Web 2.0 - The Cracks are Beginning to Appear
Web 2.0 has been a great thing for the internet.
In fact a lot of people have hailed it is the “democratisation of information” in the way that community oriented sites have allowed people to promote information based on popularity rather than any corporate or media agenda.
That’s great but the cracks have started to appear. Some of you have surely been following the latest Digg episode that has sparked a slight furore on the internet. It turned out that Digg was manually altering the results in response to somebody spamming their front page.
Then of course, there was the Tammy NYP saga over at Technorati - basically where a sex tape was dominating their search results to such an extent that they were forced to remove all references to it from their front page.
We also shouldn’t forget the problems that Wikipedia had with people altering other’s biographies.
I guess then we can stop referring to these sites as the “democratisation of information” in favour of something like the “benevolent dictatorisation of information” (something tells me the boys in marketing aren’t gonna go with that one).
These recent problems of course, begin to show us the weaknesses of the basic concepts behind Web 2.0. It will also show us where the next evolution has to come from.
Some of you might remember by article a while back on Web 3.0 and how I thought it would be driven by similar technology than Web 2.0, but with a vetted voting audience that was actually qualified to vote on certain topics. For example, scientists voting on scientific information etc.
To be honest, the latest problems with Digg and Technorati have simply cemented my opinion on that one.
The trick will then be to stop the “qualified” users from promoting themselves and the corporations they work for in the same way that the corporate media panders to their own sponsors. Ironically, that is why Web 2.0 basically became so popular in the first place.
Such a vicious circle.
Technorati Tags: technorati, digg, wikipedia, web 2.0
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