Blogs

Paul Kedrosky chimed in on the recent introduction of Structured Blogging (SB). Paul suggests that laziness is going to prevent SB from taking off and I would have to agree. Like many Web 2.0 concepts, it puts too much faith in the hands of the user - and aside from over zealous alpha-geeks, it will likely be too much work for users to actually use.

As time goes on I am certainly finding that just using a search engine is actually faster than using del.icio.us and is less work to boot! Flickr is the one exception where tagging is actually slightly more useful [1,2] - seeing as how search engines have a hard time indexing image content . This is my common conclusion from using many different online services. Sure I sign up for all the great new Web 2.0 / AJAX services … I signed up for Writely and they can use me in their stats of doubling their user base every X weeks but I am never going to use it again; not because it is not cool and slightly useful but because I am simply too lazy.

This subject also came up yesterday as I was reading one of the latest fire stoking, “Five somethings about Web2.0 / AJAX”, post [3] by Dion Hinchcliffe over on the Web 2.0 blog. Dion’s number one reason that Web 2.0 matters is because it “seeks to ensure that we engage ourselves, participate and collaborate together”. Again I can’t help but think about how lazy most people are. Sure people that are actually interested in Web 2.0, tagging and the like make it seem really great but for the most part they cannot be bothered.

For Web 2.0 to get traction beyond the alpha-geeks I think it needs to empower developers and ask less of end-users.

References

[1] More Tags - Dave Johnson, Dec 14, 2005
[2] Tagging Tags - Dave Johnson, Dec 1, 2005
[3] Five Reasons Why Web 2.0 Matters - Dion Hinchcliffe, Dec 7, 2005