It's All About Us

[piccolomondo]

If web 1.0 was organized around pages, web 2.0 is organized around people. And not just those special people who appear on TV screens and in Op-Ed columns. Web 2.0 is made up of ordinary people: hobbyists, diarists, armchair pundits, people adding their voice to the Web's great evolving conversation for the sheer love of it.


The question "What is Web 2.0?" among other things was pondered and explained in a number of video attempts. A new video recently emerged to take viewers on an extremely creative journey from the beginning of the web to what we are now calling "web 2.0."

The video titled, "Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us" was created by Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.




A Lesson in Viral Video

Michael Wesch was one of thousands of Internet users to add material to the video-sharing site YouTube. The next morning, Wesch sent the link to 10 colleagues and friends. It was a second draft. He mostly wanted their feedback. And they responded positively by forwarding the link to a few of their friends. Within hours, the video had more than 100 hits on YouTube.

“I was elated,” Wesch said. “By that time I was already satisfied that I generated a viral video.”

Eventually, a popular blogger discovered the video and posted it onto his site, which helped send the hits into the thousands. Scores of people saw the clip through the Internet blog search engine Technorati, and a number of them promoted it to the front page of the news aggregate site digg. By then, the blogosphere was all over Wesch’s project, and some were calling it a must-see video for anyone wanting to understand the hottest features of the Web.

The video page had been viewed 19,000 times by early Monday, 30,000 times by the afternoon and 91,000 times by early Tuesday.

“I was totally amazed,” Wesch said. “My guess is that [the subject matter of the video] is attractive to the people who can make a video become popular,” — the bloggers, techies and news junkies who habitually pass on their favorite links to others.

Wesch’s experience of quick Web exposure is hardly rare in an age of hyperlinks, blogs and constant content sharing. And it has helped illustrate the power of Web 2.0 to his class on “digital ethnography.” Students, who have been discussing what makes a video popular on sites such as YouTube, viewed the video on Thursday, before it became an Internet hit.

Wesch said the class is researching the social and cultural phenomena of the Internet and how the technology has spawned new language (HTML-speak, for instance).

Wesch graduated from the Kansas State’s undergraduate anthropology program 10 years ago, received his doctorate from the University of Virginia and returned to Kansas State as a faculty member in 2004. He said he created his first Web page in 1998 and has been looking at ways of presenting ethnographies in a more visual way. (Much of his research has focused on cultural practices in Papua New Guinea.)

As part of an article on Web 2.0 that is intended to appear in a journal of anthropology, Wesch created the video to appear on the publication’s Web site.

“I was trying to explain this stuff in the traditional paper format, and I thought, ‘This is ironic,’” he said. “I can illustrate this much better in a video.”

The difference between HTML and XML, the formation of blogs and the nonlinear quality of digital text are topics addressed in Wesch’s piece. The title, “The Machine is Us/ing Us”, is a reference to a point made in the video — that we are teaching our computer new ideas every time we click on a link. As Wesch says: “The more we are aware of the machine, the better we can make it serve us.”

And as he writes in the video,

“Digital text is no longer just linking information. The Web is no longer just linking information. The Web is linking people.”

Wesch said the video is meant to remind the programmers and techies that they have a “profound impact on societies” with their ability to write open source software. He said it’s also intended to remind the policy wonks and politicians who debate Internet privacy and copyrighting that “the media we are responding to is constantly changing.”
[Inside Higher Ed]

[Bent_Bladi]

lol -- my friend just showed me that video 3 days ago...

[piccolomondo]

The question "What is Web 2.0?" among other things was pondered by TechCrunch's Mike Arrington with a number of startup CEOs and executives on a video filmed deep inside the Silicon Valley echo-chamber.

Everyone has their own definition of Web 2.0, so for a more technical view, a 24 minute documentary on Web 2.0:

Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary

The topics discussed included:

1. What is Web 2.0?
2. Are we in a bubble?
3. What are the business models that will work on the web today?
4. What is the role of publishers in a user generated world?
5. How important and how big is the early adopter crowd?

[piccolomondo]

Here are few excerpts from

Time's Person of the Year: You

The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year...

... It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before... It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.
And we are so ready for it...

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
The answer is, you do...

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail... But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

[read the complete article]

[piccolomondo]

Web 2.0 Mania - We're in a Bubble

blog, blog, blog it all
blog it if it's big or small

…blog even if you're wrong
won't you blog about this song?




Like the song? Download the MP3!

[via All Things Digital]

[piccolomondo]

"We're sorry, this video is no longer available."

YouTube takes down "Here comes another bubble" video

'Here Comes Another Bubble' has just been taken down after someone sent YouTube a take-down request and the company honored it without contacting the Richter Scales first. Too bad! The video had already got more than a million views (it hit Yahoo's front-page). Kara Swisher posts about it all here.

Kara also made a video-interview with Tom Shields, where he defends the use of all material in the very funny video, noting it is a satire and they are not making any money it, pointing to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's explanation of fair use rules in place:

A Wide Berth for Transformative, Creative Uses: Copyright owners are within their rights to pursue nontransformative verbatim copying of their copyrighted materials online. However, where copyrighted materials are employed for purposes of comment, criticism, reporting, parody, satire, or scholarship, or as the raw material for other kinds of creative and transformative works, the resulting work will likely fall within the bounds of fair use."

Here's her interview with Shields posted on YouTube!:

[piccolomondo]

Why Lane Hartwell Popped the 'Here Comes Another Bubble' Video

After making a copyright claim that effectively kills a viral video, the photojournalist behind the takedown switched her Flickr account to private, pulling most of her 5,000 images out of public view.

"I wasn't upset by the video itself," Hartwell said, but the brief flash of her photograph -- without compensation or credit -- still rankled. "I thought, 'Where does somebody just get the right to take this?'"

She admits some people react like she's a "crazy cat lady" when she stands up for her right to protect her works, an unpopular stance in certain online circles. The notion that anybody should be able to freely help themselves to her work boggles her mind, she says.

"If I want socialism in America, I want medical insurance first," Hartwell said.
"I don't want people just taking my stuff and saying, 'We're going to redistribute this to the masses.'"

[read more]