PH4H Blog First Post
PH4H Blog
This is very exciting, the first post and all. Hmmm...I should post something non-sports. OK, i read an article in Newsweek today that was really interesting. It refered to Myspace.com, Flickr, Facebook, etc as the Web 2.0. Evidently, Silicon Valley is ready for the second stream of big investments in the Internet. This article says that the Internet is becoming a community and a place where we "live." These new websites facilitate the linkages of all sorts of things in our lives from social networks to the trading of movies. Then the author gets into this metaphor of the Internet as a living breathing organism with connective tissue and everything. I thought the metaphor was a little faulty. Do you agree or disagree? Tell me why. (See this is what I do, I teach and try to provoke a discussion. Except at my high school it can be harder to do this when the little kiddies have not read the book that we are talking about. But I digress and it is my day off tomorrow so I will not talk about work.) Here's the link...http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/
So has anyone tried facebook or flickr? I have not checked those out yet. But the article does mention some stuff I've checked out (youtube.com, myspace, etc)
3 comments:
Good to have a new poster! I'll read the article at lunch and get back to you with my thoughts.
Yay, Steve!
I agree with most of the article, and while I don't think the metaphor is that outrageous, I think there are better comparisons out there. I like the MySpace as a virtual treehouse analogy better.
I just read the article. I don't particularly like the term Web 2.0. I'm not sure where the first web ended and the second is beginning. While sites like Myspace, Flickr and Craigslist have made it easier to form online communities than before, it was done to a large degree on the web before. List-servs and bulletin boards and personal web pages have been on the web as long as I've been using it.
I don't know about thinking of the net as a "place we live" either. It's an indispensible part of our lives at this point, but still, I like to think of face to face interaction and real activities as my life, and the net is something that enhances and helps me organize my life. The net has yet to feed me or provide me shelter. At least directly.
I've used alot of the sites mentioned in varying degrees: Myspace (although I've used Friendster much more), Craigslist, Youtube, I've looked at del.icio.us but have never seen how it's particularly useful, and I've looked at pictures on Flickr but never uploaded any myself.
As far as Yahoo and other companies buying these companies up, that's nothing new either. Technologies that are developed outside the major corporations have always been bought up by those corporations when they become successful.
Sorry to be so negative about the article, but it seems to me it was written by someone who wants to seem on the cutting edge and describe some radical change in what is happening on the net. But it's not nearly as radical as it's made out to sound.
Maybe the websites described have made things more centralized, and people have bigger hard drives and faster connections to make trading pictures, movies, music, etc. faster than it was before. But essentially, there's nothing much that can be done with these websites that couldn't, and wouldn't, be done without them.
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