Life & Death - The Web 2.0 & Voice 2.0 Continuum

I have been unwell, so not as feisty as usual. I didn’t rise to the bait when Michael Arrington decided that Web 2.0 is dead because of some vacation Video that Dave Morin and other glitterati created on a recent trip to the Mediterranean. But then Arrington turned his back on the term years ago, even though he was one of the founders of the Web 2.0 Working Group. He’s starting to sound like one of those apocalyptic preachers who keep saying that the end is nigh, and then, once the rapture doesn’t take place on schedule, moves the deadline back a few months.

Others are involved in the same howling, which just shows that they don’t know what Web 2.0 is. They have come to think that it’s the ups and downs of startups, or the stomach rumblings of the cool kids, which is just not what’s going on, as Tim O’Reilly says here in response to the same ‘Web 2.0 is dead’ drivel from William Volk:

Twitter / Tim O’Reilly, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

I also think that just as important as ‘web as a platform’ is the social revolution involved in our use of these tools. We are changing ourselves and the world. That may slow down a hair because Iceland has closed all its banks, but nothing has ‘died’, except paper profits in a bunch of hedge funds.

This revolution has a long way to go — at least another five years, I bet — before we migrate onto some new wave.

The stuff I was talking about over a year ago, when Calacanis was calling Mahalo ‘Web 3.0’ (which is the other form of saying that Web 2.0 is dead, by the way), still hasn’t started:

[from Jason Calacanis on Web 3.0]

Personally, I feel the vague lineaments of something beyond Web 2.0, and they involve some fairly radical steps. Imagine a Web without browsers. Imagine breaking completely away from the document metaphor, or a true blurring of application and information. That’s what Web 3.0 will be, but I bet we will call it something else.

So, we have a long way to go folks.

The financial downturn has people running in circles, ‘the sky is falling,’ and speaking in tongues. This too shall pass.