Mistake number two (and ultimately a bigger mistake than actually signing up) came in the form of clicking the “See who you know on Naymz” link.

Under normal circumstances, the “who do you know” phase of social netowrk sign up goes something like this:

1. I select the form of my address book (Gmail, Yahoo, etc) and it searches my contacts.
2. It shows me a list of the contacts who are currently members and asks me if I would like to become “friends” or whatever the nomenclature they use may be
3. It then shows me a lit of all the unmatched addresses and asks if I would like to mail them an invite (to which I universally say no)
4. If I say yes, it e-mails my friends an invite (ONCE!)

This is where Naymz does things a little differently.

Naymz will let you connect to other social networks to find connections. I chose LinkedIn. It scanned my contacts and presented a list, just like the others do.

Naymz, however, actually combines step two and step three above. It presents the list, and lets you send your messages. Since I have signed up for dozens of these networks to test them out, and I have never seen anyone stray too far from the steps I outlined, I clicked ok. I failed to notice that Naymz includes a small icon and disclaimer that says only those people identified with the icon are users (very few of the people I know are – even now). It also says you should remove anyone you don’t want to mail. The icon and disclaimer are small enough that I missed it completely the first time through and only found it after I became aware of my original mistake.

Now, I had expected to see a list of unmatched addresses after clicking that button. What I saw instaed was an immediate inflow of e-mail that had subject lines like, “What the hell is Naymz?”

I spent the better part of a day apologizing to people for the Naymz spam and told them they should not take that as an endorsement of Naymz. I told everyone that I was simply testing it out to see what I thought.

Since that fateful day, I have recieved many more messages asking the same question. Until today, I had always assumed that was because they had just opened the original message.

However, upon actually logging in to Naymz today (I was looking for a way to turn off or limit their WAY too frequent messages to me), I discovered Naymz has been e-mailing constant reminders (a la Plaxo) to those who had not replied. It hadn’t simply used my name to spam them once, it was following up with mupltiple requests.

So now my Naymz account is cancelled. If you received a request from me to sign up, I apologize profusely. If you said yes to that request, doubly so. If you didn’t say yes, and have been bombarded by further appeals since, even more so.

I had told some people that I would let them know my thoughts when I got done with my evaluation. So here it is:

I would avoid Naymz like it’s the plague. It combines all the annoying characteristics of Plaxo with the disregard for informed consent typically reserved for malware.

I have deleted my account. That is a rare step for a guy who has littered the Internet with unused SocNet accounts. But I am not stopping there.

I hereby hope and pray that the good people at Naymz suffer the karmic ass kicking which they have rightly earned. They’ll go down with Plaxo and Gator as yet another Internet scourge.

If you’re interested in looking at the characteristics that separate the top tier bloggers from the lower tier it all comes down to hustle. That’s pretty mych true of any profession, but that hustle takes a different form for blogs.

The average top-tier blogger posts 10 or more times per day and utilize 5 or more web 2.0 apps.

Perhaps the most interesting facts for social marketers are the way bloggers interact with brands. 90% talk aout specific brands, and 80% talk about customer service experiences. That should be enough to make any company take blogs seriously. However, the more relevant stat is the fact that 61% of bloggers report they are influenced by other bloggers discussion of products, services, and customer experience.

In short, whether you are online talking about your company. product or brand or not, there is an active and vibrant discussion of it taking place. You need to decide whether or not you want to be part of it.

The fact is the whole thing is stupid.  Capuano’s argument for why he is doing this, Nancy Pelosi’s defense of him in her letter to Boehner, and Shelbinator’s defense all come down to the same lame argument.

In order to keep up with the “decorum” of the House, they ought to find a way to do so that doesn’t get too tangled up in commerce or political campaigning due to free market forces (i.e., if you watch a Representative’s “official” YouTube video, it might be unbecoming if the three “related” videos that pop up in the YouTube player after it’s over were a racist anti-Obama ad, a pitch for Viagra, or candid footage of Britney Spears’ crotch). Not unreasonable suggestions, I think.

I left a comment on Shelby’s site, but I think it bears repeating here.

If these rules are so critical to protect us from unrefined content that might accompany “official” communications, why hasn’t the Franking Commission required newspapers to print any columns submitted by Members on facing pages with no advertising, comic strips, or campaign news?

If this is such a reasonable request, why hasn’t the Franking Commission required TV news programs to not bookend Member appearances with commercials?  Why don’t they have rules for what other stories can appear in the crawl on the chyron?

The fact is Capuano is ignorant of the equivalence between offline and online communications.  He clearly doesn’t use, know, or understand the area over which he is attempting to exert jurisdiction.

Honestly, the idea of franking dates back to the 1600s.  The entire concept of the Commission is a joke in the era of the Internet.  With newspapers losing subscribers, TV losing viewers, and every other aspect of society being radically changed, Capuano’s action is nothing but a desperate attempt to remain relevant in a position that is growing obsolete by the second.

When Micah Sifry and I were in London in April, we had many discussions with the academics there that felt they could just watch the Internet change everything else on the planet, but somehow they would be excused from the Internet Age.

Congress is now making the same mistake.  They’re attempting to ignore the flames around them and keep playing their fiddles as the US burns.  They’ll continue looking for ways to apply 17th century standards of decorum to 21st century communications technology.  It’s frightening that our institiutions are so far behind the world around them.  But that’s what you get with bureaucracies…

Having been the guy to officially ‘pull the plug’ on Team Leader, I can tell you it was not a matter of ‘giving up’ on it. It was, in the end, a tragic loss due to my overestimation of how much support I actually had for creating a Republican destination through GOP.com.

The idea was to build a bigger and better program that was more open, more engaging and a true online community – something akin to a cross between RedState and Townhall. The difference would be the connection to a voter file to register, ID and turnout voters, inviting self-mobilization through volunteer activities, and syndication of the system across state party, candidate and activist websites.

We had two problems with the Team Leader program and attempted to address both as part of the rebranding and retooling.

Our first problem was the name. The name of the program actually ended up limiting its success. When you focus group things before you release them, you discover issues like this. As it turned out, a lot of people were afraid of the “Team Leader” title because, while they wanted to be involved, they felt intimidated by the idea of “being in charge” of anything. We actually saw this on the Bush campaign and changed the name from Bush Team Leaders to Bush Volunteers. When we did, our take rate exploded.

The other problem was the disconnect between the Team Leader effort and GOP.com. As in a lot of places, the RNC had different divisions doing different (and often competing) things online. GOP.com had been run out of Communications while GOPTeamLeader was run out of Political. They competed for budget dollars and eyeballs. In redesigning GOP.com after the 2004 elections, we combined all those efforts under one roof. We changed the name to GOP Teams, and the verbiage to being ‘a part of the team’.

As I said, a much broader social networking program and more options for true involvement were to be the foundation of the effort. This ultimately ended up being the MyGOP tool – and was a faint shadow of the original idea.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the opposition to open systems that I encountered. The aversion to letting go of the message and allowing individual supporters to grab and run with it proved to great. With the advantage of 20/20 hindsight, I would not have dismantled a relatively successful if top-heavy system like Team Leader to end up with what exists now.

This is illustrative of a larger problem the GOP has. This is where I part with David on his belief that a party-sponsored web 2.0 infrastructure will bridge the digital divide. I believe that divide is a function of a much deeper distrust of letting the message go. If the GOP is going to be successful online, we cannot wait for the party to do it.

As the Democrats have shown, this will need to be organized by those in the party who get it. We will have to drag the party apparatus, kicking and screaming, to the dance.

Republicans are getting trounced by Democrats…

Some attribute this disparity to activist energy on the left, a hatred of President Bush or even dissatisfaction among Republican supporters with their own stable of candidates.

But I offer another reason: Republicans have failed to place a premium on an effective Internet strategy. While the Internet’s transformational shift has emerged and has been dubbed Web 2.0, Republicans still operate in a world of Web 0.5.

As Democrats rally, connect and urge activism with their base through coordinated nationwide town hall meetings hosted by MoveOn.org, Republican presidential candidates are still considering whether or not they should even blog on their sites.

This gets back to the heart of the discussion Ruffini and I were having last week. Patrick had suggested that my focus on implementing web 2.0 in an effort to get activists engaged would be less than successful without a corresponding effort to increase the quality of the content you’re offering. I agree. I think both are critical.

This is where I part with David. I agree that we need a more effective Internet strategy, and need to build an infrastructure that will support the type and level of activity David suggests, but I don’t think simply building it will attract droves of Republicans. The GOP has greater problems than a lack of social networking. There is a party that is not terribly happy with a sound electoral loss a few months ago, a continuing series of miscues by the Administration, and a lackluster field of Presidential candidates. That is a significant hill to climb, and we won’t be able to if we don’t fundamentally alter our approach.

The Democrats blog community is strong because the leadership of the party views bloggers as activists. With very few exceptions, our candidates and elected officials view them as another form of media. They approach blogs the same way they approach newspapers, rather than the way they approach a neighborhood association or a pancake breakfast.

Further, while the GOP has been recognized for its effective message control with a stable of surrogates repeating the same mantra over and over and over, the Internet gives more people a voice. That’s the appeal of web 2.0. But messages, like technologies, are introduced and then take on a life of their own – changing and shifting as they pass from person to person. GOP efforts will need to relinquish control over the message and allow users to adapt it if we ever expect to be effective in an Internet world.

Then today, I saw this article about a flash mob storming a train station in London. It made me conclude that flash mobs are really an expression of the same concept. You can’t get more of an anti-social social network than 4,000 people showing up for the same event, at the same time, only to dance to their own personal iPod soundtrack in what appears to be complete silence to everyone around them.

Unfortunately, AntiSocialNetworking.com is taken. Otherwise I would build it out as the most anti-social web 2.0 site I could possibly create.

My reply, in essence, challenges the first assertion in the article – that the “Great Man” theory of humanity took a beating this year. Despite all the hype around YouTube, MySpace, and web 2.0, I don’t buy that the fundamental balance between fame and obscurity was altered in the slightest.

If you look at the big moments online – Macaca, Conrad Burns, Michael Richards’ meltdown, etc. They have one thing in common – they are all stories about ‘great’ men. Now I use great not in the context that they actually are, but to suggest that in our celeb obsessed world, they would probably fit into Thomas Carlyle’s definition.

Other than the guy running the camera in the Allen video, does anyone actually know the name of the people that captured these events? Of all the bands pimping themselves on MySpace, how many have actually entered pop culture relevance because of it? The Wikipedia page for MySpace lists two – Arctic Monkeys and Lily Allen. The former had never even heard of MySpace before discovering a fan had created a site and the latter points out that she had a contract before ever establishing a presence online.

What about normal people getting hundreds of thousands of friends and becoming celebrities? Well, most are either models, actors, porn stars, or bands. The few who have escaped obscurity and landed any kind of mainstream publicity are far between and generally relegated to c-list exposure like Playboy spreads (Can you say Darva Conger?) and appearances on daytime talk shows.

So MySpace hasn’t really ‘made’ anyone. With the exception of fat kids who want to be Darth Maul, or fat kids singing/dancing to obscure Romanian pop songs (neither of which, it is worth noting, originated on YouTube), most of the few examples of video that have become famous involve people who were already major or minor celebrities.

So clearly there is some other indicator that these sites are changing the world, right? Well, no. Not yet.

Does that mean all the hype over online collaboration is empty hype? I don’t think so. I am a firm believer that the Internet empowers people. in campaigns, I have seen the possibilities for allowing people to work – either independently or with others, and achieve some amazing things. We may yet come to a day when the power of the Internet is realized, but I do not, at all, believe a 24/7 version of America’s Funniest Home Videos, or a virtual American Idol for garage bands, amateur directors, porn stars, and wannabe actors is changing the world.

These sites, in the short term, may add a few more marginal celebs to the balance sheet, but they will not fundamentally change the nature of our fame obsessed society. They will be, in the annals of history, the Internet equivalent of the pet rock.

So, in answer to Katie’s question, yes. I believe Time magazine took the easy way out.

This isn’t really about that, though. It’s more about control as expressed through the mitigation of risk, more than through message discipline. You could argue the two are closely entwined, but I really think there is a distinction and I’d like to draw it. I’d also like to explore a tendency I see in culture that is really disturbing to me.

I’m a big fan of Greg’s Previews on Yahoo Movies. I liked it better when it was UpcomingMovies.com, but Yahoo! hasn’t damaged it too badly. I’m not, however, a big fan of a tendency I see in Hollywood, and in politics.

I read recently that Kristin Cavallari will be starring in a remake of Revenge of the Nerds. that news really made we want to gag. Every time I read movie news, it seems like some studio has decided to remake either a classic movie (generally ones that aren’t that old), or has adapted a classic 70s or 80s TV show for the big screen (Dukes of Hazzard, CHiPs, Miami Vice).

I’ve railed on this blog before about the fact that Hollywood seems to be completely and totally devoid of new ideas. But I really don’t think that’s it. Movies like Stranger than Fiction, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Napoleon Dynamite and others have convinced me that we do not have a dearth of creativity. We have, I believe a dearth of bravery and an abundance of fear.

In Hollywood, fear of failure leads to studios making horrible remakes of old TV shows. They try to tap into our sense of nostalgia in an effort to draw an audience, and instead end up creating films that nobody wants to see. I would be interested to see a study (and perhaps I’ll do one in a few weeks when Mrs. Quip is traveling), that examines the percentage drop in revenue for films as a corollary of the number of remakes in a given year.

Similarly, in politics, we continue to rehash all the same tried and true charges of liberalism, tax-and-spend, extremist, etc. In advertising, we recreate the exact same spots over and over – the grainy photo of your opponent, the newspaper headlines, the flashing lights of a police car in the background of a crime spot. It’s all the same, but since the images don’t change, the only way to make the charges stick is to exaggerate – more and more – the actual charge. The reason we think we’re drifting down a spiral of ever more negative ads isn’t because the ads get worse. They stay exactly the same. It’s because the script gets worse.

Is the audience for movies shrinking because the interest in movies is shrinking? Or is the interest in movies shrinking because the quality of the movies is in steady decline?

Do you need to make political charges ever-more sensational because people are ignoring politics and we must break through? Or are people ignoring politics because the process of breaking through is ever more repellent?

I sat on a panel this week on political advertising. It was interesting in that one of the panelists was a member of the Tuesday team that created the Reagan-Bush “Morning in America” and “Bear” ads. Also on the panel was Linda Kaplan Thayer who worked on media for Bill Clinton.

A discussion of Clinton’s advertising came up and someone made the claim that Clinton’s version of “Morning in America” was superior to the original – a claim that made me laugh. I had the same reaction when I heard people say the Bush-Cheney 04 ad titled “Wolves” was superior to “Bear”. I laughed again today when someone made the comparison between the RNC’s new ad “The Stakes” and Johnson’s 1964 ad “Daisy”.

For the same reason that Jessica Simpson will never replace Catherine Bach as Daisy Duke and Colin Farrell will never be as cool as Don Johnson was in the mid 1980s, these ads pale in comparison to the originals. Why? Because they’re not original.

Politicians and parties today are running campaigns from the same playbook they’ve used for 20 or 40 years. They refuse to step outside that structure because they fear anything new. A new tactic is a tactic that might fail. Failure might mean losses. Losing can cost you control or keep you from getting it.

So what you see, on both sides, although it is admittedly more common on the GOP side, lately, is a fear of creativity.

From the web 2.0 standpoint, that results in a fear of technologies that are new, different, and open. If you look at what the Democrats are doing online, and their use of web 2.0, it’s not, under any circumstances, that the party is using web 2.0 effectively. It is the people, who have abandoned the party in favor of their own organizing, that are using these tools to communicate. The party apparatus, like the GOP, is using these tools sparingly.

Now there are two aspects of this that I think play a huge role in the final outcome to be expressed next week. First, I don’t think, even if the parties made huge efforts to implement web 2.0 concepts into their online operation, you would see a lot of adoption.

People are inherently distrustful of institutions and will look elsewhere for “trusted” information. They recognize that the parties create press releases. They don’t create news. If they want to share a video with an undecided voter, sending him to YouTube is a better idea than sending him to Democrats.org or GOP.com.

Second, what interest there is in online politics, as I mentioned yesterday, is largely on the left because it is the best interactive media to cauterize the anti-establishment sentiment.

Will that result in a victory for Democrats in November? I doubt it. If they do win, will it be because of the Democrats online activity? No. An electoral win will have less to do with the use of web 2.0 and more to do with the implosion of the Republicans. Only Kos, Stoller, Marshall, Duncan and Armstrong would argue differently

I have seen, already, a large number of posts by Democrats claiming that the netroots is responsible for the palpable excitement that the party currently feels. Honestly, their success, should it come, has less to do with the web and the netroots and more to do with the old adage, “Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut.”

Should they win, however, and should they win big – claiming both the House and the Senate – I think they would immediately, from a party perspective, see the same fear of being new and creative. The antics of the Democrats online would be quickly denounced by a party concerned with losing control rather than being embraced by a party concerned with gaining it.

That is the nature of control. Political parties are consumed by its pursuit, and yet, that control runs afoul of web 2.0.

They got me wondering whether the online ‚Äúconservative elite‚Äù was aware of what the left had in mind and, if so, whether they were concerned. During the past few years, I have had the opportunity to ask this of Internet specialists working on the Bush-Cheney campaign, top officials in the Republican National Committee, communications specialists at the White House and dozens of top conservative bloggers…

When I suggested that ceding control of the major “nodes” in the online world to the left was a huge mistake, they were dismissive. It became clear they could not imagine one day finding themselves boxed out of what is fast becoming the biggest force in electoral politics.

First, I’m not sure who he was talking to, but it wasn’t me. Having been the eCampaign Director for both BC04 and the RNC, I’d think he would have picked up the phone, but alas, he didn’t. It’s probably better for his story that he didn’t, because I would have been tempted to point out how dumb his premise really is.

Nobody gets boxed out of web 2.0. That’s sort of the whole point. But let’s look at this through three factors – the movement, the medium, and the message.

Movements have nothing to do with the medium. You can argue that the whole lefty “people powered politics” is a function of the Internet, but it’s a fallacious argument. The same passion, ideology and motivation existed before the Internet. The reason the GOP turned to radio in 1994 is the same reason Democrats turned to the Internet after 2000 – it is the most interactive form of communication available and it is a media popular with the youth.

What does youth matter? I’ll explain, but let’s hit the interaction angle first.

After the defeat in 1992, Republicans needed an outlet – a way to share our collective misery. There was this guy named Rush on the radio and he was saying a lot of the things we all felt, so we listened, and we called, and we talked, and we shared with our fellow conservatives.

After the election in 2000, Democrats needed the same release. The Internet, however, had become the more interactive medium and blogs, unlike radio programs, were on 24 hours a day, not the three or four hours relegated to Rush or Ollie.

Now the youth in America have a common tendency. They are almost always drawn to the side of anti-establishment causes. They gravitate toward anything opposed to the status quo. They also tend toward interaction and adoption of new media. Around 1992, there were a lot of young Republicans tuning into talk radio. They may not have been the bulk of the audience, but in politics, it is the young that make things happen. Old guys may have ideas, connections, and check books, but young guys (no gender discrimination intended) have the energy and motivation to walk thousands of doors and make thousands of calls.

In 1994, the GOP won the House and Senate. In 2000, it was the Presidency. We had become, to the detriment of our cause, the establishment. Our success was also our first weakness. We clung to our older media – radio – because it is what we knew. It is the technology that brought us to the dance.

Once we became the establishment, the natural tendency of the youth shifted to the Democrats. The generation that has been propelling them since 2000 is one that learned the Internet early and thinks of the radio in terms of music, not interaction. For interaction, they look for immediacy and that comes from the Net.

It’s the movement not the medium

That is not to say, however, that the Democrats have a lock on the Internet, but they do have, currently, the power of the anti-establishment cause and an audience that tends toward the medium.

As with any establishment, there are a small cadre of dedicated Republican revolutionaries who are not content to sit and watch their movement fall into disarray. So they seek to adapt the old movement to new mediums. The Republican bloggers, the eCampaign professionals, the GOP Internet activists all recognize the power of the new movement, and are trying to keep the parade from passing by, but it always does.

The one constant, on either side, is the message being conveyed by the respective movements. On the GOP side, you have, by necessity, a movement that once was right, but now must continue to be right, so they cling to the status quo to prove their correctness, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The Democrats must, out of necessity, challenge the establishment. They will continue to do so until they win. They do not need to offer ideas, merely to challenge the correctness of the GOP.

The messages never change, only the party in power.

Where Cox Goes Wrong

Cox’s argument falls apart for three reasons – he focuses on the medium, not the movement or the message; he ignores the tendency of the youth, and he assumes a permanency to web 2.0.

Assuming the Democrats are successful this year, and win the House and Senate, they will, in very short order, become the establishment. All those that argued their cause will continue doing so, but very quickly the number of new converts they attract will decline. The failure of their policies will be apparent to all but the partisans who fill their ranks. That’s not to say Democrats have failed policies. It merely reflects that the establishment always advocates for failed policies (again, to prove they were right to begin with).

Look at the Great Society policies. Nobody can argue that they eliminated poverty, lifted the poor and elderly, or ended class distinctions. You can, however, argue that they created a nanny state, an out of control welfare system, and a society burdened with government debt. Yet the Democrats still look at them with fondness for no other reason than to argue they were right.

It took the GOP movement to reclaim Congress, pass welfare reform, balance the budget and put our house in order. It took the same GOP Congress, and the Administration as an accomplice, to undo it all. It is, simply put, an opportune time for a new movement to challenge the establishment failures.

The youth are aligning with that movement, using the most interactive medium they have available to propel it. That has nothing to do with web 2.0.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is an architecture and a medium, not a movement. The left talks about web 2.0 as if it were the coming of the messiah. It ignores two key points – there had to be a 1.0 to get to 2.0 and there will have to be a 3.0.

The Democrats currently spend more time on the Internet, and spend more time engaged in social networking. That, in no way, precludes the GOP from doing so. The nature of our society prevents that and web 2.o precludes it. Web 2.o is about a gathering of the like-minded using an open system that facilitates collaboration. It is not about exclusions and forced adherence to the status quo.

Our society favors the best idea, but our concept of the best idea changes very, very rapidly and is generally anchored in what meets our needs the best. Apple was revolutionary, but Microsoft was easier to use. Linux keeps poking at the bubble, but it still is not as friendly as Microsoft. When another OS finds a better combination of features and ease of use, Microsoft can, and will, be knocked off.

Cox offers this really poor example to claim otherwise.

Some might note that Malkin can still host her videos elsewhere. Of course she can, but that would fail to understand the powerful forces of “network externalities” at play online. There is no Avis to eBay’s Hertz for good reason: Once an online network is fully catalyzed, there is no reason to join an alternative network. If you want to get the most money for your Beanie Baby collection, you are going to want access to the most potential bidders — and that means eBay.

If that were true, it would have to be true of human tendency to stick with one choice regardless of how well it fulfilled your needs. The example of Fox News disproves that. When it launched, people said it would never work, the market could not support two cable news networks and people would never leave CNN (under the same goofy logic Cox uses). But guess what, people liked it better, and Fox News became the dominant news network.

Friendster was “the” social networking website until MySpace came along. When a social networking site with better graphic design, less advertising, and more features comes along, MySpace will become the Pets.com of social networking.

That’s the problem inherent in arguing permanency with anything on the web. The web is, by its nature, a very dynamic microcosm. As in any microcosm, the survival of the fittest is always assured.

So why, if they can be, is the GOP not successful on the Net? Why do we seem to lag behind the Democrats? The answer to that does have something to do with web 2.0, but it’s something we can easily change. I’ll take a look at that in my next post on web 2.0 and control issues.

I think I’m going to end up doing this in several parts because my effort to wrap my brain around it led me in too many different directions. I’ll start with some of the issues created with intellectual property.

Assuming we want to look at this through the framework of the “principles” cited in the Wikipedia article, they would include:

* the Web as a platform
* data as the driving force
* network effects created by an architecture of participation
* innovation in assembly of systems and sites composed by pulling together features from distributed, independent developers (a kind of “open source” development)
* lightweight business models enabled by content and service syndication
* the end of the software adoption cycle (“the perpetual beta”)
* software above the level of a single device, leveraging the power of The Long Tail.

I’ll try to keep this out of the technology weeds, so if you’re more interested in the intellectual property aspects, keep reading. I’m going to, by hopefully a few degrees, draw some conclusions about 2.0 based on the application of such technologies to ownership and the constitutional protections afforded to artists and scientists.

Many of the principles outlined above are self-explanatory, and some may even seem self-evident. Some of this will likely be elementary, but bear with me.

I’ll try to process the characteristics into a thick soup.

If you have spent any time at all with (what used to commonly be called) Application Service Providers, you understand the concept of the web as a platform. In the past, applications were written to run on one platform or another – Mac or Windows, for instance. By leveraging the power of the web, you can write for one platform, and everyone can share the application.

Sharing the application with anyone on any platform and allowing them to actively participate in the information that flows in and out of the application creates the “network effects”, or, in other words, encourages interaction between users of the application. It’s an egg-head way of saying multiple people creating and sharing content (the data) that becomes the heart of the application. Exchanging that information with other sites becomes easy. Because of the constantly changing user demands created by their interaction, there is never really a finished “product” so much as an ever changing environment in which they are immersed. I’ll ignore, for now at least, the open source characteristic because I don’t believe it must always be present. I’m also going to skip the long tail discussion for now, though I may dive into that later.)

Put all of that together, and you end up with something beyond a simple application that becomes more of a collaborative effort to work with information. As an example, that could mean something as simple as YouTube. People can add their content, interact with one another, interact with the content (enough people rating it highly or viewing it makes it more likely to be seen by others so it becomes self-referential) share it on their own sites, etc.

All of this relies on something that is inherently causing friction with the web 1.0 or non-web world. The question of ownership. In a communal world, there would be no problem with web 2.o. We would all give and take for the sake of being creative and growing our intellect. Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. The world we live in is generally driven by things like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the US Constitution.

In the real world, people own things. In many cases, those things have financial value and the people that own them want to protect them. The constitution has guaranteed them that right, sort of. Article I, Section 8 reads:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

So the government appears to agree that the creators of these works have rights to them, and often times web 2.0 applications like YouTube, MySpace, and other run afoul of these. It creates two interesting debates.

First, does the placement of an audio or video clip on a site adversely impact the sales of that same item at retail? The movie and music industry says yes. They argue that someone posting an episode of the Simpsons on YouTube will lead to people watching it, which leads to a decline in the audience for that show on TV which leads to a loss of revenue from syndication.

Others argue that exposure to one episode through something like YouTube might lead that same viewer in a different direction. Maybe they become a big fan, choose to watch on TV for the bigger screen, increase syndication revenue, or better yet by the seasons on DVD for $50 bucks a pop and increase revenue from other sources.

Honestly, I suspect there is probably more of the former than the latter if there is more than one episode available online. If you can get everything online for free, you’re probably not likely to go pay for it elsewhere. Maybe you would, but I doubt it.

The second interesting debate, I think, is whether the advancement of technology may have actually surpassed the intellectual property clause of Article I, Section 8.

If the purpose of the clause was to promote science and useful arts, and the science of technology is now making it cheaper and easier to create both, and it is, arguably, the intellectual property rights that are now inhibiting their progress, is there even a need for that clause? Is an amendment to strike intellectual property protection from the Constitution now overdue?

I can make an argument, as many who are avid consumers of technology could as well, that intellectual property, especially in art, is inherently disingenuous. If I sample a three second riff in a track by Queen, add my own beats, my own lyrics, and even my own chords to complement the riff, am I really interfering with intellectual property? Or does the law afford too much protection to the record company that owns the original?

Nobody would confuse my version with the original. If I were doing a cover of the original, I can understand a degree of protection. I’m not creating anything new, I am just performing their song. With much of the guerilla video that is being produced, there is no pretense that this is the original. Do our IP laws actually stifle otherwise completely new and original works? If so, our constitutional protection is actually having a detrimental effect on the very thing it seeks to promote.

Does anyone believe the trailer for “Brokeback to the Future” was an actual movie? Should the original producers have the ability to stop its distribution? Or does that prevent the advancement of “useful arts”?

Honestly, I am better at finding questions than I am at providing answers. I just wanted to throw this out there. I’m going to keep thinking about it, but next I want to dive into the question of web 2.0 and control/risk mitigation issues (not related to ownership). I’d also like to spend some time thinking about web 2.0 in politics (as a function of the other two topics) and the concept of web 2.0 in general.

I definitely think this is the future of applications, and have spent much of the last year building a number of applications that depend on it. I’m just not sure if I can see a clear path forward, and I always like to know where I am going.