well, exactly. but it is interesting, isn't it? "information wants to be free" and all that? and "free" there doesn't just mean "free as in beer," but the web (or, i think more properly, "the internet," insofar as focusing on the web is perhaps to limited a view) doesn't just ideologically trend towards no-cost and low-cost, maybe, and this is what we're seeing, it trends toward no-cost inherently. i'm reminded of the arguments about music-sharing and IP -- my argument for years is that the music companies have to figure out new business/revenue models and stop trying to legislate their old business models. maybe the "2.0" in "web 2.0" is this stuff that pushes closed providers to open up. even the E, which sits still at the very beginning of this set of threads, recently stopped charging for much of their online content:
=== Published: August 13, 2007
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The experiment in paid content is over. No sale.
Charging for web content looked pretty promising back in 1996, when the pioneering new web magazine Slate was gearing up to try just that. "Our belief is that the medium will prove itself over time and people will pay for it," said John Williams, the founding publisher.
He never got a chance to test that proposition; he quit for Starbucks two months after launch. Then Slate made its move -- but lasted only a year before going free again in February 1999. Now there's a crescendo of similar falling walls at serious news sites -- including The Economist and CNN -- and the likelihood that the websites of both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal will soon be free.
=== <http://mobile.adage.com/html_article.php?li=612ae406>
So, it's about your point regarding scale and the advertising revenue you can generate.
Compare this article from back 01 when online publlishers were starting to charge because they couldn't make money offering free stuff: < http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1447145.stm>.
So, and in a way this goes to your point about, um, let's call it Social Networking 1.0?, that the real value here for businesses is in pushing product. I think the relationship is somewhat more symbiotic in 2.0 -- i don't see pyramid-scheme-like setups or cult meetings for technorati, for example, and *everyone* can make money because *everyone* pushes product to *everyone* -- but i think you've got onto something with that comparison.
"For example, at the first Web 2.0 conference, in October 2004, John
> Battelle and I listed a preliminary set of principles in our opening talk.
> The first of those principles was "The web as platform." Yet that was also
> a rallying cry of Web 1.0 darling Netscape, which went down in flames
> after
> a heated battle with Microsoft. What's more, two of our initial Web 1.0
> exemplars, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both pioneers in treating the web
> as a platform. People don't often think of it as "web services", but in
> fact, ad serving was the first widely deployed web service, and the first
> widely deployed "mashup" (to use another term that has gained currency of
> late). Every banner ad is served as a seamless cooperation between two
> websites, delivering an integrated page to a reader on yet another
> computer. Akamai also treats the network as the platform, and at a deeper
> level of the stack, building a transparent caching and content delivery
> network that eases bandwidth congestion.
>
> Nonetheless, these pioneers provided useful contrasts because later
> entrants have taken their solution to the same problem even further,
> understanding something deeper about the nature of the new platform. Both
> DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers, yet we can also see how it's
> possible to realize more of the possibilities by embracing additional
> <
> http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=3#designpatterns
> >Web
> 2.0 design patterns.
heh. the "wisdom of crowds." my very first pseudo-paid online writing and community management was working with/for jim surowiecki at "Rogue," one of the gardners bros' several AOL-only publications. along with the motley fool, they had a movie-based content area called "follywood," and a sort of culture-vulture place called "rogue." ah, those were the days: working for a free aol account. lol. but it was a lot of my early online community experience, experience working as part of an editorial-publishing team, etc. indeed, AOL may be instructive, here. aren't they really the first early web 2.0 company, if we think facebook = web 2.0? that is, they precisely had community, profiles, shared user content, the idea being something like to have a vacation resort online, where you didn't have to go to the big bad scary internet to get anything. this was partly an old media problem -- they wanted to be the one channel -- and partly a 2.0-ish problem -- they wanted to be the gated/facebook place. maybe they were web 1.5. but they had to open up. now they're basically just an isp, afaict. and not even very good at that.
Let's drill down for a moment into each of these three cases, teasing out
> some of the essential elements of difference."
>
> --
>
> drill down. ugh.
yeah, but there are times when it's a useful term, like in navigation. but here it's just irritating biz-speak. ymmv.
j