Web’s moving too fast - Got what it takes?
My latest project centers around integration consumer generated content with “officially-produced” news and writing. At its most mundane, you slap a news site with a blog site and kinda hope for the best.
This is, without saying, the best path to failure. It fails to take into account:
1) the fact that most people produce content where they damn well please, and odds are it won’t be your site
2) that just stitching people content and news content together with some keywords and tags will result in something no better than hastily stitched together patchwork quilt
3) the very real difficulty of weeding out useful content, not to mention content that is useful to me, which is all that matters to people, anyway
I’ve been reading up on Web2.0. Web2.0 is zooming, and although the general public has no clue, one day you’ll wake up and your life will be Web2.0, and everyone will be Web2.0 and no-one will realize it.
Which brings me to…
Stuff happening in the web world which scares me shitless, as a web idea person
1) MyWeb, which according to Troutgirl is server-side bookmarking and tagging, finding out what the rest of the crowd is reading, and human-powered search engine (whatever that means)
2) Technorati, which lets you see what blogs are linking to your article
3) Super cheap online storage and the tools to go with it, because dammit that’s as good as having on your site
4) Huge conglomerates moving into online classified, because mass is money (as eBay knows), and money begets… more money, and if they had the money to deal local and cut out the small folk…
5) Microsoft’s RSS extension, which is bilateral as opposed to unilateral, and while I can’t really think of a practical app at the moment, it’s gotta be good for something
6) RSS feeds feeding content, and the people who have figured out how to track all that shit
And more, although I can’t remember. Knowledge is amazing, knowledge and information can be amazingly powerful (although also a real pointless time-waster), and whoever comes up with the next big idea for making all that text and images and sound and links and whatever make sense, mean something, to me, well, that’s human revolution for you.
You know what it comes down to? Everyone produces content into the web. I go to the web, and I say, I want info on this topic, in this form, to these specifications, kinda remixed to toss the crap I’m obviously not interested in, and tweaked to include stuff I didn’t ask for but would be real useful… and it comes back in a nice little bundle with cherries on top.
That’s real web for you.
Oh yeah, guess I should think about how to get stuff on the web easier, too.
