I haven’t peered into MacLeod’s Gaping Void in a while. Let’s take a look, shall we?
I was in the pub the other evening, trying to explain the difference between Web 1.0 [“Dotcom”] vs Web 2.0 [“Blogs & Social Media”] to a web neophyte friend of mine.
The short answer: “Dotcom was about ‘taking’. Web 2.0 is about ‘giving’.”
The architecture of Web 2.0 is about people giving away their stuff i.e. “sharing”. Whether its a well-written blog post, or photos uploaded onto Flickr, or videos uploaded onto YouTube, the act of you giving is every bit as important as people other people receiving. This is why the number of blog readers isn’t that much larger than the number of blog writers. Writing is as important as reading. Giving is as important as taking.
