Deja 2.0

posted by Jeff Moriarty on July 11, 2007

I wonder how many stupid variations I can do on Web 2.0 component names. I may have to devote an entire post to it and see if I can get this out of my system once and for all.

Anyhoo, last week I wrote about how I thought Web 2.0 could help Intel. I posted a variant of that on our internal blogs and got a lot of interesting reaction, especially a post that basically said everything in Web 2.0 has been around before, and all this hopping about regarding a reinvention of the web is just silly. I agree with him, which is what drives me nuts.

Since I despise the term Web 2.0, ending up with it in my official job title has to be some sort of karmic payback for an injustice I apparently inflicted upon the Universe. I hate it for all the reasons my coworker stated, and a few more. While I lack a better blanket term for blogs, RSS, forums, mashups, and friends, this buzzword runs a serious risk of trivializing the real value.

I follow some of the “A-List Bloggers”, and I often think I should write some sort of psych paper on these guys. I find it increasingly difficult to find posts from them that contain actual content. It’s more often blogs about other bloggers, blogs about blogging, blogs about what other bloggers are blogging, bloggers blogging about what other bloggers blogged about them, and just about every grammatical variation of this sentence you can imagine. It’s like some crazy set of fun-house mirrors.

Then hit a casual search for Web 2.0 to catch the latest buzz on why Web 2.0 has died, is dying, or will die. I hope when it’s my time to go I’m hit by a bus and don’t linger this long in the ICU. It’s no wonder when I talk about this stuff people think I’m selling snake-oil.

Yet inside Intel I see our blogs connecting people in new ways. In the past week I’ve talked about enterprise search with someone in Poland, cultural differences with someone in Russia, and corporate ethics with someone in Penang. I didn’t know any of these people the week before. I’m using our internal wiki to collaborate on RSS deployment with people on three different continents and across six time zones. There are just some great tools and ideas here if you can get past all the sugary frosting.

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tagged: blog, value, Web 2.0