Nostalgia: Web 2.0 is the Old Web

Every so often, I get nostalgic for Days Of Olde(tm) and the early days of the Web. Those magical days when the Web was all Webrings (invariably of people’s D-n-D characters), lists of CDs, and pictures of people’s cats. On GeoCities.

Then I consider several things:

1. In 1996, I wanted to move from Chicago to Minneapolis. I spent Mondays at the Borders on North Michigan reading the Sunday Star-Tribune for job ads. These days, it’s easy to be totally online with hunting.
2. Webrings DID invariably include people’s gaming characters.
3. The blink tag. Holy moly. I had to clean up instances of it even in 2000 when I was working on a major corporate portal. Blink was NEVER a good idea.
4. MySpace and LiveJournal are fundamentally GeoCities 2.0. You can find lots of “I’m listening to…” things (lists of CDs!) and pictures of people’s cats

Sometimes the whole notion of Web 2.0 cracks me up because in some ways, all Web 2.0 represents is a throwback to people making bizarrely-colored pages on GeoCities. This time, though, it comes with the phat broadband connection to allow for massive, poorly sized images of people’s cats. The inbound link algorithim really dates from something like a topical Webring, which explains why it’s so poorly suited to e-commerce. Web 2.0 is fundamentally about democratization of content — taking back control of the Web from corporations and the corporate shills (like myself) who co-opted it for commerce.

It will be interesting to see where business attempts to ‘use’ Web 2.0 go, and what some of this action means for the traditional link model. It certainly changes the process of SEO to be more about building trust. And possibly about providing more pictures of one’s cats: