The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen
(Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £12.99)
Gordon Brown recently described MySpace, the website on which teenagers write about themselves, as Britain’s largest youth club. Mark Zuckerberg, the 23-year-old founder of Facebook, which consists of profiles of its users’ daily lives, was offered $1bn for his company last year. And this July, YouTube, home to millions of banal amateur videos, will achieve more hits in Britain than BBC Online. Just when it seemed we had emerged from the hubris of the internet bubble, the technological revolution is back. Welcome to Web 2.0.
The phrase “Web 2.0″ dates from a famous Silicon Valley brainstorming session in 2004 led by Tim O’Reilly, a cultish west-coast businessman. Participants, noting the new types of organisation emerging from the wreckage of the dotcom crash, began to evangelise for a second phase of the internet boom. O’Reilly later tried to tie down what he meant. Web 2.0 was, among other things, about “trusting users as co-developers” while “leveraging the long tail through customer self-service.” Put less bafflingly, first-generation internet companies tended to sell things, while Web 2.0 companies tend to help people create and share ideas and information.
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