- Winston Churchill

Last week, I voiced some of my concerns about Web 2.0 in a post entitled The Great Web and Web 2.0. Essentially, it spoke to the need for us to ask two questions about Web 2.0 investments – determining value propositions and business models (other than, “Buy me!”).

VCs like Fred Wilson (Web 2.0 Reactions), Rick Segal (Web 2.0!=check), and Paul Kedrosky (Blog Renamed: Infectious Greed 2.0) have also articulated some thoughts in relation to Web 2.0 feeling “bubble-ish” but they seem to be the exceptions to the rule.

Today, Kevin Burton takes a stronger stance in his Dot Bomb All Over Again?, where he writes, “A lot of the recent news around Web 2.0 is starting to frighten me. There is just too much money flying around with too much hype and too little value.”

Are we headed towards another bubble burst? I’m not certain that anyone can (consistently) predict the future with something as volatile as the web. What we can do, however, is learn from the past. We can learn from what we now call “Web 1.0″.

In my second blogoposium, I propose that we examine Lessons Learned from Web 1.0. We’ll discuss what so many dot bombs did wrong the first time around, think about the signs they missed, and hopefully come up with some “lessons learned” for all the Web 2.0 companies, investors, and VCs out there.

How to Participate

If you are confused about what a “blogoposium” is, check out the blogoposium category.

This blogoposium will run from Monday, October 17th through Wednesday, October 19th. There are several different ways to get your voice heard in this discussion:

1. Tag Your Post – Use the Technorati tag blogoposium2 in your post so that we can find your thoughts easily. You can also post any visuals up on Flickr to the “blogoposium2″ tag (thanks to Dion Hinchcliffe’s suggestion during our first blogoposium).

2. Tag Relevant Articles – Using del.icio.us, tag relevant items you find to “blogoposium2″. I will be monitoring the blogoposium2 tag and may highlight some of the more interesting thoughts (I’ve already added a handful of articles)

3. Trackback this Post - Use the trackback below.

Or you can simply leave a comment below.

One final thing, I need your help! While we had an awesome turn out for the first blogoposium, I’d like to see something even better this time around – more bloggers with a larger variety of backgrounds. Please publicize the blogoposium in whatever way you see fit, so that when Monday rolls around everyone will be ready to go. Thanks and “see” you at the blogoposium!

tagged under Web 1.0, Web 2.0, blogoposium2

To see what has been contributed to this point:

Feel free to also weigh in on my Web 2.0 – As Defined by People post .

Thanks for making the first blogoposium a success. Definitely send along any feedback and let me know if you have any ideas to better facilitate this type of discussion.

Web 2.0 has obviously been a hot topic in the blogosphere this week, outside of our little blogoposium experiment. Instead of highlighting yesterday’s thoughts, I’d like to point you to an archived version of tech.memeorandum. You’ll note that Web 2.0 was the top ‘meme’ and can reference all of the Web 2.0 relevant discussions.

Since I’ve been ‘hosting’ our part of the Web 2.0 conversation via blogoposium1, I won’t add my 2.0 cents. What I would like you to see though, are the concepts that people relate to Web 2.0. Before you take a peek below, I’d like you to note that this research is quite unscientific and it does not necessarily get to the heart of how we as techies, business folk, and other early adopters can actually articulate Web 2.0 ideas to the non-technical community. It only loosely identifies how we have been viewing Web 2.0 to this point.

I took a look at the Web 2.0 related tags and tag cloud for two different social bookmarking sites, del.icio.us and BlinkList. These diagrams paint a very abstract picture of concepts that people related to Web 2.0. In the del.icio.us example, I also choose to examine the related tags for ajax and tagging -

Finally, I took a number of my sources from my newly created Everything Web 2.0 Rollyo searchroll and created a TagCloud (you can check out those sources by accessing my Everything Web 2.0 searchroll – to read how TagCloud extracts keywords from RSS sources, go over to their about page)

I’ll leave the analysis to you…what do you think, are these diagrams on the right track? Are they missing anything? Are they helpful in describing Web 2.0?

From Peter Forret’s RSS is a hammer

It’s not because you have particularly strong feelings about one building block of the Web 2.0 temple that you can simplify the whole thing. RSS is important. Ajax is important. And so are REST/XMLRPC/SOAP, KML, social software, folksonomies, contextual advertising, “Long tail” logic, Creative Commons, … It’s the sum of all these forces that hint at a future “Web 2.0″ that’s bigger and brighter.

Peter also recently contributed a Web 2.0 Meme Overview over on the Flickr blogoposium1 tag. He explains it in some detail in his Web 2.0 mememap overview post.

From Matteo Brunati’s My thoughts on the web2.0

The point IMHO is this: data is the main focus and if i want to control and personalize the tools i am using, the choice is fundamental… as for the standard format of the data…

From John Evan’s Is Web 2.0 RSS 2.0?

The success of Windows may now be an encumbrance to Microsoft as it faces the need to carve out new niches for itself in the emerging multiplex of markets often referred to as Web 2.0.

From Richard MacManus’ Web 2.0 Elevator Pitch

Web 2.0 at its most basic is using services on the Web. Some examples: Gmail for email, Flickr for photo-management, RSS for news delivery, eBay for shopping, Amazon for buying books. That’s why the Web is being called a platform – because all of these services are being built and used on the Web. Why Web 2.0 only now though – hasn’t Amazon been around since 1995? Why yes, but it’s taken until 2005 for broadband and web technology to catch up and reach a ‘tipping point’ – the Web is fast becoming the platform of choice for developers, business, media, public services, and so on.

Richard also highlights some other excellent Web 2.0 thoughts, by the likes of Om Malik, John Hagel (who also trackbacked his post to the blogoposium – thanks John!), and Susan Mernit.

Others including Stowe Boyd should be weighing in today or tomorrow. For those that don’t know about the blogoposium, please let them know, so that they can tag their posts. At the very least, make sure you tag them yourself under the blogoposium1 del.icio.us tag.

Finally, I’ve created a Everything Web 2.0 searchroll on Rollyo. Check it out and let me know what you think. I’m happy to add or remove sources based on the relevancy of results.

If you are unsure of what a blogoposium is (after all, I did create the word), Marshall Kirkpatrick describes it simply as “tagging and synched blogging”. You can read all the details about the blogoposium at the announcement post.

A number of people helped publicized the event – thanks to John of SYNTAGMA, Andrew of Changing Way, Danny of Raw Blog, Dion of Web 2.0 Blog, Kevin of Left Brain / Right Brain, and Marshall of Web Tool Blog, who were some of the first bloggers to get behind this blogoposium. They took a chance on an idea. Without their help, there would be no blogoposium. I appreciate those who emailed me to let me know of their participation and I look forward to their contributions.

There have been some fine contributions to this blogoposium’s theme – Communicating the Ideas Behind Web 2.0. Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his Visualizing Web 2.0 post, “I try to describe Web 2.0 as a term given to a natural emergence of related events, rather than some artificially imposed vision.” He also created a very interesting Web 2.0 diagram included in that post, which I strongly encourage you to check out.

Dion also added a wonderful suggestion, to tag any relevant visuals or diagrams for this blogoposium on Flickr with tag “blogoposium1″. He has already tagged both Tim O’Reilly’s “Web 2.0 Meme Map” and his own “Web 2.0 Visualization” as blogoposium1 on Flickr.

In case you need some fodder to get your Web 2.0 juices flowing, I’ve tagged some articles for you to look at on del.icio.us under the blogoposium1 tag. In particular, I’ve tagged articles that analyze Web 2.0 from two very different perspectives, so be sure to check them out.

If you have not done so yet, make sure you read the announcement post so that you know how to join in the conversation. Let’s make some Web 2.0 noise in the blogosphere these next three days!

Hope to “see” you at the blogoposium.

One of the generally accepted definitions behind the term “Web 2.0″ is ‘the web as platform’. But as Dave Winer recently alludes to, Web 2.0 seems to be more a concept than anything else (although I am certain there are many who would disagree with him).

That is not the real problem though. Instead, it is the general disconnect between the average user and those who have heard of or understand what Web 2.0 is or is becoming. Many businesses and organizations are still struggling with Web 1.0 – terms like RSS, tagging and folksonomy, “the long tail”, and AJAX are not even on their radar screen.

Perhaps more importantly, what does the phrase “Web 2.0″ communicate to the non-technical community? Does it imply that there will be a “Web 3.0″ or “Web 8.5″ one day? Is this really the best way to articulate the next evolution of web technologies? Is Web 2.0 just “a marketing concept used by venture capitalists and conference promoters to try to call another bubble into existence” as Dave Winer suggests?

Thus, the focus of my first “blogoposium” is to spur some debate in addressing (and not necessarily ‘answering’) these types of questions. The general theme is Communicating the Ideas behind Web 2.0. I’d encourage those who participate (details on how to do so follow below) to really think about this topic from the perspective of the most non-technical users – the friend who still needs help with email, the client who is hesitant to use new technology, or the family member who still does not know what a blog is.

How to Participate

First, a brief definition – a “blogoposium” is a word I created (Google proof and the newest domain to my growing collection) that allows those in the blogosphere to simultaneously blog on the same topic (OK – the word is new, the idea is not). It leverages the power of tagging and social bookmarking to provide an easy way for everyone to not only participate in but also to keep track of the conversation.

The blogoposium will start on Wednesday, September 28th and run through Friday, September 30th. There are several different ways to get your voice heard in this discussion:

1. Tag Your Post – Since this blogoposium is the first of many that I hope to “host”, I have created a Technorati tag called blogoposium1. Simply tag your post with blogoposium1 to get involved in this blogoposium. The idea is to create subsequent tags in the future – “blogoposium2″, “blogoposium3″, etc. but that will depend on whether or not people usurp them prior to the next topic – please don’t!
2. Tag Relevant Articles – Using del.icio.us (although I have been blinking lately), tag relevant items for this blogoposium to “blogoposium1″. I will be monitoring this the blogoposium1 tag and may highlight some of the more interesting thoughts.
3. Trackback this Post – Use this permalink within your post on the blogoposium topic (using this link in your post should create an automagic trackback). For those not using WordPress, however, the safest way to get tracked is to use this trackback. The first 30 trackbacks will receive a complimentary copy of the advanced uncorrected proof of Seth Godin’s The Big Moo (the book doesn’t come out till October). Similar to TechCrunch, I’ll foot the bill for shipping for those of you in U.S. or Canada and ask $5 for those outside there. If you see you are within the first 30, drop me a line with your shipping address. Limit one book per blogger.

Or you can simply leave a comment below…I look forward to everyone’s thoughts and to a successful blogoposium future with you!

P.S. – Depending on how this first blogoposium goes, there will be some ways you can get involved in the future, so make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed.