After the recent Web 2.0 conference, in which many presenters used the phrase "Web 3.0", and the recent John Markoff NYT article which used "Web 3.0" without irony, I fondly recalled the most important prophet of all things internet.
It's Clay Shirky.
Go to his web site, and bask in the answers to all current and future questions about the nature of the web and the internet.
- Here's a post that tells you why Web 3.0 - the semantic web - won't work.
- Here are a couple that say that Micropayments won't work. Ever.
- And my all time fave - a post that explains how all groups, from Usenet to forums to Digg, go thru the same set of (destructive) patterns.
Shirky is just so damned right about all of these things... The hits just kept coming and coming. He had a Tiger Woods-ian Y2K back in '03. He dominated.
Don't miss his sidebar, describing what the hell he thinks he's writing about. It contains brilliance like:
If I had to describe what I write about, it would be “Systems where vested interests lose out to innovation.”Or maybe “Systems where having good participants produces better results than having good planners.”
and
I find that whenever I waste time thinking about what I think should happen, it interferes with my ability to predict what’s going to happen.
But I guess he's done. Apparently, by the end of 2003, he'd reached enlightenment, understood all there is, and he's reached the end of the internet. I'm just glad he keeps renewing the domain.
I wonder if that golden age of Shirky Prolificirky has passed...
When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed. Say something once, why say it again?
¶ 11/14/2006
