Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

Russell Beattie Notebook – WTF 2.0 a good reality check on the Web 2.0 hysteria (people screaming in the streets). I think what also needs to be said is that the ethos behind a lot of the Web 2.0 shit has been there all along, but people are now falling into the trap that because something is labeled X, and X has been profitable for party Y, that any Z can then make money by doing the same type of thing.

This was Web 1.0. People made money because of the agnostic nature of the medium. It came out of the blue basically and turned traditional representational models on its head. Initially, people came in as enablers for this technology and made a lot of cash on it. Then people came on and filled in gaps in terms of implementation of the new media, and made cash.

But then everyone came in and tried to replicate the same with other portions of real-world space that had no business in a temporal/spatial neutral space. They failed, and for good reason. Newspapers are still falling into this trap. Now we have Web 2.0, where some people made a lot (not as much as before), some people come along and are clever, and some people are just playing dress-up as businesses. Its a lot more innocent, in some ways, but that innocence can only get you so far.

What is Web 2.0? Not learning from the mistakes of the past. We shouldn’t name a movement, or even define this as a movement. What is really happening is the reduction of walls and the realization that the proprietary barriers put in place to protect assets on the Web before (which themselves were vestigal remnants from corporate realworld space), are not necessary and counter to what the Internet is.

Web 2.0 as labeled is nothing more than the realization of the fact that the TCP/IP protocol stack enables much more than single point connections between Application and Physical layers. It is the realization that our individual packets will bump out in the ether, and if we give them something to talk about, nice things happen.

That in and of itself is not a business.