Tim O'Reilly on the Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy

Tim O'Reilly came back from his vacation and walked right into the ongoing shitstorm about the Web 2.0 trademark that CMP (his partner in the Web 2.0 conference) is in the process of registering. As I pointed out, last week, companies have to protect their trademarks or lose them, which Tim and a number of others (like John Battelle, Jason Calacanis, and others) pointed out last week.

I think there are several misconceptions still floating around. CMP's trademark application is just for events, not for the general meme of Web 2.0. I can state that my blog (for example) is a Web 2.0 blog, and there is nothing they can do about it. And CMP, O'Reilly, and Battelle (the three partners in the conference) certainly have not claim or aim to owning the general meme.

But Tim seems to be laboring under a misconception, too:

[from O'Reilly Radar > Web 2.0 Service Mark Controversy (Tim responding this time)]

The flap about the Web 2.0 Conference trademark has shaken my faith in the collective intelligence of the blogosphere. Of all the hundreds of people who commented on this issue, only a few touched base to do a bit of fact checking.

Tim seems to think that every person out there with a loaded blog should be a journalist, and undertake some level of fact checking before firing off a few pithy comments. For a guy that has been around the blogosphere for a long time, that's an amazingly off target comment.

The blogosphere is working: witness that Tim is back, and trying to respond to the conversation in a sensible fashion, at least an internally consistent one. It might even be reasonable for him to be so pissed off that the mob was so quick to burn down the house that Tim built, but he still doesn't get the mismatch between the O'Reilly brand (yes, his persona imbues the O'Reilly corporate brand), based on chewy, vitamin-packed Web goodness: openness, transparency, and community, for example. The mob made an intuitive and totally wrong assumption that filing a trademark application for "Web 2.0: the conference" (and subsequent cease-and-desist letters) might in fact lead to an attempted control of the trademark in a broader sense. Cooler heads throughout the web stated all the reasons why what was being done by CMP was fair and businesslike, but the whole thing jars against the image we all have of the avuncular Tim O'Reilly, the Mr Rogers of the Web.

There is nothing to be done, except for us to cut Tim and his partners some slack, and for Tim to shelve all the howling about the big, bad blogosphere not being fair. Everybody's right and everybody's wrong.

tags: tim+oreilly, web+2.0+trademark, web+2.0, web+2.0+conference, john+battelle, cmp

Comments

[Anne]

Tim's comments on bloggers reminded me of the "audience as enemy" theme you hit earlier. Bloggers may be some of his most dedicated fans and customers and yet we're described in such insulting terms. I didn't enter into the discussions about the trademark, not knowing anything about the legal issues involved, but if I had, I don't think there'd be anything wrong with expressing my opinion without doing the same due diligence that the NY Times does.

[Paul Elosegui]

The blogosphere takes Incident Management to another level. One of the reasons for the fuss is the vacuum left by Sara and Tim once the "incident" was released by a disgruntled Mr Raferty at IT@Cork. As communication proffessionals have told me often, never leave a communications vacuum or it will filled in for you. In the blogospace, with instant communication, this takes on another meaning.