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Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
lamaditx writes "There is a good chance that you have heard about "Web 2.0" — the buzz-word coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2005. You will find several reviews of books about this topic on Slashdot. These cover mainly technical aspects of implementation whereas this book introduces the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement... Web 2.0 is so much more than the technology.' The table of contents is available from O'Reilly, together with a chapter preview. The book does not come with any extras but includes the usual free 45 days access to the book on Safari. When reading a book I usually flip through it quickly to get an impression for it, in this case there are three things which I noted right away." Keep reading for the rest of Adrian's review.
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide
author
Amy Shuen and Simon St. Laurent (editor)
pages
266
publisher
O'Reilly Media , Inc.
rating
10
reviewer
Adrian Lambeck
ISBN
978-0-596-52996-3
summary
Business thinking and strategies behind successful Web 2.0 implementations
First, I was drawn by the the foreword by Tim O'Reilly. Since I have read his article about Web 2.0 back then I came to the conclusion that the strategy guide is a kind of successor. The next think I was looking at is information about the author. Amy Shuen concentrates on business models and teaches entrepreneurship, strategy, and venture finance on major business schools around the world. Amy is currently a Professor of Management Practice at the "China Europe International Business School" (CEIBS).
Secondly I noticed that there are a lot of footnotes on every page which reference other publications that fit the current topic. This is perfect if you want to drill into the details about a specific issue or lack some background knowledge.
The last thing I notice are the really big "End Notes" which spread across 40 pages and the bibliography which consists of 22 pages. This means that around a quarter of the book is additional information. I am pretty sure this fact is due to the academic roots of Amy Shuen and I think it is appropriate for this kind of guide. Actually this is what I expect from a guide — it should guide me through the topic and summarize the overall picture.
After flipping through the book I started reading it — and couldn't stop. I had to travel to Munich the other day — I boarded the plane with nothing else but the book and my boarding pass. I received the book on Thursday and finished reading it on Saturday.
Reading this book is fun for several reasons. I hate authors that put graphics into their books and don't provide you with additional information. That is not the case in this book, all the graphics are easily read (the only exception is a picture on page 5). Most graphics, functions, and screenshots are self explanatory. From my own experience I know it is not easy to find the right mixture between too much detail and too little.
Another important point are the numerous case studies in every chapter. Of course they do not include all information and details but they emphasize the theoretical point and provide you with a good feeling about the business case. Reading these kind of "historical" stories also adds some life to the book. Even though I have written a paper about Google's Page Rank algorithm and therefore a rough understanding of it, I learned many details about the competition between Google and GoTo (later known as Overture) that I did not know. It also teaches you that the effortless looking success of a company like Google involved tough times in the past. Running the Web 2.0 track is not always that easy as it looks like.
Talking about the big names: This book is interesting for anybody involved in a Web 2.0 (or escaping Web 1.0 ;-) ) environment no matter if you are working in a big, small, or start-up company. Amy stresses this point several times as she points out "Your business probably isn't Facebook, LinkedIn, or even something that looks much like them".
So how are you be able to transfer the knowledge you gained from the book to your own Web 2.0 concept? Amy to the rescue. Each chapter ends with a "Lessons Learned" section to summarize the most important points. After that she provides you with a section "Questions to Ask" which cover strategic and tactical issues with these tools at hand. The last chapter will also support you to "apply Web 2.0 strategic thinking to your business". Maybe you are writing a business plan or a project proposal to get your idea started. The last chapter will help.
In the end I would like to talk about the rating I am assigning to this book. I rated it as 10 which means it is "excellent" or one might call it a "classic work". I have not talked much about the content of the book because I did not want to provide you with a plain summary. I expect this book to become one of the "must-read" in business as well as technical classes since more and more business models will evolve in a Web 2.0 environment. Another reason is the well explained and easy to read writing style. Technical terminology is kept to a minimum thus not requiring a lot of prior knowledge.
Adrian Lambeck is a master student in "Information and Media Technologies" in Germany and thinks about starting his own (Web 2.0 ?) business.
You can purchase Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Secondly I noticed that there are a lot of footnotes on every page which reference other publications that fit the current topic. This is perfect if you want to drill into the details about a specific issue or lack some background knowledge.
The last thing I notice are the really big "End Notes" which spread across 40 pages and the bibliography which consists of 22 pages. This means that around a quarter of the book is additional information. I am pretty sure this fact is due to the academic roots of Amy Shuen and I think it is appropriate for this kind of guide. Actually this is what I expect from a guide — it should guide me through the topic and summarize the overall picture.
After flipping through the book I started reading it — and couldn't stop. I had to travel to Munich the other day — I boarded the plane with nothing else but the book and my boarding pass. I received the book on Thursday and finished reading it on Saturday.
Reading this book is fun for several reasons. I hate authors that put graphics into their books and don't provide you with additional information. That is not the case in this book, all the graphics are easily read (the only exception is a picture on page 5). Most graphics, functions, and screenshots are self explanatory. From my own experience I know it is not easy to find the right mixture between too much detail and too little.
Another important point are the numerous case studies in every chapter. Of course they do not include all information and details but they emphasize the theoretical point and provide you with a good feeling about the business case. Reading these kind of "historical" stories also adds some life to the book. Even though I have written a paper about Google's Page Rank algorithm and therefore a rough understanding of it, I learned many details about the competition between Google and GoTo (later known as Overture) that I did not know. It also teaches you that the effortless looking success of a company like Google involved tough times in the past. Running the Web 2.0 track is not always that easy as it looks like.
Talking about the big names: This book is interesting for anybody involved in a Web 2.0 (or escaping Web 1.0 ;-) ) environment no matter if you are working in a big, small, or start-up company. Amy stresses this point several times as she points out "Your business probably isn't Facebook, LinkedIn, or even something that looks much like them".
So how are you be able to transfer the knowledge you gained from the book to your own Web 2.0 concept? Amy to the rescue. Each chapter ends with a "Lessons Learned" section to summarize the most important points. After that she provides you with a section "Questions to Ask" which cover strategic and tactical issues with these tools at hand. The last chapter will also support you to "apply Web 2.0 strategic thinking to your business". Maybe you are writing a business plan or a project proposal to get your idea started. The last chapter will help.
In the end I would like to talk about the rating I am assigning to this book. I rated it as 10 which means it is "excellent" or one might call it a "classic work". I have not talked much about the content of the book because I did not want to provide you with a plain summary. I expect this book to become one of the "must-read" in business as well as technical classes since more and more business models will evolve in a Web 2.0 environment. Another reason is the well explained and easy to read writing style. Technical terminology is kept to a minimum thus not requiring a lot of prior knowledge.
Adrian Lambeck is a master student in "Information and Media Technologies" in Germany and thinks about starting his own (Web 2.0 ?) business.
You can purchase Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
please stop with the version numbers, it's insulting and it's dumb
...sailing the sausage seas!
Not really how we expected the Internet to develop.
"Web 2.0 is so much more than a technology." Priceless. I can sum up the entirety of this book quite simply: If you want to be "Web 2.0", develop a web application that is social-based, use plenty of Flash or Ajax (Ajax preferable), and create an API that allows script kiddies everywhere to fashion useless add-ons (preferably that involve cute icons of small furry animals or various celebratory trinkets). That's the Foreword, Prologue, and Chapters 1-5. Chapters 6-10, Epilogue, and Appendices are as follows: The magic behind the Web 2.0 movement is this: the generation of kids nowadays have grown up using computers, are computer savvy, and are used to being online. So websites have become portals for social interactivity. The more interactive you can make the sites, the more "social" they become. So ends the mystery of Web 2.0.
I don't need it. I already beat the interwebs. The end guy was hard.
Programmer: an ingenious device that converts caffeine into code.
Technical terminology is kept to a minimum thus not requiring a lot of prior knowledge.
Is that really supposed to be a selling-point for this crowd?
Are there any cheat codes?
The boss is easy to beat. You give him a lot of venture capital, ask for fifty new features that confuse the user interface and when his user base starts to dwindle, you pull the funding.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Who writes your stuff? President Bush?
"Strategic" is an adjective, exactly the word you need there. "Strategical" is a nonsense word.
... Figure out what Web 3.0 is, then do that.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The next think I was looking at is information about the author
Did they proofread the book or rely on a spill chucker two made surly tea spilled thins wright?
Amy Shuen concentrates on business models and teaches entrepreneurship, strategy, and venture finance on major business schools around the world. Amy is currently a Professor of Management Practice at the "China Europe International Business School"
This is the LAST person I would want to read a webmaster guide by.
provide you with a good feeling about the business case
I finally figured out the difference between web 1.1 and web 2.0. Web 1.1 was about content, web 2.0 is about filthy lucre.
This book is interesting for anybody involved in a Web 2.0 (or escaping Web 1.0 ;-) ) environment no matter if you are working in a big, small, or start-up company
There it goes again. As if the internet or the WWW is only about businesses and money. Dammit, Jim, I'm a nerd, not a businessman!
I thank you for the review; I see this is not the book for me. You may have saved me checking it out of the library.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Do NOT upgrade to Web2.0 until at least the 1st service pack!
Anyone else noticed that almost all Web 2.0 applications are strongly centralised and cannot survive a central server outage?
A "Web 2.0" application being based on a strongly centralized server is a problem of defective implementation, rather than defective concept.
Google is an example of good implementation, i.e. distributed server with no central chokepoint.
This is the first in O'Reilly's new Buzzword series. Coming soon: "Blogospheres", "Synergy", and "Social Cloudcasting"
Instead of making a service that relies primarily on advertisement, make "Web 2.0 applications" that customers want to buy access to. You know, actually sell something rather than rely on collecting eyeballs and information.
1. Use Visual Studio and .NET, or Flash
2. Make sure there are tons of shiny multicolored buttons for everything even when not necessary
3. Implement a buddy system even though your site has nothing to do with anything social
4. ?????
5. PROFIT!!1!11
There are mountains to cross for those that are willing.
I'm a former beta tester for dirt. It's still full of bugs, nobody ever bothered to write a service pack. So we may not actually get a web 2.0 servoce pack.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Anyone else noticed that almost all Web 2.0 applications are strongly centralised and cannot survive a central server outage?
Partly true, and in that, partly necessary.
A lot of what's going on in what I will reluctantly call the "Web 2.0" world is built around database-centric frameworks. The SQL RDBMS is a strongly centralized approach, and since it was invented in the days of the mainframe, that's not a big surprise. So if you start out with a normal PHP or Rails setup, you've implicitly bought into centralized thinking whether you need it or not.
Sometimes, that centralization is a pretty poor approach, and compute offerings from Amazon and EC2 push people away from that. It's a struggle for some; people who have only built SQL-backed web apps have a strong bias to centralization. It always worries me when I talk with a team that can only talk about "the database" (or "the server" or "the application"); if you grow sufficiently, one of anything isn't enough.
Sometimes, though, centralization is legitimately hard to avoid. A lot of Web 2.0 apps are inherently social, and social graphs are hard to partition. If you are moving to London and want to find people in your social network who live there, that's not an easy problem to distribute, especially if you need things to stay up to the minute and work reliably.
Is it pronounced "Web 2'dot'0" or is it "Web 2'point'0"? I don't want to sound foolish when I talk to people about the internets.
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
Why are the uber-corporations against P2P? It's the perfect paradigm of dynamic community-based sharing of innovation and ideas, and is the pinnacle of Web 2.0. With all those buzzwords, it must be good for business!
For the revision that will cover Web 2.0.98, patchlevel 4.
Have gnu, will travel.
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/web3point0/
It was obvious that Web 3.0 was the answer more than 2 years ago. Why are slashdotters so slow?
I am not sure what you mean by "Internet". When I say the Internet, I mean the network where segments can be nuked and can go away and I can still get to a website where the nukes did not affect.
As for twitter being up and down, that's their business. The Internet will still be up, even if they are down.
Something for the rich and tasteless to sink their cash into, with any expectations of long-term success being relegated to wishful bar talk.
Also, it's a good browse spoiled.
There is a good chance that you have heard about "Web 2.0"
WTF is this, 2002 ? Is this book written for the Amish ?
Web 2.0 is now old hat. The magpies have moved on to bigger, shinier garbage like AIR and Silverlight.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0
Web 2.0: A Strategy Guide, written by a student who thinks about starting his own (Web 2.0 ?) business.
In the same vein, readers might also be interested in these other entertaining books:
"Running a Business", by Someone Who's Never Run A Business
"Orgies: How To Feel Your Way Through If You're Blind", by Helen Keller
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
...you're still on 2.0, while anybody with any hipness is all the way on 4.5.
I'm gonna hold out on buying it till they release it in book 2.0 format. My new eyes 2.0 aren't backwards compatable.
Bastard stole my idea after I called his second wife "divorce 2.0"
The review says that almost a quarter of the book is endnotes referencing other books and an extensive bibliography. Considering that this is a book written about the web, don't you think that the average reader will know how to use Google to find that? I'd rather have a shorter, less costly book that trusts me to know how to find further information should I need it.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
These cover mainly technical aspects of implementation whereas this book introduces the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement
Ummmm...strategical?
The entire premise of this book makes me want to strangle someone.
This sentence (I use the term loosely) in the summary "...the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement..." pushes me over the top. Subby is lucky he/she did not submit this in person.
when I reached this part:
The next think I was looking at is information about the author. Amy Shuen concentrates on business models and teaches entrepreneurship, strategy, and venture finance on major business schools around the world.
I cried a little.
I felt a little better when I read the last sentence which indicated that the reviewer is not a native English speaker.
I would still expect a little more effort from a book reviewer. If you know that your book review will be read by tens of thousands of people you should at least take the time to bring your writing up to a high-school level.
If you cannot do this yourself then ask someone on the Internet to help you.
This book review is sub-par for a grade 6 English class book review assignment.
You DON'T (in theory) have to worry too much about scalability. At least not the infrastructure side of it. So if you're caught being slashdotted, you're OK.
Not saying these services are all the way there yet, but it appears to me that there is a whole class of sites that more and more are likely to have high traffic variability. It can be pretty hard to predict too. Cloud style utility computing is definitely one answer to that.
So it would seem to me that 'learning how to size their solution' may be exactly what web devs WON'T need to worry about for much longer. This seems to me almost inevitable, they are orthogonal concerns. In general such things eventually get segregated into different parts of the IT skill stack, and the less one factor influences another, the more effective the overall technology.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
...we have to standardize on RICH XML frameworks to demarginalize our proactive data delivery paradigm.
Because you've cursed us with a buzzword that's far more detestable than most, I stopped buying O'Reilly titles and now pirate them exclusively--88 in my library at last count. Obviously I won't be "stealing" the title from TFA though. No hard feelings, Timmy.
do you think anyone still care ? havent you guys already moved to new buzzwords to shove people more books ?
Read radical news here
Monsanto released a service pack for dirt, codenamed "RoundUp." But it's not open source and the EULA is a real biatch.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Screw Web 2.0, I'm still waiting for Web ME
Book aside (I didn't RTFA) and glossing over the Web 2.0 jargon the important change I see isn't the social features you seem to be mocking. That's just an easy facet to focus on.
What's news is websites have become services.
Mull that over for a second if you want.
Now days there are 2 kinds of websites: destinations and services.
A destinations major draw is it's content and it relies on this content to draw visitors and to thereby grow its site. A service will also have content, but like the name suggests a service also provides it's visitors with services and it relies on its content *and* the usefulness of its services to grow the site.
Now if we extrapolate that for a second we can create two imaginary retailers: musicshop01.com and musicshop02.com
Musicshop01.com is a good old music retailer. They sell cds, lps and t-shirts and have a great selection. People love to go to musicshop01.com and find the latest music.
Musicshop02.com just opened and they have a similar selection, but the owners a bit younger with some computer experience and a few programming buddies. People can browse catalogs and lists just like they could at musicshop01.com but they start to notice a few other features: they can create tags, add comments, create and manage lists, add ratings or reviews, view personal history, suggestions, search these items, add friends and send and receive recommendations. The website owner is happy because the cost of this user-generated content is very low (increased overhead) and the users are happy because the peer-generated content provides additional information which can prove useful.
Over time users realize that the services provided by musicshop02.com are convenient and can save them time and can help them find products that they might not find otherwise.
At the same time growth at musicshop01.com has been flat and is now beginning to drop as users become increasingly familiar with the services available at musicshop02.com.
Welcome to the social revolution.
Quack, quack.
"I have not talked much about the content of the book because I did not want to provide you with a plain summary."
- because telling me what the book was about would be.. like totally wrong or something.
captcha: docile .. similar to the sheep buying into web 2.0
Does the guide cover how to beat the end boss of the Internet?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Your distinction between destinations and services is dead on. That being said, I think we're now talking semantics here. All of the "services" you're using as examples are, indeed, "social features." Welcome to the social revolution, indeed.
> These cover mainly technical aspects of implementation whereas this book introduces the strategical thinking behind the whole Web 2.0 movement
Semantics is true. :)
But the reason I make the distinction is because I think it's important to reiterate the over arching concept, which is the shift towards services, and how that really has been a useful and fundamental change in our focus.
Once we establish that it's easy to see that social services are/(*cough* well, can) be a useful subset of possible services. But more importantly we can see much more clearly what makes todays site more (services based) or less (destination based) relevant and that seems to be the topic du jour (in the guise of the nearly unintelligible concept: Web 2.0).
And finally, that services are about more then tacking on a blog, a wiki, a friends list and creating some worm-like 'viral marketing' campaign.
The exchange in a service based landscape is simple: You want traffic. There's an invisible contract between you (the site) and me (the visitor): if your service isn't useful; you are not relevant.
Quack, quack.
Web 2.0 is so much more than the technology.
Sounds to me like a very typical bullshit from those clueless project managers that has none of IT knowledge, but running with Gannt charts across everywhere.
There is a fucking clear definition, already defined by ESR years ago: content, content, content and, again, content matters. While from technical perspective Ajax is NOT a technology, but a bunch of techniques that wraps all that REQUEST/RESPONSE game into more sophisticated way. As a consequence, developers that had no much clue before suddenly hyped to use XmlHttpRequest widely in the typical fashion: "I can get it working too!!".
The fact, that you're putting an icon with a glass effect, bigger font, using pastel color gamma and refreshing page partially still does not mean something. Besides, it is as same HTTP with HTML that has been here for years.
Again, from technology perspective, new things are Sun JavaFX, Adobe AIR, M$ Silverlight or Novel Moonlight etc â" these are conceptually newer and makes different approach to the Web in general. So technically speaking, I would suggest shut the fuck up about "Web 2.0" and call it just "Web" as it actually is.
And from business perspective I just do not care, because I am nerd. Not a business man.
they can create tags, add comments, create and manage lists, add ratings or reviews, view personal history, suggestions, search these items, add friends and send and receive recommendations.
Until the user realizes they've been suckered into working for the website owners. Then they become much more selective about what they contribute. The only ones left are the young, the naive and the marketing parasites all of whom tend to take away value rather than add value.
No social revolution. Just a new way to take advantage of the naive until they learn better.
Like .com, "Web 2.0" is largely a hype bubble. While there is some value in "Web 2.0" it is vastly overrated as a social tool and businesses that want to take advantage of the very socially aware younger generation are in for a rude awakening as the rapidly self-educating young move to websites that really do have value rather than web sites that fake it with "Web 2.0" superficialities while trying to extract maximal value at the expense of their userbase.
---
Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
Stay off the interweb at least until Service Pack 1 is released.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
At the same time growth at musicshop01.com has been flat and is now beginning to drop as users become increasingly familiar with the services available at musicshop02.com.
Correct me if I am wrong, but this says musicshop01.com is in fact a destination, which still is no revolution.
You are thinking new thoughts in an old box. You have yet to escape it.
Welcome to the social revolution attempt.
I guarantee you 2.0 is not it.
If you are reading a 2.0 strategy guide now, you have definitely missed the bandwagon. It may indeed be a great book, but hindsight is 20/20.
Yes, you are wrong and in such a peculiar manner that I don't know how (or even if) to correct you.
Quack, quack.
I thought about this for a while myself. I work from both angels 1) as a user who values my privacy *and* my freedom 2) as a technology professional working in the development industry.
The thing you need to understand is that while yes, companies *are* rubbing their hands together thinking user generated content is a big fat freebie, no, that's not how it actually works (or will work out).
The thing to remember is that these are services. Sort of like dry cleaning is a service. The service any site provides is only useful if it is relevant. Irrelevant, cumbersome or annoying services will not find footing in the market, or will lose it as equal or better services emerge.
An example would be google versus yahoo, the one-time market leader.
So forgetting all the annoying hype and the related market (or pundit?) frenzy we still have a fundamental shift toward services. If your service isn't useful; it is irrelevant.
Which is to say that if you like and visit my site xyz.com and I provide tools that enhance or simplify your experience in some way, you are likely to use them. The more useful you find these services the more likely you are to use them. In this equation, evil doesn't necessarily = successful because it impedes useful. Hence we have companies like Google who's motto is famously: Don't be evil. I'm sure they will be (or have, or are), but they seem to understand that by behaving badly they risk losing relevance.
Anyway, what I've advocated here is to simply look beyond the social hype and the unintelligible Web 2.0 lingoism and call it what it is: a shift to services.
Quack, quack.
Not that I don't get where you're coming from. But the thing that we seem to be discussing when we pull out this useless and unintelligible term Web 2.0 is the real and fundamental shift in the (for lack of a better word) marketplace.
Pundits want to explain it (hi Tim!) businesses want to understand it. But we continuously end up talking about the technologies used (yay AJAX! yay Javascript!) or the days most popular implementations (OMG Social Social Revolution!) while we miss or ignore the simple fact that sites that are becoming relevant today are offering to be more then just a destination by provide users with useful services.
In fact you might argue that there seems to be an increasingly direct correlation between usefulness and relevance.
So sure, AJAX is topical and it helps you achieve some enhanced usability. But the fundamental shift in focus towards services seems to be the more salient point, remarkably, missing from the conversation.
Quack, quack.
BINGO!!!
You say there are two kinds of web sites. Yet, ALL web sites are destinations. If usefulness is what gages service-ness then, well, a useless destination is one that no one goes to, so all destinations are pretty much services to a degree.
Your example translated into a real case is pretty much what amazon.com and buy.com were during the first IT bubble, so bringing that up now 10 years later is not news. In fact, if you consider amazon or google or match.com or myspace or ebay to be services, well they've been around for a long time, and pretty much have been doing the same thing. Ebay and amazon have added new 2.0-like features, but are they revolutionary? No. Lookup their web services and they've pretty much had those for a good 5 years too.
If you were to say new amazon2.0s and google2.0s are around the corner about to take over the world, as per your musicshop02.com exmample, then tell me more, but that is clearly not the case, and so there is no revolution.
As a surfer, you are free to place your favorite sites into two folders labeling one "destinations" and the other "services." If that helps you, that would be your revolution.
IX CCXLIX XVII II CLVII CXVI CCXXVII XCI CCXVI LXV LXXXVI CXCVII XCIX LXXXVI CXXXVI CXCII
Sorry, I'm already working on Web 3.0
Except one day you wander into musicshop01 and actually talk to a cute girl there.
Later you go back to your computer and surf to musicshop02 and go over the same lists that now seem kind of lame and lifeless.
OMG dude that's so cool I want a -1 funny too.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
Y'all need to try harder. Just one -1 Troll ain't gonna cut it. I need at least two more -1 Overrated and a +1 Funny. I have a birthday coming up, get busy please.
i ate crayons when i was a kid and now i have two braincells and the blue ones taste nicer
The most critical is:
"The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the Rest of Today's User Generated Media Are Killing Our Culture and Economy"
by Andrew Keen.
It may shock techies that the incredibly clever and flexible code that has been devised to enable these websites might be seen as having potentially negative side-effect on society. How can something which promotes that marvellous thing "social interaction" possibly be bad?
Andrew Keen explains, and some younger folk may come to see this primarily as a generational divide.
As other commenters have mentioned on this thread, techies are merely pushing the envelope to produce what kids who've never lived without the existence of the Internet or mobile phones would expect to be offered.
But young folk who've always inhabited that brightly coloured bubble may be blinkered from recognising the downside, for they are so swept up in the ingenuity of each new development, and love the functionality that it provides, day in, day out.
Imagine telling Americans they have to give up their car and will have to bicycle or walk to work to save the planet - "No way!" they'll shout - "sod the planet; I can't survive without my SUV"
That's how I imagine trying to show people in the bubble that maybe Web 2.0 does have a downside - perhaps therefore its inadvisable to post this on this forum - but maybe you'd find it interesting to read an alternative view.
Andrew Keen's arguments might do that - or maybe you are so convinced of the "inherent goodness" of Web 2.0 that you won't hear a word said against it.
The second book is:
"We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity" by Charles Leadbeater
who appears to be a fully paid up true convert to the amazing delights of community participation tools that characterise Web 2.0.
He even wrote the draft of the book online, garnering comments from all and sundry after each chapter.
He doesn't examine any of the difficulties identified in the "Cult of the amateur" but the book really rushes you along in a breathless sprint through the delights that surround us and await us as Web 2.0 develops.
He sounds like an old man who is genuinely captivated by social software and social websites but who is worried that if he voices any criticism he will be seen as unhip, and lose the "cool" he's accumulated by detailing this brave new world.
So one book is critical; and the other is from an enthusiast - you judge their arguments.
It seems like anything that is printed in hard form is behind the bubble these days