
I'm really puzzled by this comment, and by the reference to communism. There is no state (or even single industry) control of production, knowledge, or even providing. I'd say its got practically nothing in common with communism, so I'd be interested in hearing your explanation of what the link is. Maybe I'm missing something.
Gambler wrote:Hey, since nobody gives a damn about things like individuality and personality, why don't we skip all those intruductory steps altogether?
On the contrary, Web 2.0 welcomes individuality, and makes it far more possible. Don't like the RSS feeds from Fox News because of the bias? No problem, switch your feed to pull from CNN instead.

Web 2.0 means embracing the web as a service. Instead of "If you want our news, you have to get it in our format, with our ads, with our poor layout choices", you get the raw data, and can perform whatever changes you want to with it.

Thats empowering small sites to become incredibly powerful at very low cost. Want to do a social networking site? You can use the GoogleMaps API to layout where people are, you can use Flickr for photo storage, and so on. Its about enabling fast application development with a minimal amount of reinventing the wheel.

But you don't have to rely on one vendor's implementation either - you can pick and choose. Don't like Google much? No problem - use Yahoo's search API instead. The list goes on.
Gambler wrote:All we need to do is combine the minds of all humans into a single information matrix. (I hope my Vacuum Flowers reference will not be lost in vain.)
Its not combining minds. Its making information available in raw form, from multiple providers with no strings attached, to allow better communication. Thats not the borg-ification of humanity - thats the unix philosophy brought to the net.

If you were serious in your concerns, please, explain further, because I don't see anything negative about Web 2.0, and I'm usually one of the most paranoid people around.

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 9:19 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Hey, since nobody gives a damn about things like individuality and personality, why don't we skip all those intruductory steps altogether?
Strange I though all those blogs and social networks were by user choice? ;) This is actually spreading individualism not stunting it. Blogs have attained a level of influence unheard of for the average user in the younger days of the internet.
Imho it's yet another hype in the hope to get some managers enthousiast and make lots of money... Waiting for web3.0 where things will be really shiny and usable...
The thing is its already out there, and it works. Its hard to pass something off as hype when its proven to work effectively. The problem is turning everything so far into effective business models - there seems to a habit for a lot of progress to emerge in areas not traditionally considered. Who'd have thought MySpace would explode so much?

Companies along the lines of Google are going to get there a lot faster (they have less baggage and assumptions to weigh them down).

I keep hearing Microsoft will challange Google, but to date Microsofts impact on my online experience is limited my Hotmail account. Outside the provision of email where is Microsoft's gigantic presence on the web? We've already established it takes more than a predominant browser to make money from the internet...

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 1:22 pm
by pilau
I hope you don't mind me asking but what is Web 1.0?

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 1:44 pm
by m3mn0n
Web 1.0 -> Web 2.0
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
Akamai --> BitTorrent
mp3.com --> Napster
Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
personal websites --> blogging
evite --> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation --> search engine optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness --> syndication

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:09 pm
by Gambler
I'd say its got practically nothing in common with communism, so I'd be interested in hearing your explanation of what the link is.
It has plenty of things in common with communism. The thing I love about that word is the way US propaganda of the cold war period is still echoed. The theory of communism is all about building an efficient society where everyone is equal, and everyone contributes to the community, and everyone is helped by the community, bla, bla, bla. I think the connection is obvious. More detailed explanation of what I don't like about the article would require me to write an article myself, and my English sucks too much for scribing anything readable.

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 8:22 pm
by Roja
Gambler wrote:
I'd say its got practically nothing in common with communism, so I'd be interested in hearing your explanation of what the link is.
The theory of communism is all about building an efficient society where everyone is equal, and everyone contributes to the community, and everyone is helped by the community, bla, bla, bla.
It depends on which author you are referring to, but the portion "where everyone is equal" is categorially opposite of Marx's writing. In fact, Marx specifically says "each gave according to his abilities, and received according to his needs."

Marx incorporated (into his theory) the natural and real differences in man, and allows each to receive truly different items as well. Thats *not* being equal. His theory had great purchase because it was so dramatically different from the capitalist view of each man having to produce enough to support himself (and getting unduly rewarded for over-acheiving).
Gambler wrote:I think the connection is obvious. More detailed explanation of what I don't like about the article would require me to write an article myself, and my English sucks too much for scribing anything readable.
I'm still interested if you have an honest connection between the two, but your only tenuous connection is based on a flawed understanding of communism, and even if that were accurate (and its completely wrong), it *still* isnt a good description of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 doesn't make everyone equal by any stretch. It simply asks for compatible (read: Interoperable) standards so that competition can be its most intense - the polar opposite goal of communism, where competition is reduced to increase productivity.

I think your issues are more with your misunderstanding of communism than with Web 2.0. Either that, or you do need to explain further.

Posted: Mon Jan 09, 2006 10:27 pm
by neophyte
It's not that far off....

After all the United Nations is trying it's best to lobby for control of the internet. They have been for years. If they succeed it may become eCommunism after all. Why? Because...

The UN Charter was written by Communists. The main contributors to the UN charter were officials from the USSR and officials from the U.S. State Department and Treasury Department. The US officials were later determined to be secret Communist agents. These men drafted the Charter. The charter mirrors in almost every aspect the USSR's constitution. Why were they doing this? They were planning a world wide Communist government of course! They're still working on it. The history of the 20th century is the history of increasing government intrusion. The 21st century will only hasten the pace.

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 2:42 am
by Maugrim_The_Reaper
Bunch of communists, eh? Man, they made some serious errors then...

There was lobbying for international control over the internet because an internet controlled by one nation only can be misused. One or two nations can decide a lot of things and ignore everyone else (hardly the first time that happened in recent history if you recall).

Posted: Tue Jan 10, 2006 6:27 am
by pilau
neophyte wrote:Why were they doing this? They were planning a world wide Communist government of course! They're still working on it. The history of the 20th century is the history of increasing government intrusion. The 21st century will only hasten the pace.
It sounds like a huge world-wide conspiracy to convert all capitalist constitutions to communist constitutions :P
Roja wrote: [...] competition is reduced to increase productivity.
I believe this is a false way of addressing the productivity "issue". I mean, as you can see in many capitalistic states and markets, competition between companies and services only makes them better. I'll give an example of to children having a competition between themselves - which only leads to the kids putting more hard workj to beat each other.
A reservation I have for this (my) opinion or this method, though, is that while the strong businesses or services survive this competition, while the small, weak ones don't. However, maybe it is better this way, because weak businesses may not have as much as productive impacy on the economy (in spite of their potential to grow, which is why i stated the reservetion above).