Swik and the Truth of Web 2.0
by
on March 23, 2007,
Meet one of the faces of the real Web 2.0, open source community! Swik, the SourceLabs project has put on a new dinner jacket and is ready to tango.
I was surfing for news when I ran across an article on Techmambo about Swik. Ironically, a good friend IM'd my yesterday about Swik's latest project to offer users the ability to submit stories (ala Digg and Netscape) and to tag and vote on those stories. This is not another story about a startup, but one about open source people developing something we need.
Web users have created some really “top shelf” user generated content and innovations, but we have yet to see many places where those experiences can be optimally applied efficiently and correctly.
Alex Bosworth, Project Manager for SourceLabs, has revamped Swik into a compelling combination of Digg, Netscape and Wiki. Alex told me that his vision for Swik is to have a valuable community resource for open source, and to educate and document these resources so that people can utilize and understand them better.
Bosworth carried me on a guided tour around some of the most interesting, usable and crisp conceptualizations I have seen on any Web 2.0 site. We are all so accustomed to semi-Web 2.0 text platforms, and popular community driven roughhousing, but where is the meat of Web 2.0? The bottom line is, we have been adding to Web 1.0 rather than creating Web 2.0 in most of our habitations on the Internet.
Take MySpace and Digg for example, both popular and excellent places for users to congregate. MySpace has functionality but is mostly a crowd, while Digg has a unique community for comment and news, but neither has the full creative or functional capacity they could have. They are essentially Web 2.0 derivatives of Web 1.0 concepts. They effectively do no more than voting for the swimwear on Yahoo!, or creating a web page on Angelfire in 1999. They are brilliantly conceived and applied by developers, but beyond sharing a few videos, really Web 1.0.
In a way people have been lured to these type places under the delusion that user generated community is here, when all the developers really did was use your web pages to provide their content in a huge cattle pen for ad revenue. MySpace is limited by partitions between users and its advertising model, and Digg is limited to the control and mathematical model that monitors the system, plus the undercurrent of SEO tricks. This is true in many ways for nearly all non-open source web sites.
I think of sites like these as a sort of “kindergarten” for social networking. People hone skills, address community, create and learn new skills and then attempt to apply them. However, they are constrained in all of this by the boundaries imposed upon them. Wiki open sourcing has virtually limitless boundaries and only needs more users. So, we just need to graduate to the first grade in many situations, and I think many successful developers are still enjoying recess.
In open source environments; technically oriented people can construct and form, artistic users can create, analytics will study and resolve and communicators provide connectivity for the group. All these things occur in any community on the Web, but not at the pace or quality possible when collaborative efforts are focused. In a way, this is part of the problem in the real world.
Why are Swik or Wikia better than Digg or MySpace? Traditional communities are finite realms constraining the infinite power of the human mind! I am not suggesting that Swik or Wikia are the answers to the world's problems, but they are a damned sight closer than the noise, adolecence and chaos of most communities out there right now. Face it folks cute don't always get it done!
Alex Bosworth and others have been creating innovative and provocative works like the Web 2.0 area at SourceLabs. Here you will find hundreds of hours of work revealing a consolidation of blogs unlike any I have seen, and simple mouseovers help navigation in the cleanest way. Created with what Alex termed “bozpages”, this simple organization of data looks ripe for the addition of your own personal touches. Swik is a work in progress, and it will take people to transform it into anything like I have suggested.
I asked one very basic question of Bosworth, I wanted to know if the new tagging/voting aspect of Swik held any accountability feature. Alex told me that stories are not ever buried, but rather tagged as bad, and that everyone can readily see who tagged it and why. Being up front about everything is what my Web 2.0 is about, and I bet it really is yours too. Accountable, in the open, meaningful and unique, kind of like a good human being.
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Bighorn
kalipso
Mav
Opensource 
Michael Fidler 
Sounds very promising Phil!! i’ll go check it out and feedback
You make very pertinent observations on digg and myspace. I see that this is not the first time you bring the two into discussion, but the best part is that you bring Swik to the public attention. I am really curious to read your take on blogger communities - for example “MyBlogLog”.
Thanks Guys!
I will attempt to revise the definition of Web 2.0 in my terms soon. MyBlogLog is a tool, and a very useful one. It too needs improvement, but it has potential that perhaps has not been realized. I think any place that does not progress is going to be a ghost town sometime in the future.
As for open source communities, a much more interesting and lasting environment can be established there because of the core of people who start the places. Commercial enterprises so far have just hyped Web 1.0 stuff into Web 2.0 in my opinion. To a large extent we are at the whim of entities with large sums of money, but a lot of “little money” is as good as a “little large” degree of investment. Boy that was a tongue twister.
Well, MySpace exists because (for whatever reason) people like to go there. So we are “voting” for that community in our little Web 2.0 democracy here. Face it, people are paying for that community with real money too, the question is, are they getting their money’s worth?