Why Web2.0 is 90% Rubbish

22nd October 2007 07:04 by tom

Whatever happened to editorial control? Since when has every Tom, Dick or Harry been an expert on everything and anything!? Sharing information and ideas is a great thing and the internet has given everyone a voice. Web 2.0 has taken this a step further by taking control away from the few and putting it firmly into the hands of the masses, but do we really want to listen to some guy next door with an over inflated ego and delusions of grandeur. Should we even waste our time. I think social bookmarking is great, I wasn't sure at first, but now it's clear to see how successful and revolutionary it's really been. Allowing people to work as a society and cherry pick the best bits of information to share with everyone else. You would think it's faultless, how can the masses be wrong... Right!? Well as we know, public opinion is sometimes influenced more by hysteria, emotions and fiction than cold hard fact. The scary thing about everyone having so much information, is that people actually believe it makes them experts in everything they spend 5 minutes reading about. I don't know why doctors even bother going to medical school anymore, when you can spend 5 minutes on Google and self diagnose yourself with practically every deadly disease under the sun. I think we should have a new form of social web order, one influenced by everyone but ultimately decided upon by experts in their fields. Lets make achievement, hard work and qualifications actually mean something again... I would call it Web3.0, but people have already started running away with that acronym, mostly marketing types who jump on every bandwagon they can, so instead I'll call it Web2.0 +1. I don't know if anyone else has used that before, but I think it fits well; it's still web2.0, just with 1 editor to decide between fact, fiction and plain rubbish. You might be thinking this all sounds very familiar, well to be honest with you, the idea is nothing new, it's called a newspaper! People lead very busy lives, we are being presented with more information than ever before, yet we have less and less time to distinguish the crap from the creme. That's why I don't think newspapers and magazines have anything to worry about. So that's my (not so) revolutionary idea!