Vegemite Mashup

This morning I read in the Sydney Sun-Herald (yes, I'm old enough to read newspapers in hard copy) that the winner of the Kraft Foods competition to name Vegemite's new cream cheese-laced version is Vegemite iSnack 2.0 . The news is also widely reported on the web. Try http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/mp/6103975/wa-web-designer-names-new-vegemite/

The entry was submitted by Perth web designer Dean Robbins - maybe he's a graduate of Curtin? His entry was "tongue-in-cheek", borrowing from both the "i" naming phenomenon and Web 2.0. But applying it to Vegemite? I'm quite happy that Dean should submit such an entry, but for Kraft to award it the first prize is quite amazing and it adds something to my understanding of how modern marketing works!

Now, I'm even spreading Web 2.0 on my breakfast toast!

Is Web 2.0 Worth it?

Having read the Intro to Web 2.0, there is really no doubt in my mind that O'Reilly has it wrong. At best, it should just be Web 1.01 or something like that to highlight that the change is really just incremental at the most. The significant changes, as has been argued, are really just in the way designers are designing, and users are using, and I submit that that evolution doesn't justify the label of a whole new version.

When the web designers decided to use scripting languages like PHP to build interactivity into webpages (no doubt it started with forms, but soon expanded into blogs, which are just big and versatile forms), they probably didn't realise that they were relinquishing their monopoly on content. I'm saying nothing new here, but giving users control over the content of the world wide web is the most material aspect of Web 2.0, but only because it changed people's behaviour, not because it was a great leap forward in technology or engineering.

My grasp of where Tim Berners-Lee was headed is that he wanted a globally accessible and cross referenced database of all information. Parts of Web 2.0 would serve that objective - I'm thinking of Wikipedia here. But I can't see that he would see the rise in social networking as contributing to the goal - I suspect he would view it as a waste of time.

Corporation for National Research Initiatives

Today, when researching answers for our first Assignment, my surfing led me to the website of CNRI, and in particular, the 1999 paper by Kahn and Cerf entitled What Is The Internet (And What Makes It Work). This provided valuable insights for the Assignment, but what I also found fascinating was its predictions for the next ten years, given that it was written ten years ago!

Kahn and Cerf correctly anticipated huge growth in the internet, much higher transmission speeds, and the net's penetration into other devices like telephones, but they largely seem to have missed the evolution of what we now call Web 2.0. They anticipated issues with intellectual property (which immediately brings to mind the phenomenon of Google Books), but don't appear to have considered the interactivity and user-participation that Web 2.0 promises and indeed provides.

It's easy to have 20:20 hindsight, not so straightforward to have clear forsight, and I'm not meaning to criticise these authors for their lack of clairvoyance. However, it will surely always be interesting to look retrospectively at predictions made in the past of what our current world will be like!

Coming to Grips with Web 2.0

Having read our course materials and watched the iLecture on "Intro to Web 2.0". I've realised that Web 2.0 is a concept to be grappled with. No wonder I've never been able to make head nor tails of it from what I've read in newspapers and the odd computer magazine. Merely defining it as "interactive websites" is way too simplistic O'Reilly's remark "Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core" puts it into a good perspective for me. The YouTube video on Web 2.0 is also helping crystallise this concept.

Both of the above sites were found after joining Delicious and searching for net11_test, so thanks to those other students who had previously bookmarked these sites. Using other search terms in Delicious wasn't so fruitful, and I found a lot of irrelevant content. Maybe, with experience, I can get better at finding useful material in Delicious, and hopefully I can achieve Tama's target of bookmarking 5 new sites. I haven't found anything really good so far that doesn't have the net11_test footprint already.

So, what is this Delicious thing? It's got a delectable name certainly. My first thought is that it is a "WikiGoogle", i.e. mainly a search engine but one where we, the users, collectively dictate the ranking rather than the secret mathematical algorithm adopted by the conventional search engines. That term has no doubt been use elsewhere, but I haven't seen it personally. (Searching for that tag on Delicious produces mostly links about Google Maps.) I haven't yet cottoned on to the social nature of Delicious - that might come later.

I liked Tama's presentation on McAfee's SLATES, so searching for that produced the blog by Hinchcliffe, 2006 which had a cute graphic but didn't really seem to add much to my undertstanding of Web 2.0, other than that you can buy a PDF of O'Reilly's report on its Principles & Best Practices for a mere $US375. For less than double that, I can get to see and hear Tama's almost certainly more entertaining expositions on the subject.