Web 2.0 Content - Heading Toward Mediocrity?
03/13/2007, 1 year 5 months ago
I was reading an older post from Shoutblog that, in turn, referenced Chris Anderson's The Long Tail. The post started out describing two friends making an "all time top 10 list" of songs, but found as they voted out choices that weren't the same for both of them, they headed toward the Billboard charts, leaving edginess and originality behind for the common music that everyone seems to know.
The trend that seems to be taking hold of many Web 2.0 companies is to build enough of a community of users to attract a big name buyer like Google or Yahoo!, but is that really in the best interest of the future of Web communities? In order to appeal to the masses of folks necessary to appeal to big sites like that, is it required that some of the fringe elements of the community need to be removed?
Last week, YouTube was blocked in Turkey for a day, until they caved in and removed a video that was said to depict Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as a homosexual. Greek and Turkish nationals were said to have posted retaliatory videos in response, but YouTube decided to remove the original video rather than lose the Turkish users.
What was lost in that decision? If the only content on Web 2.0 sites is that which is going to offend the fewest number of people, is it any different from the top 10 list of songs taken directly from popular music? If more and more sites follow that lead, you have to wonder what parts of the communities will be lost.
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Good points. I find I’m concerned that web 2.0 will be centred around a small number of big companies, and that the shape of web 2.0 will then be determined by the choices these companies make - just like the YouTube choice you describe. It would be naive to think that, no matter what their rhetoric, Google and Yahoo! are any less corporate than bad-ol’ Microsoft when it comes down to it. To make web 2.0 really participatory, it needs to be widely distributed, not just dominated by Google and a few other big companies.
Thanks Tom.
I do find the gobbling up of Web 2.0 companies upsetting in that regard. And I think that you summed up exactly what I was thinking; when I first reviewed Google for another site that I’m on, only folks in the tech sector knew what it was; everyone else was using Yahoo or AltaVista for searching. Now it seems to have lost some of its edge with its world domination path and is resembling Redmond a little more.
I’d like to see more of these community-driven apps and services stay a bit more small-scale. Rather than build something to sell for big money, make it able to support itself and make it more relevant to a smaller segment.
I think of it in the same vein as the small bookstores; they were all driven out by Barnes & Noble, which carries all the best sellers and coffee to boot, but lacked the personality and customer-driven focus of the smaller stores. Then Amazon moved in, and you could get back the niche selections, but still don’t have the personalized service. Web 2.0 looked for a little while like it was brining back that small mentality online, but it seems to be following the same pattern in many instances.