Internet 2.0 - Its NOT Media

Jeff Jarvis's Feedthink kicks open a whole bunch of doors about the future of the Internet and justifies something I've been saying for a decade now. The Internet is NOT a media proposition.

My case was the Murdoch by exclusion method that goes like this.

• Rupert Murdoch gets mass media (its encoded in the guy's genes, you can find it on his DNA)
• Rupert Murdoch does NOT get the Internet. (He admits it and, Some things do not change)
• Therefore, the Internet is NOT a Mass Media proposition. QED

Simple, but probably not convincing. Then along come Jarvis

: There are two kinds of stuff on the internet: * Resources and articles and other static gems. * Feeds and lists and conversations and other dynamic goodies. Even that is a quite imperfect bucketing of the wonders of online but stay with me for a second, for it's at least a useful means of distinguishing some fundamental aspects of Web 1.0 from 2.0 and what's coming next and what's needed. Web 1.0 is built primarily on the former, the resources and articles and pages and mostly static things: It's about stuff that sits and is found at an address. It's about search. It's about URLs and permalinks. It's about Google and Yahoo before that. All that is valuable, always will be. But Web 2.0 adds on the wonders of the latter: feeds (RSS, Atom, FeedBurner, et al); lists (OPML, etc.); conversations (blog posts, Technorati links, PubSub feeds, comments); swarming points (tags on Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Dinnerbuzz); heat sensors (Blogpulse et al); aggregations (e.g., Command-Post.org); communities (Craig's List, et al); alerts (Craig's List feeds); decentralized distribution (bittorrent, etc.); and on and on.

Go read the lot, it is heartwarming stuff for those of us who think that information and its containers are finally parting company and the promise of Negroponte's Being Digital takes a step close to being filled.

But that isn't even close to exhaustive, check out his link to How Google Maps Got Me Out Of A Traffic Ticket A defendant uses a WiFi connection to Google Maps from a courtroom to demonstrate that the cop's memory is faulty, feel that thing shift?

Meanwhile check out what others are doing with Google Maps, mostly without Google's permission, but also mostly so far with their acquiesence.

Chicagocrime.org - no longer do citizens have to trust politicians crowing about safer streets. "We've never been able to track trends before," Mr Cappleman said. "Now, when we tell police there is a problem, we'll know what we're talking about."

Floridasexualpredators.com, combines Google Maps with data on convicted sex offenders, click on the pushpins to see the name, last known address and mug shot of each offender.

ahding.com/cheapgas, blends Google Maps with data from Gasbuddy.com's database of prices at individual petrol stations.

Home buyers can pinpoint the locations of houses in their price range at Cytadia.com.

Renters can turn to Housingmaps.com melds Craigslist and Google to spot available housing in 29 cities.

All these sites are operating without Google's permission, clearly violating the company's user agreement. But none charges any fees, and Google, which declined to comment, has made no effort to shut them down.

Ownership of information is going away, data about stuff will float in the air like sunlight and oxygen and the real question is how we are going to cover the cost of keeping the networks up, but the old model of selling containers that just happen to carry information is a dead man walking.

I think we are going to end up with data networks as a public service like roads and storm drains, but that's just me.

Comments

[Jon Husband]

I think there's a chance (at least in theory) that blogging and vlogging .. with blog software as the *substrate* or medium, could become an interactive version of some of the core aspects of what public televsion once held out as promise .. there are of course some clear differences as well.

But then there's the current and future inevitable pressure to rein in these dynamics, from various angles and vested interests.

BTW, have you ever read *The Digital Imprimatur*, by John Walker ?