Blurb

I have been delaying posting because of various reasons... mainly because I have all these grand schemes to make a great blog of this heroic travellor in Malaysia, taking pictures of food, people, culture, maps, environment, infrastructure, sounds of music....etc...

Following the Japanese style of TQM -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_quality_management

- I've decided that something is better than nothing.

So I thought I would share my thoughts on Web 2.0.

What took so long? It wasn't technology.. the fiber-optic cables have been in place for some time now. But of course now that Web 2.0 is here, technology is increasing at an incredible rate.... but I don't need to tell you about economic drivers.

What I would like to talk about is people. Us. We are what stalled the internet. Why? Because people got fed up.
I can't help reminiscing on that eerie sound of the first modems when they 'dialed-up' to the network. How the combination of modal, bi-modal, unharmonic frequencies made it actually sound like we were connecting to something live... matrix anyone?

So what happened when the .COM boom came? We became obsessed with this new thing. A place where you have complete and absolute control over communications... television, phone, telegraph no more was the promise. We were racing to get their faces seen. We were spending nights chatting to people anonymously as dream people. (n/s/l?) We were looking at dirty pictures. We were racing to make money.

Then what happened? The .COM bust. Everyone almost all at once decided they were fed up with the internet. Not necesarrily computers, unfortunately we couldn't sever ourselves completely, microsoft had to good a hold on us with office productivity and all that jazz.. plus our schools and corporations new that IT would make a come-back and the fear of failing due to being left behind in the dust over rided the fear of being consumed.

But seriously, am I right? Was the .COM bust a victom of people just deciding they had had enough? I think so. I think if anything, its a valid and important question. Especially for anyone thinking about making a career in web technologies. What was the reason for millions of dollars to be gained and lost literally over night?

What 'caused us to get fed up? I can think of two reasons. Firstly, our economic machines, the same people that didn't give a crap about the people they were offering a service too, just making a quick buck. Spam emails (which we still get), pop-ups (thank god for pop-up blockers), invasion of privacy... the list goes on.

Second, our fear of being consumed by technology. When .COM came, it came so fast that people were overwhelmed. They said, hey, wait a minute, I don't like staring at the same computer screen for days on end. I would much rather go back to staring at television screens.

oooh ooh.. idea.. maybe for old people its an inferiority complex. yes I definitely have something there

Thats okay. The web wasn't wiped away. We didn't burn a bunch of papers. We didn't delete all of our files on all our web servers. People got realistic. People started providing service and waited to reap the rewards (google). People were slowly enticed, lulled, wooed whatever you want to say.

People are hooked again. Some people are wooed by the prospect of contributing their ideas to a bigger picture (open source projects like wikipedia) some people just like communication, whatever it is... I know I am back.. and hopefully this time it is to stay.