“Slate”:http://www.slate.com is one of my favourite online publications – and not just because is survived the Microsoft Sidewalk days! Slate’s technology coverage includes “Clive Thompson”:http://www.slate.com/id/2110034/ (late of Shift and “Canadian Business”:http://www.canadianbusiness.com and currently of “Wired”:http://www.wired.com and the NYT among other publications) and is consistently excellent.
The site’s webhead column has “a recent article by Paul Boutin”:http://www.slate.com/id/2138951/ expressing some confusion about what the web 2.0 craze really means.
Any other Web 2.0 ‘skeptics’ out there? To follow on “my recent post on email”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/03/30/sorry-rss-email-is-here-to-stay, ‘Web 2.0’ is the latest next best thing, but as Boutin says, basically a way of packaging specific ways of interacting with content, user-generated and other. In other words, is Web 2.0 a way online content will be augmented for specific types of sites and audiences (and personality types, and degrees of technology savviness) rather than the way of the future?
I personally love (what I understand) Web 2.0 (to be), but I can also see how it’s not going to work for certain kinds of audiences, content and information. An example would be sites that are intended to showcase design and visual content, or transactional sites where you want users to get to buy and not lost in how they can engage.