Some Brisbane Guy

The Buzzword

Like any good buzzword (say…agile — or is that AGILE? No, it isn’t.), Web 2.0 is overused and bastardised to mean a thousand different things by some groups of people, and at the same time it’s mocked and dismissed as just another buzzword by others.

OK so it’s March 2008 and Web 2.0 is so not cool these days because it’s so old, but I feel like it’s important that I share two insightful resources that really do describe Web 2.0, if not succinctly then at least fairly comprehensively

The Resources

The first thing I want to share, and probably the canonical Web 2.0 description, is Tim O’Reilly’s essay “What Is Web 2.0 - Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.”

The other thing is this Youtube video that really had an impact on me when I first watched it. I think it does a good job of demonstrating the ideas behind web 2.0, especially for only 4 minutes and 31 seconds. It’s a good, quick conceptual overview of the whole concept.

The “I Kinda Reckon” Bit

So now that we’re talking about the whole web 2.0 concept thing, I’d just like to point out that it is really a lot different to the ideas people had back in the dotcom boom/bust days. Business ideas were much more aligned to the big dollar outlay, build-it-and-they-will-come, broadcast mentality of more traditional media and businesses (although some apparently got it right anyway.)

So everyone threw all that stuff out in favour of lightweight, bootstrapped startups that rely on users contributing, and APIs and interoperability and simplicity and figuring out what the web is and not imposing some model from before.

If you look at it like a giant agile development project, the original dotcom web bubble was our first iteration. We got some features, some stuff worked, some stuff was missing, and we threw some stuff away in the dotcom bust. Maybe Web 2.0 is iteration two — Fred Brooks did say, “build one to throw away.”

The Wrap Up

So as insanely belated as this post is, I really wanted to get these two resources off my chest and out of my private wiki (feel the two-point-ohness) so that y’all can enjoy them. Please do so.

Wow.

It looks like my dreams are finally coming true; Krispy Kreme is opening in Brisbane! They were going gangbusters in Queen Street Mall today at lunchtime, giving away 500 dozen doughnuts and they had a giant Krispy Kreme sandcastle — I don’t know why they had that but it was awesome.

And they had a van and promo chicks and ex footy players (Paul Sironen) and balloons and what not.

I snapped some pics on my phone (see em on Facebook):