Online Media Cultist

It hit home for me this morning – not enormously revelatory of course to anyone paying attention – that we’re in the midst of a great and sweeping period of mergers and acquisitions right now in the tech and Internet space. We’re probably in something like the “latter web 2.0 days” of the Internet’s evolution, a time where big players are swallowing littler ones in an effort to grab market share, where the companies who produced the best ideas and services and were lucky enough to grab eyeballs and users and customers along the way are now setting themselves up for the long haul, and the sad shakeout of those companies who didn’t make it will continue to play out as spaces continue to become better defined.

Just taking a look at the news this morning, we see that Microsoft announced the acquisition of Rapt, a company involved with online advertising technology. Technology companies are now advertising companies, and Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and so on have been gobbling up companies and technology left-and-right for the last year or two now in an effort to gain an edge.

We also see Microsoft still trying to strategize its way toward a merger with Yahoo. The argument goes that Microsoft + Yahoo > Google. We’ll see how that goes.

Moving on, we see AOL making great strides to propel itself back into the elite tech companies pantheon. Just this week the acquisition of Bebo was announced, and now rumors say that the acquisition of “out of the box” social networking platform Kickapps could be next.

As the economy overall remains jittery, I think we’ll see this overall trend continue. Soon enough though new-fangled semantic web services will appear, social networking will evolve to its next phase, online video advertising models and companies will mature, website traffic metrics will improve, and overall Internet usage will shift.

And then we’ll be in a new place, and it’ll be fascinating to see how it all plays out then as well.

The term “web 2.0″ has been around for several years now, and has over time evolved to represent the current state of the modern Internet. It’s a ubiquitous term that can apply to things like the social networking phenomenon, fancy “drag-and-drop” applications powered by AJAX, the much reviled term “user generated content,” and even an over-arching design aesthetic (super simple and clean) right down to a now hyper-clichéd logo and site name (you’re screaming to your audience that you’re web 2.0 if you drop a vowel from your site name and make one of the consonants a different color!).

So in a very general sense sites/services like MySpace and Digg and GMail and YouTube represent the web 2.0 era, even if we can argue that most of the underlying technology has been around for years. The point is that these are sites that got massive numbers of people to use this technology and form communities around these services

Over time people have started to muse about what a “web 3.0″ world might look like. Jason Calacanis basically nails it today, echoing a consensus that has sprung up from conversations that I’ve had with colleagues over the last several months:

Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform. […]

Web 2.0 services are now the commoditized platform, not the final product. In a world where a social network, wiki, or social bookmarking service can be built for free and in an instant, what’s next?

The thing to know about today’s web software development environment is that everyone is playing with basically the same set of tools. No one really has “better technology” to use and deploy than anyone else anymore, and likely this will never be the case in the future.

What that means is that good ideas that meet market needs, that give people the right solution to the right problem at the right time, OR the right service to the right need at the right time, will be the web 3.0 winners.

I see all of this as great news for the continued evolution of the Internet. The barrier to entry is lower than ever, and great ideas have the opportunity to dominate the marketplace when executed with precision.

Again with the studies and the misreading of the modern online media environment.

A Reuters story cites a study which declares that user interaction on “web 2.0″ sites “remains weak” and “is far less participatory than commonly assumed.” Stats to back up this claim include .16 percent of YouTube users upload video and .2 percent of Flickr users upload pictures. The study does however grant that somehow, “despite relatively low user involvement, visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 688 percent in two years,” according to Bill Tancer from Hitwise.

This proclamation of weakness is, well, weak.

Here’s why:

* First things first: web 2.0 = the Internet. There’s very little use in differentiating “web 2.0″ websites from the rest of the Internet. If you can leave comments, if you can upload media, if you can personalize a search function in any way, if you can set up a profile of some kind, you’re in web 2.0 land.

* They’re forgetting the 80-19-1 rule. I picked up on this rule from Jason Calacanis, and although it relates to social news sites like Digg and Netscape, I’ve found it very useful in framing the way in which online communities in general tend to operate. The first part states that 80 percent of an online community will never participate, and will be content simply to consume information or entertainment content.

* The 19 percent part is where the study (and its coverage) really misses the mark. According to Jason’s rule, 19% of a community will interact in some way, whether it be leaving comments, or perhaps taking part in voting or ranking on a social news site like Netscape.

What about the 900 million people who have a MySpace and/or Facebook and/or Bebo and/or some other social networking profile, you ask? Aren’t those good folk “participating” on “web 2.0″ sites by browsing profiles and friending and posting pictures and prancing and cavorting and flirting and so on?

The answer would be a big fat yes. Just because media uploads are concentrated into a relatively small group on YouTube and Flickr doesn’t mean that huge numbers of millions of people aren’t actively interacting with the Internet i.e “web 2.0″ sites.

* And what of the 1 percent, or the power users? Those uploading media on YouTube and submitting stories to Digg are the engines that keep those web platforms afloat. However, that the study doesn’t take into account the 19-percenters who comment and vote and rank and set up profiles on these sites is surprising.

A new study produced by Clearswift shows that lots of people use “social media” and “web 2.0″ sites at work. In fact, we’re told that “87% of office workers access web 2.0 sites each week.”

The implication of the study is that businesses should take note of “red flags” such as people spending too much time on non-work related tasks and the potential for “data leaks” (in the e-roof, I guess?).

I’ve got some issues with this study and its analysis as presented by Clearswift. First of all, I’d love to learn how they define social media and web 2.0 sites as compared to the rest of the Internet. In fact, the Internet is social media: it’s an interactive medium. Every time you hit that keyboard or click that mouse on a website, wham-o, you’ve just entered social media-land. That’s so web 2.0, you want to say. And you should. But not out loud, please.

Secondly, didn’t we already know that people spend lots of time goofing off at work in front of a computer? Does MySpace really provide the extra excuse people need to not put a cover sheet on the old TPS reports? In fact, if people want to screw around and not work, there is any number of ways that they can do it. Remember how you always used to see bored secretaries playing Solitaire and Mindsweeper?

In terms of “data leaks,” this comes down to common sense more than anything. Tom from MySpace and the fellas on your Fantasy Football message board aren’t trying to manipulate you out of the Great Secret Project that your company is building. “Social media” websites don’t play greatly into the equation. Either you have a good sense of what and what not to reveal about your personal life and your workplace, in real life or in front of a computer screen, or you don’t.

I’m being slightly tongue-in-cheek here. There are doubtless sensitive situations that come up when an employee engages in business-related discussions within a publicly viewable web environment. This collaboration with colleagues is doubtless largely a boon for the employee’s knowledge base and therefore benefits the organization.

So I would think that instead of laying down the hammer and restricting Internet access in the workplace, a short memo from the brass to the note of think before you type and try to give the Facebook and the Twitter and the AIM a break every now and again, we may be watching, ha ha ha, cough cough cough would be much more appropriate, and really better serves long term interests all around.

Web Worker Daily (which uses the coolest Soviet-looking font ever in its header) provides some good and practical tips for laying off the ADD-vortex of the Internet, including setting aside blocks of time for e-mail, and allowing yourself the right to lay off registering for yet another site “just because all the cool kids are doing it.”

No one can agree on what “web 2.0″ means, or if it even exists (and to be fair, most folk have never even heard the term). But if you want a quick and breezy and fun visual overview on how we got to the now of now, this video is for you.

Picked this up via RSS Blog.

Cuts in U.S. media jobs rose by 88 percent in 2006, 17,809 positions slashed versus 9,453 in 2005, according to a new Challenger Gray & Christmas survey. Large traditional media organizations such as The New York Times Company and Time Inc. were cited as having to reduce staff in order to compensate for reduced revenue from print publications.

This year will likely be little different, with large, traditional media companies scrambling to beef up and modernize online media offerings in order to stay relevant and solvent. The idea of a newspaper publication going to online-only production is no longer a joke (though some old school ink-stained newspaper cats may laugh bitterly at the notion) and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that 2007 will see a major U.S. newspaper do just that.

As eyeballs continue to drift away from paid print offerings to free online publications, as advertisers slowly but surely realize that the online medium is a much more efficient way to reach target markets, and as content publishers optimize the ways in which they can monetize their offerings, the “new media” or online media takes another step toward being the dominant force in how information and entertainment is transmitted in people’s daily lives.

This process will play out over a number of years. Print publications will forever hold some role (nothing can ever replace the tangible feeling of reading a book in your favorite comfortable chair or ruffling through a newspaper on the subway) but that role will become a niche one, meeting the needs that can’t be met by online media.

Online media will always have its bumps and roller coaster rides, of course. There will be layoffs and screaming of bubbles bursting and “the end of web 2.0″ and market shifts and rumors of imminent collapse and advertising market crashes and other such talk. But we can safely say now that the dark years of 2001 – 2003 are over. They one day may be seen as akin to those early years of the automobile industry when cars were derided as the latest fad.

Online media ain’t no fad.