There is a lot of discussion going on right now about the usefulness of the term "Web 2.0" (Mark Evans sums up a fair bit of the discussion). I don't have any strong preferences (as long as I am able to clearly identify Web 3.0 when it comes along); however, a neat piece by Nathan Torkington quoting Doc Searls over at O'Reilly Radar entitled "Business as Morality" got me thinking ...
Doc shares the idea that there are three moralities: self-interest, accounting and generosity. He says:
I think some of what we see in Web 2.0 (a term I've never liked, much as I like Tim, who has done the most to promulgate it... I think it's what we'll call the current bubble and the next crash) is the morality of generosity. At eTech, I saw a preview of a browser-based Photoshop/Album organizing/print product front-end service. The biggest thing the creator wanted to show was how generous Flickr is. "Watch this," he said, before using Flickr's API to suck all 6000+ of my photos from Flickr into his product. All the metadata, all the tags and associations, were intact. His point: Flickr isn't a silo. Their closed and proprietary stuff doesn't extend, not is it used, to lock up customer or user data. It's wide open. Free-range. Most of all, however, it is a "good citizen". It is generous where it counts.
Doc's observation about the generosity of Flickr and other applications lead me down a path of comparison. We see "Web 2.0" technologies being used to enable other generous behaviours: Wikipedia, Favorville, even sites like Digg or Delicious where the more contributions are made by generous individuals, the better, fall under the Generous Web. We also see the Generous Web through a number of home-grown sites (that used Web 2.0 technologies and/or sensibilities) after Hurricane Katrina ... people helping people find housing, lost relatives, lost pets, jobs. These sites (most offline now) were more effective in the immediate short-term than institutions and bureaucracies originally set up to do just that.
So Web 2.0 is really about enabling. The shift has been made where the power of publishing and of distribution has been removed from the hands of the elite and turned over to the people. I believe that people are fundamentally generous, that they gain social, reputational and even sometimes actual capital by being generous. Web 2.0 enables this generosity in spades.
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