Well, this weekend I noticed that there are an increasing number of ads on the radio that are yaking about blogs… More Mo on Joe and all this other crap and companies like Burger King, movies like Jack@$$ et all having profiles on MySpace (edit 11/17 – TR article in the same vein). These Web2.0 type elements are being monetized by companies and this may end up devaluing the the democratic journalism that these spaces have provided for so many. Granted the number of non commercially driven sites and profiles out there are still significant, this is just something that has been bugging me.
All this ad and clickstream driven monetizing is leading us to search engines that pretty much are as intelligent as they need to be, allowing us to fulfill what we desire before we know what we desire. It’s the algorithms, not the search engines for the “semantic web” that are really leading us to “web3.0“. So it seems that the web is following all other media in the way that it’s being commercialized. At first, it was controlled by the powerful, then it opened to the masses, and then the Ad men finally achieved a critical mass and turned the entire process over again. In the end, AI that is needed to achieve this flip isn’t to help people who create the content manage and mash it up at will (another 2.0 concept), though it may be available for this purpose, for a fee, or some ad space (just as the 1.0->2.0 transition required). Now begs the question, will 4.0 bring power back to the people?
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