I haven’t written anything in a while and the reason is that I’ve been researching and absorbing a lot of new technology.
Wow. Things have changed a lot since the mid-nineties, when I did a website for my employer at the time, a small publisher of specialty magazines. A bit later in the 90’s, I did a site for myself to promote a CD release of electronic music I was working on.
These were vanilla HTML sites built around words, with an illustration or two, and created with a simple text editor.
Soon after my personal site was complete, Microsoft and Netscape started slugging it out big-time for control of the browser market. Before long, different browsers supported different implementations of HTML, most of which didn’t adhere to any published standards.
Major media companies, after ignoring or dismissing the Internet, were starting to get the idea that they were missing out on something important. The stampede to the web by traditional media had begun.
Art Directors with backgrounds in print publication and graphic design were put in charge of web development. These people, though talented in making books, magazines and advertisements that looked good, were clueless when it came to HTML and the World Wide Web.
Information Design is not Graphic Design.
This was the era that produced the giant GIF sites. Sites that were created out of a single huge bitmap image, with hot-spots to activate links and features. At the time, making a site out of a single huge GIF was one of the only ways to give management a 100% guarantee that the site would look more or less the same to eveyone who loaded it, every time.
These sites really, really sucked because they took forever to load everywhere but in the conference room where they were approved by corporate top managers. And it didn’t matter because the managers who were making the critical decisions about the Internet didn’t use the Internet and thus would never have the same shitty experience with the site that their customers had.
Soon after, courtesy of Netscape and their proprietary set of HTML extensions, the era of the table-hacked site began. During this era, designers were obligated to produce several versions of a site, to support different browser implementations. And all of these sites had static content. So someone had to update all of this by hand, for each version, every time something changed.
It’s no wonder that clever people in New York and small towns everywhere else started making money operating companies that created and maintained sites like these for people. The entire process of site construction and maintenance had become complicated and expensive. The general public began to regard these web development companies as technology companies. The reality was that they were more like advertising agencies or graphics design studios. And in spite of an obsessive focus on what the sites looked like rather than on being useful and providing a smooth user experience, more often than not they were ugly, as well as being difficult to use.
At this point, I bailed. My simple text-based sites were already looking dated, and I didn’t have the patience or time to hand-code versions for every browser out there. So I let my sites languish for a few months before cancelling my hosting contract and taking them down.
And I’m glad I got out when I did, because the era of proprietary dynamic content systems and plug-ins had arrived. Now a simple HTML editor wasn’t enough to build convincing websites anymore. You had to buy licenses for exotic-sounding stuff like ‘Cold Fusion’, ‘Shockwave’, ‘Flash’, ‘Dreamweaver’, and on and on and on.
Traditional media companies were also scrambling like crazy to devine the Internet business model that would yield up the same buckets of cash and huge profit margins they were used to achieving in the gate-kept scarcity-driven traditional media.
The small specialty magazine publisher I worked for at the time was inundated with pitches from all kinds of con men and hustlers. Often, I’d have to sit in on the meetings with these people, being the internet technology guy and current web master. It was a struggle not to laugh in their faces. Once, a hustler had forced the publisher of a magazine about horseback riding to sign a non-disclosure agreement to protect the idea of setting up a website laid out like a town through which the user would move to collect information and buy products and services. The title of the website was ‘Horse Town’.
A fucking NDA to protect an idea like that? I thought I’d piss myself laughing. But the hustler had the last laugh because, even though Horse Town never saw the light of day, he was paid a retainer for the concept.
The full-bore Dot-Con era had arrived. Media companies everywhere were scared to death that they were missing out on the next big thing and were spending tons of money on the lamest bullshit imaginable. Hustlers of all stripes were learning a couple of buzz-words and getting rich.
New York City spawned ‘Silicon Alley’, a concept created by a publicist. Since publicists were far denser on the ground in NYC than technology people, New York became the Dot-Con Bullshit hub of the world. And when the gifted publicists hooked up with the financial engineers, you got The Bubble. Many people managed to cash out on IPO frenzies around a lot of really stupid ideas. Most of these stupid ideas were media-related and originated on the East Coast.
The New York people were especially gifted in appropriating a veneer based on the language and culture of genuine Silicon Valley technology startups and grafting it onto ideas that were really just magazines or ad agencies translated to the Internet.
The Bubble was grown and sustained by traditional media companies whose journalists wrote about it ad infinitum. Media was eating itself.
Meanwhile, almost none of the ventures launched made any money.
Of course the delusions and madness of crowds always come to an end, usually by morphing into the polar opposite. Lame internet startups and tulip bulbs may go way up, but inevitably, they fall further down. The Bubble burst and overnight, in Corporate America, nobody was wearing jeans, working flex-time, or evangelizing the Internet anymore. The *new* technology buzzwords became ‘ROI’ and ‘Y2K’. Suits and Microsoft enterprise technologies were back, in a big way.
And the web had become maddening. Pay sites. Pop-Ups. Registration dialogs with confirmation emails. And plug-ins. It always seemed that the plugin you needed wasn’t available for the platform or browser that you preferred.
Building websites appealed to me about as much as getting a colonoscopy.
I shunted my company web-mastering duties off on the Marketing Services department, who in turn hired one of the better small-town web agencies to maintain it.
I found myself using the web less and less.
Meanwhile, I relied on the mailing list, the oldest, best source of information on the internet.
Fast-forward to 2005. In spite of being in virtual web seclusion, I’m starting to hear a lot about ‘Web 2.0′, and subliminally I’m trying to triangulate what it is, exactly. Early this year, what people mean when they say Web 2.0 started to gel for me.
It means different things to different people. Some folks think it’s all about the social networking sites like MySpace, YouTube, and places like that. Others think it’s about news aggregation sites like Reddit, Digg, and others.
And to some extent, the bullshit artists are back. I saw an aspiring Dot-Con dude bleating about net neutrality on the PBS news magazine ‘Now’ a couple of weeks back. He had the nerd-chic/funny eyeglasses look down cold, and the oleaginous rap of someone used to asking for money and getting it. Meanwhile, he was promoting the MySpace killer he was putting together ‘in a garage’ somewhere in New York City. Then the report cut to a party on a rooftop somewhere in New York where a lot of similar people were mingling with ‘venture capitalists’ trying to ‘get funded’.
The IPO thing is never going to happen again. That whole deal was based on being able to hype and then sell crap companies built around stupid ideas to retail investors. This is what happened the first time. Well, once bitten, twice shy. Ask Vonage, whose IPO sank like a stone.
Venture Capitalists are looking for different exit strategies this time, and the primary exit strategy is getting bought by someone with deep pockets, like Rupert Murdoch. And it isn’t going to be retail investors who get burned this time. It’s going to be big traditional media companies. People like Rupert Murdoch. They are going to smugly buy up all the MySpace killers they can find from smooth-talking nerd-chic dudes and dudettes with funny eyeglasses. And they’re going to pay way, way too much. And then the bottom is going to fall out.
The bottom is going to fall out because today building, hosting, and monetizing web properties is really, really cheap and really, really easy. You don’t have to ‘get funded’ to build the next MySpace killer. You can build it yourself in your basement, host it somewhere for less than ten bucks a month and monetize it with Google AdSense and dozens of other similar advertising brokers.
Web development has arrived. LAMP, Open Source CMS, Ajax. All of this is really good stuff that is really easy to use, and costs nothing. And it’s all built around good, solid standards. XHTML, XML, CSS. Now you can make a website and control both the hierarchy and presentation of the information *and* the way everything looks. You can do each independent of the other with XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Even Flash animations are possible using free, open source tools. You can build an animation using any tool of choice and convert it to Flash format that will work anywhere with an open source tool called ffmpeg. And the major browsers — Firefox and IE 7 — both deal with this stuff in pretty good, consistent and standards-abiding ways.
Good hosting plans based on Linux servers, with all of these tools available and more are cheap — really cheap. Like less than ten dollars a month. The hosting company I have, www.bluehost.com even offers a tool called ‘Fantastico’ that allows you to do default installs of dozens of the best Open Source CMS and blogging packages with just one click. How can it get easier than that?
Will these basement-built MySpace killers scale to a level that would interest a venture capitalist? Probably not. So instead of a few people getting fantastically rich, we might have tens or even hundreds of thousands of people or more making a living from sustainable businesses built around things that they love.
That is what Web 2.0 means to me. But wait a minute, that’s not Web 2.0. That’s what the Internet has always been about. That’s what was happening in the background while The Bubble was happening, and what will continue to happen while the next speculative frenzy comes and goes.
The real Internet is just starting to get off the ground and the real party, a slow-building sustainable one, is just getting started.
Essayist Paul Graham has put together the best commentary yet on Web 2.0.
As well, Paul has a great selection of other essays available. Subscribe to his feed. It’s worth it.