I had the opportunity to go to An Event Apart in NYC this week. In addition to meeting some very cool people and get schooled on some areas I haven't been aware of (e.g. Tantek's microformats pres) I also got to experience Ze Frank's Web 0.2 presentation, which was described as "a personal, down-in-the-trenches view of how the technology revolution impacts the way we communicate with a mass audience."
Take aways:
- Conversations resist top-down control
- Users/Consumers want to have a conversation with designers/developers by conversing with prosumer tools and media that were previously only in the professional's domain
- They will show you what's interesting
- Designers/Developers are facilitators of the the conversation
- Web 0.2 gives designer/developer an amazing amount of data to start using in the conversation
His observations are partly drawn from all the literature about the bottom-up evolution of conversations, viral phenomenon and the web itself. It's not new, but it's a very profound reminder he provides by showing us that the most interesting developments are user/consumer driven, e.g. MySpace and YouTube. This is where the conversation gets interesting because the mass of consumer use drives the medium and affects it in terms of economics and sustainability.
It's the same idea, really, as Nardi and O'Day's in their Information Ecology thesis. I keep returning to this over and over every few months. The idea just seems to keep getting validated. The analogy of sustainable biological ecologies seems to apply to so many different information ecologies, whether it's in describing media consumers and their internet publishing/use ecology or the information ecology of enterprise knowledge workers. Sustainability comes from organic growth and localized need or desire.
In any case, the message from Ze for embracing this is the same message many of us have adopted for evangelizing the use of the new wave of grass-roots-oriented enterprise software. He referred to Tim O'Reilly's "What is Web 2.0" article in order to give this advice, which I believe paraphrases O'Reilly.
Create architectures that encourage participation and conversation and build value as a side effect of the ordinary use of an application. From the passive to active to interactive.
Excellent stuff. I'm off to finally read that O'Reilly article. I've put it off because it seemed so long, but I see that I can't ignore it.
Comments
12/07/06 @ 09:08
Zefrank is a great idea this is true and more important:)
03/24/08 @ 20:37
I presume you meant Web 2.0 and not Web 0.2, but anyways, there are tons of sites monetizing the user-driven Web 2.0 scene. Sites like YouTube, Myspace, and Facebook (to name a few) have grown dramatically from allow their users to participate in ways that were never before possible when the internet first developed. Also, programming like Ajax has had a signifcant impact on Web 2.0 by offering web developers additional flexibility and sparking innovation. It will be interesting to see what changes unfold as the web continues to evolve.
03/25/08 @ 08:02
No, Frank's tongue in cheek title talks about "Web 0.2." His point with the 0.2 version number is that part of what characterizes 2.0 sites is UGC, which puts the tools of professionals into consumer hands. In a majority of cases their use of these tools is very basic. His discussion focuses on the dialog that designers and technologists have begun with this consumer audience, who start out as 0.2 users when it comes to the tools of 2.0. Get it?
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