Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

The Multi-Headed Beast of Web2.0 Adoption

I recently was forced to describe Web2.0 as a “Multi-Headed Beast”, and as the numbers of heads went up from Cerberus to Hydra proportions, I thought I’d whimsically arrange them into a spectrum of Web2.0 adoption, beginning with the ignorably trivial and working through towards the more larger goals of Web2.0; the result led to blind alleys and confusion, so I was forced to split it into two parts:

First, I propose a list of (some of) the stages of Web2.0 adoption:

  1. “We have wikis, internally”
  2. “We have blogs, internally”
  3. “We have employees who write blogs”
  4. “We have employees who write blogs, hosted upon a corporate blog server”
  5. “All our press releases are posted on the blogserver and have a RSS feed”
  6. “Several of our CxOs have got blogs”
  7. “The CEO has a blog and actually writes his own postings”
  8. “We have wikis, externally, and allow employees to modify them”
  9. “We have employees who read and comment upon blogs of their peers, partners and customers”
  10. “We assign our employees a significant percentage of time to write, read and comment on blogs”
  11. “We have wikis, externally, and allow anyone to modify them”
  12. “We stopped writing press releases, and started communicating with people instead”
  13. “We wash our corporate laundry in public on the blogserver”
  14. “We disabled AJAX hyperlink popups, realising they are evil”
  15. “We fired our public relations and marketing staff, realising they are no longer relevant”

…and then there is the list of Web2.0 things which are NOT REALLY Web2.0 things – ie: things you can do without actually achieving anything:

  1. “Our website contains a mashup with google maps”
  2. “We sell hardware and software to ‘web2.0-focused’ startups and service providers”
  3. “We sell software and consultancy to ordinary companies which want to do blogs and wikis internally”
  4. “Our developers live and breathe AJAX, and have enabled cute popups on all our hyperlinks”

More suggestions are welcomed in the comments section. 🙂

⊞

Comments

4 responses to “The Multi-Headed Beast of Web2.0 Adoption”

  1. Stephen Usher
    re: The Multi-Headed Beast of Web2.0 Adoption

    The term “Web2.0” is not a multi-headed beast, it’s merely a misnomer. There is no new web, it’s a consiquence of slow, continuous progressive mutation.

    If anything it’s “Web1.5.4” (i.e. the fifth update with a few tweeks) technically.

    As for blogs, Wikis and the like, they’re merely implementations. Corporate blogs are mostly just marketting fluff anyway and I don’t believe a word written in them. Wikis are documentation which is only as good as the contributors and for technical stuff marginally better in some cases than a flat ASCII file, though not when you’re trying to use the said documentation to build something on a machine where you have no net access (e.g. trying to recover a system which won’t boot but the only documentation is a web page.. useless!).

    I wish Sun would stop delivering documentation on CD and the web only, by the way, for the reason that if you don’t have a working system THAT is when you need to read the manual.

    Actively scripted web pages *CAN* be an excellent new and helpful feature if used properly and sparingly, e.g. for WYSIWYG editors or photograph viewing etc. but remember that there are a whole load of devices out there which won’t or can’t run those scripts, i.e. text reading systems for the visually impared, mobile devices etc. so you have to be *VERY* careful how you implement things and think long and hard whether active scripted pages are appropriate technology.

    Sorry for being a bit of a luddite and trying to pop people’s bubbles on this matter. “Web2.0” seems to be just a rebranding exercise to try to distance the image from the bad experiences people have had before.. but those problems haven’t gone away.

    Reply
  2. Stephen Usher
    re: The Multi-Headed Beast of Web2.0 Adoption

    P.S. Do you know what the first thing that comes to mind when anyone mentions AJAX?

    Is it a character from Greek mythology? No. It is battle rocket used by Flash Gordan to raid Ming’s palace? No.

    It’s a toilet boil cleaning agent… how apt.

    Reply
  3. alecm
    re: The Multi-Headed Beast of Web2.0 Adoption

    Steve…

    > Corporate blogs are mostly just marketting fluff anyway and I don’t believe a word written in them.

    That’s a shame. Precisely how much of blogs.sun.com have you read?

    Or this blog, even?

    For the record I dislike the web2.0 term, too.

    However I lack a suitably well-known replacement term.

    Reply
  4. Stephen Usher
    re: The Multi-Headed Beast of Web2.0 Adoption

    Blogs.sun.com maybe the exception, but how can I tell? Maybe I’m just too much of a cynic.

    As for this blog, well, as you built it, modified the code and have complete control (with no marketting department or legal department in a certain house in Hartley Wintney as far as I’m aware :-)) I’m able to trust that the views expressed are yours and yours alone with no spin other than that produced in your own head.

    As for Web 2.0, does it need an overarching term for such a disparate set of concepts and technologies which are not necessarily linked and, in the case of the technologies, are merely incremental improvements of what has gone before.

    Let’s look at blogging. Corporate blogging is merely a commercial uptake of a previous technology. A blog itself is merely an application of a form of web site content management, which has been around for a very long time.

    There may be a cultural change underway in the way certain content is perceived, at least in some specialised areas of the IT, marketting and media business, that’s all. You, being inside this bubble, probably see it as a far larger and more important thing than most people do. Maybe it’s time to take a trip in the Total Perspective Vortex(tm). 🙂

    Reply

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