Are you ready for the masses?
Web 2.0 might be the hype of the year, but all what Tim really meant was: the people get involved and the “interactive factor” of the web is finally playing a role in the success or failure of web-sites. Interactive?, you say - while looking at your guestbook and your blog comments with a big question mark. Yes, the users need to work on your website, too! Waitaminute, do you really want that?
We have started around 10 new sites in the last 24 months, either in english or in german. All should incorporate some Web 2.0, so we gave more power to the users, protected by CAPTCHA, supported by RSS and some upload features. The majority of users said “thank you” and bombed us with p*rn, pills and poker links wherever possible!
I’d say: get ready for Web 3.0! We need a trusted (or a few trusted) sources of information beyond commercial interests. I hope Google forgives me, if I say: NO, not google! We need independent sources without commercial interests but with the eye for the masses. Professor XYZ might be a really trustworthy person, but he got no glue about the latest ringtones and I honestly dont want to hear his opinion about cool antivirus software. So, it might be the masses - but they need to be filtered, controlled by some morality of higher grounds. People today just leave crap in your blog, if you don’t take all precautions, they spam your guestbook, they infiltrate your wiki.
Some sort of identification would be a bless!
