Ahead of the Crowd

After adding political celebrities to the show, Web 2.0 hype scaled a new peak last week. Tim O’Reilly’s meme for “harnessing collective intelligence” and building systems “so that they get smarter the more people use them” seemed prescient when it arrived in 2004. But Web 2.0 became a “piece of jargon” which “nobody even knows what it means” according to web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, who grew bored of it two years ago. Now Web 2.0 has jumped the shark.

Listen to what environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore said at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Summit last week:

Web 2.0 has to have a purpose… to bring about a higher level of consciousness about our relationship to this planet and the imminent danger and opportunity that we face because of the radical transformation of the relationship between human beings and the Earth. We have everything we need to save it…

Let me translate: Web 2.0 is about saving the Earth. From ourselves. Endorsing Gore’s rhetoric, O’Reilly gushed, “Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0 as well as global warming?” The divisive global warming political debate has no middle ground. By cranking the dial to the left and ripping off the knob, O’Reilly now adds partisan politics to the long list of things Web 2.0 stands for. When a buzzword stands for everything, it stands for nothing.

I write about technology, not partisan politics. O’Reilly is following a political path, which I respect, but I cannot endorse. Our blog’s former tag line, “Cognition, Coordination, and Cooperation in the Web 2.0 Era” is history, not just because the Web 2.0 meme has lost its mojo, but because politicizing Web technology is the wrong way to go.