Web 2.0 is already old, and where are we?

Bruce Annan - consultant with Classified Intelligence Inc. (and a fellow blogger here - thanks Bruce!) offered a whirlwind tour of the Web 2.0 world in his session: Personalization of Online Content and Advertising, that was worth attending for the url's alone.
I've added some of my own in this list - if the names and sites are unfamiliar to you, spend some time clicking through and looking around — you'll end up with a good sense of where our end of the web is headed.
Bruce is a deceptively unpolished, naturalistic speaker with a self-effacing style that tends to mask what seems like a  decent grasp on where the web is going and what we ought to be looking at.
You're not alone if you're a little confused by the fuzzy Web 2.0 term. It was coined six or seven years ago by that brilliant tech publisher, Tim O'Reilly in a brainstorming session about the future of a post Dot.Com bust world.
(ed note: Tim is the fellow behind one of the absolutely smartest tech blogs, O'Reilly Radar. If you don't read it, you'll be getting your tech and web innovation news six months after the smart people do.)
Simply speaking Web 2.0 covers the post dot.com boom and bust web innovations that focus on the web as platform and the user as participant, not consumer.
Newspapers are still very slow to understand that final, key sea change - although people like Doc Searls (see the ClueTrain manifesto - which was written in 1999),  Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen have been screaming about it for several years. 

But while the folks like Rosen are relatively didactic, viz:

You don’t own the eyeballs. You don’t own the press, which is now divided into pro and amateur zones. You don’t control production on the new platform, which isn’t one-way. There’s a new balance of power between you and us.
- "The people formerly known as the audience"

Bruce is more realistic.
He warned that newspapers are "well behind the curve" when it comes to meeting user's needs around content and community creation (check out Topix, OutsideIn, Your Hub, and the new product from Morris publishing, Spottted for some ideas).
But he brought a journalists' fact checking sensibility to the issue, pointing out that while the audience and user increasingly wants to control the information they get, wants to be part of  the production and organization of that information, most people are still consumers. On YouTube, for example, only 0.16 percent of visits are to upload videos - everybody else is just watching. And even the king of user produced content, Wikipedia, can only boast a 5 per cent creator to 95 per cent reader ratio.
Some of the highest profile citizen journalism sites have flopped. OhMy News is now sinking into the red after a couple of profitable years. Tech blogger and citizen journalism guru Dan Gilmour quit his newspaper job to open a modest cit-journalism site, Bayosphere, that bombed within a year. It morphed into BackFence, attracted some decent venture capital but now it to is sinking, the CEO has quit and they've laid off all but a skeleton staff.
So, while user as participant is likely a critical piece of what we do and will be doing (handing personalization and filtering and blogging/networking tools to readers has been hugely successful for USA Today in their re-launch two months ago) it isn't about to sweep us into the dustbin of history just yet.
Bruce gave a good quick-ish look at some of the most interesting developments in adverstising on the web — behavioural targetting. Some websites ( eg. Boston.com) don't just track their user's behaviour by using your unique IP number, they mine it and market it to advertisers. Research show, said Bruce that new car buyers will be in the market looking for 8-12 weeks and they'll be checking auto sites during that time. But, he said, they'll only spend 4 per cent of their web time on that task. If you know they're in the market (becuase they've visited your auto pages) then that information is valuable to auto advertisers who could track that same user elsewhere - and serve auto ads to them during the other 96 per cent of the their web time. That's exactly what Boston.com does.
"That's great news for advertisers, a little scary for consumers, I guess," Bruce said.
He ended his talk with a run through social networking sites - including a number with huge user bases that have probably slipped under most of our radars: Hi5, Xanga, Piczo and with a tip of the hat as well to TorStar's new social site OurFaves and theWinnipeg Free Press's lively family of web sites.
Bill

Comments

[Jay Rosen]

I think your use of me and my words is cheap, superficial, insulting and dumb.

It would have been just as accurate to say "Rosen has warned that newspapers are 'well behind the curve' when it comes to meeting user's needs around content and community creation.

Cheap....