Scripting News for 5/15/2006

Share Your OPML now has an RSS aggregator that is automatically subscribed to the feeds in the Top 100. 

I agree that Al Gore would make a great candidate in 2008. 

This is one of my favorite pictures. I love the colors. 

My ears are totally clogged, went swimming last night, and now I can barely hear anything. I can barely hear what anyone is saying. I’m speaking in 40 minutes. Oy. 

Yet another conference where we sit in the audience checking email, listening to a couple of guys on stage. 

Salon epitaph of the West Wing (warning, spoilers here). 

Goodbye West Wing. Did you know what Mallory’s gift was? Seemed kind of obvious. Fitting end. Corny, for sure, but it worked. Almost like the ending of Gone With the Wind.  

Speaking of the obvious, when is Guy Kawasaki going to list the ten biggest lies.. of Guy Kawasaki? 🙂 

Is Web 2.0 a bubble? 

That’s really what we’ve been debating the last few days.

Are we onto something here, are the ideas behind Web 2.0 real, powerful, going somewhere, or is this another bubble like the one that grew in the 90s and then popped in Y2K?

I think the answer to both is Yes. But there are a couple of catches. Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 are the same thing. A lot of people seem to think there’s something new, but there isn’t. All the two-way technology of Web 2.0 was invented and pioneered while the 1.0 bubble was building and popping.

So Web 2.0 is every bit as real as the original web was. Ask TBL if there is such a thing as Web 2.0. He should be able to tell you that it was always part of the vision of the web that it be open to everyone to write and publish. If you go back before the web, to word processing and spreadsheets, who could imagine a one-way word processor? A graphics program that could only view but not create graphics? Feh. PCs were very much two-way things too.

Now, will there be a bubble? Yes, of course, read the VC blogs, they’re basically telling you they’re running out of deals they’re willing to fund. And who doesn’t think the growth of Google is going to slow at some point? Don’t we all know that web advertising is a scam? A friend who writes for a very big news site said the other day that he had never clicked on an advertising link. Even people whose salaries are paid by the advertising industry think it’s a scam. And scam is just another word for bubble.

But the two-wayness of the web will continue after the VCs leave us, again, after missing the point, again. The purpose of this place is not to make them money, no matter how much they believe it. The first time around we believed them. This time around, they look like just another self-centered group of bloggers, oblivious to all the other self-centered groups of bloggers in their midst. It’s all those groups that’s the real story of the web, no matter what version number you put after its name.