Ed Yourdon on Web 2.0, part 2.0
I mentioned the other day that Ed Yourdon, one of the guiding lights of the structured programming revolution of the '70s and '80s is involved in putting together an issue of the Cutter IT Journal on Web 2.0, and is also blogging. So, I thought a short email interview was a good idea:
Stowe: Ed. I'm glad to see you are blogging. What precipitated that? What do you think so far about the experience?Ed: For those of us lucky enough to have our own web site, I think blogging was probably a bit less revolutionary and empowering as it has been for others. I set up on my own web site in 1995, using a Notepad-style text editor and a superficial grasp of HTML. The tools got more powerful over the next several years, culminating (for me) with Dreamweaver, so the task of adding new entries to my website was as quick, painless, and fun as it is for today's bloggers.
But eventually I had so much "stuff" on my website that I began to worry that people might not see the new material I added -- especially if it was buried three levels deep, and depended on someone following a non-intuitive navigation path to reach. So I started posting "what's new" entries on my home page, which functioned somewhat like the chronological summary/abstracts that you see on today's blogs. The fact that the entries were carefully organized in a hierarchical structure was important to me, but probably less and less so for casual visitors who occasionally returned to my site (without, of course, the benefit of today's feed-readers) to see whether I had, in fact, added any new material.
Somewhere around 2002, I began seeing descriptions of the early blogging tools; and I thought that the informal look-and-feel of the early blogs made them qualitatively different from the formal, structured, "organized" information that little guys like me, and big companies like IBM and General Motors were putting on their web sites. But I found the early blogging tools hard to use, user-hostile, and WAY less productive than Dreamweaver. But I acknowledged the importance of chronological, blog-like entries of whatever random thoughts came into my mind; so for about six months, I added my own blog-like entries into a separate frame on the left side of my website ...
But by 2005, I decided that my website was now 10 years old, and just looked amateurish from top to bottom -- not surprisingly, since I'm not a graphic artist, not a Web designer per se, and far too busy to spend a lot of my own time working on. So I hired a Web designer to redesign the whole site, and give it a whole look and feel ... which he did quite nicely, except that it created the situation that most companies have been dealing with for a long time: there's an intermediary between the actual website and the person who creates the content. Whenever I want to make the tiniest change to my new website, I have to send an email to the webmaster and explain what I want -- rather than just getting online with Dreamweaver and doing it myself.
But that's probably okay, because most of my website is now pretty stable ... hopefully not static or stagnant, but not changing constantly. The "constant changes" are now incorporate into my blog, which is simply a sub-level part of my yourdon.com domain. But most importantly, it's something that I control myself (once the "template" and overall look-and-feel had been created by my webmaster), and it's something I update every day myself, using today's generation of blogging tools.
I happen to use WordPress for blogging, which I find adequate but still pretty primitive compared to Dreamweaver ... but what has changed ENORMOUSLY is the collection of aggregating tools, measurement tools, and other blog-management tools. I don't generate a penny in advertising revenues from my blog (and only about $5/month in Amazon commission from click-throughs to Amazon from my "official" website), so I shouldn't really care how many people visit my blog each day. But I watch the statistics with great interest, and I'm delighted to find that I'm well within the top one-half of one percent of blogs, according to Technorati.
Stowe: I know you are working on an issue of the Cutter IT Journal on Web 2.0. I saw your voluminous mind-map. What's the 40,000 foot view at this point? Is it a revolution, or just an evolution of what preceded it? Is it a bubble, or just another turn of the screw?
Ed: As far as the technology is concerned, it's only an evolution: things like Ajax have been around for several years, RSS and XML have been discussed for years, and the pervasiveness of broadband Internet access is something we've been anticipating for years.
What IS revolutionary, I think, is the business/social aspects of Web 2.0. The transformation from a culture (which existed long before the Internet) in which information was controlled and disseminated in a closed, proprietary, top-down, hierarchical fashion to today's Web 2.0 style of open, bottom-up, grass-roots, consumer-controlled fashion is profound, and I think we're only beginning to see the consequences. The technology of blogging, for example, is not revolutionary; but the fact that bloggers can (and have) brought down public figures like Dan Rather is, at least in my opinion, pretty revolutionary. The technology of wikis is still fairly primitive; but the social/cultural phenomenon of Wikipedia, as compared to the 19th-century (or was it 18-th century) phenomenon of Encyclopedia Britannica, is pretty awesome.
Stowe: One of the most interesting aspects of Web 2.0 (to me, anyway), is the personalities. Have you met any outstanding visionaries, geniuses, or con artists?
Ed: Well, I think I know most of the important names now, and I'm pretty sure I met a few of them in earlier lives, when they were selling a different brand of snake oil. But I've also had the pleasure of meeting a few of them for the first time, even though they've been saying VERY interesting things for a long time. Kevin Kelly is one of them; I met him for the first time a couple months ago in Amsterdam. I know that people like Tim Berners-Lee will go down in history as one of the most outstanding visionaries of both Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 (though he probably wouldn't use those terms), but I haven't yet figured out which category most of the other "loud voices" fall into.
I look forward to catching up with Ed at O'Reilly's Web 2.0 conference in November. He will be attending the New New Internet Conference in September, but, alas, I will be speaking in London at that time.
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