About Web 2.0 funeral

One of my students brought to me yesterdey, during the Graph class, the information of a brazilian weblog who said that Web 2.0 means nothing. I started to read it and, well, that post means nothing. So I went following the links (many of them in English, if you want to follow), and found there are some people really thinking that Web 2.0 is a piece of crap.

This criticism is probably a natural reaction to all buzzwords that gravitate around the Web 2.0 concept. But it lacks in a point. Web 2.0 means what we want it to mean. If we’re worried about giving names to stuff, then they’re right. But if we’re worried about things that should rule the future IT market, then we got a point, and studying Web 2.0 is not a complete waste of time.

For me, I pretend to keep Web 2.0 alive.

 

The Confunding Walls of Confusions

I have a problem with certain types of definitions. In Software Engineering, for instance, they have lots of names for some intuitive and common things. Looks like many Software Engineering related works have lots of redundant names and useless terms that transform your ten-page project definition in a two-hundred-page specification.

Then, during my Web 2.0 exploration, I stepped with an article concerning what’s called “The Five Walls of Confusion”. Looked like jargon crap. But there’s some pretty good definitions, that really should be remembered. Alphabetically sorted:

• The Wall of Buzzwords: all geek names that we have now should be, in a proper moment, banished, and replaced with “human explanation”. It’s a right thing to think, besides that giving a name to it is too much ironical.
• The Wall of Complexity: this one is also ironical. Creating huge diagrams and putting different and complex concepts concepts together, should be avoided. Giving wall names to problems that’s simpler to just explain, also.
• The Wall of Hype: there’s something here that could be a real problem. “Is that Web 2.0 real, or just a marketing crap?” is the question. At this point, better for us who believes that Web 2.0 could be real and powerful, in my humble opinion, is to keep the Web 2.0 concepts strictly in the real world.
• The Wall of Ignorance: this one can be changed to the phrase “Easyness or die”. People don’t know what a Wiki is, for instance. The most important part: people don’t need to know what a Wiki is. But, anyway, they have to use Wikis, blogs, and related stuff. What’s the solution? The old “KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid” should be enough. But user-oriented KIS, Stupid.
• (Last, but not least) The Wall of Significance: people from TI market must know what exactly does Web 2.0 is, and its significance. I still don’t know if it will be inevitable to understand Web 2.0 philosophy, or if Web 2.0 will be only a strong tendency. Anyway, it’s something that people should look.

I hope I didn’t make some serious mistakes. But, as far as I understood about the Walls concept, the whole concept could be reduced to these short definitions (and with ironies elimination) without loss. And reducing and simplifying are things that we should be worried about since the beginning…

 

Permalinks?

Since I’m kinda new to this Web 2.0 stuff, I’m still learning the jargons. And the first one that appeared was this one: permalink. If it was a parmalink, we can think about an Italian city. But it was not.

Well, I found a good definition in an article at Tom Coates’ weblog, but it’s too long. Let me, so, try a shorter definition.

Permalinks is a short for permanent links. When you have a web page such that changes its index a lot (for instance, a weblog), you can store old indexes at another addresses, so that you can forever refer to that page’s information. It’s just a concept, but pretty useful to Web 2.0 – at least to the little that I know about Web 2.0.

 

What is Web 2.0?

It’s interesting how things happen. I was just looking for design issues, and then a friend of mine appeared with some strange idea: the Web 2.0. “What is Web 2.0?”, that was my first question. And then he showed me a Tim O’Reilly’s article concerning precisely this issue: “After all, what the heck is this Web 2.0 you’re talking about?”. I didn’t finished the reading yet, but sounds pretty interesting. And it was chosen to be the first quotation here, at this weblog.

This weblog, by the way, mean to be a place where I’ll keep Web 2.0 related information. Please feel free to post, ask, help, even correct me. I’m just a newbie regarding the subject, willing to learn. Thanks in advance.