Editorial

Web 2.0 The Magazine

A Journal for Exploring New Internet Frontiers.

Editorial-mcmullen

Random Notes on the further explosion of Web 2.0:

We’ve been away for a while – but, now, we’re back and plan to get back on a regular schedule. During the time we’ve been away, there has been the continual proliferation of new tools, services, apps, and mashups – as we might expect. More importantly, there has been much greater focus on both the maturity and monetization of existing products. The maturity has been shown in improved security, greater focus on privacy, and expanded functionality of the systems. As software firms create better and better development tools, the availability of new “tools, services, apps, and mashups” will expand at such a geometric rate that it will be more and more difficult for any new product to acquire a Facebook / Twitter-type share of the market. It will also be difficult for the consumer to keep track of all the new and useful products as they are released – it will be the task of services like Web 2.0 The Magazine to provide news and insightful reviews for the marketplace and it is important that the public understand the publications have no vested interest in any of the product providers, whether they be subscribers or not.

Factcheck and Snopes that one can go to in order to verify Internet content.

Web 2.0 also provides the consumer with power as much as responsibility. Readers should demand that bloggers, list and news posters, tweeters, and social meeting participants verify anything that they post or tweet under their own name. All too often, when someone points out the incorrectness of an item, the answer is “I just passed on (or ‘re-tweeted’) what someone else sent me”. This should not be acceptable – and readers should call the re-tweeters or posters of nonsense publicly to task (“This statement is WRONG and could not have been checked”). Such calling out may not make the person doing it very popular but such collective action is the only way that we can establish some degree of creditability for the Web 2.0 universe in which we all now live.

In the first paragraph, I mentioned “greater focus on privacy.” This will not necessarily mean “privacy” as we have defined it over the years. For thousands of years, it was very difficult to “find out” much about a person if he / she didn’t wish things to be known about them. Even after more and more became information “in the public record,” one had to be willing to go down to a courthouse and wade through paper or microfilm records of real estate, marriage, judgments, traffic accidents, criminal convictions, etc. for hours, weeks, or months to find meaningful information about a person.

We all know that computers and the Internet have changed all that – public records are easily accessible and searchable and subjects help us by putting information up on Facebook and MySpace that, until recently, would have been considered “private” – yet, the choice is still ours about what we choose to make public on those sites. Now, a new app called “Recognizr” ups the ante!

The app, about to be released for Android-based systems by Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe, allows the user to point a smart phone at an individual’s face, take a picture, and match it, using facial recognition techniques to a database to see such information as the individual’s name, physical and e-mail addresses, phone number, and which web services and social networks to which they are connected. If the app is successful – and, sooner or later, it or a similar app will be – it is only a matter of time until the information is linked to all sorts of public information. There will be no hiding!

Until next time ….. johnmac

As the number of Blogs, RSS feeds, Mailing Lists, Social Networks, and Twitter postings expand at even a greater geometric pace than the products mentioned above, it is very important that the reader develop the necessary sophistication to be able to differentiate truth from falsehood. Most consumers of the print media, no matter what their political bent, will agree that there is a much better chance that information presented in the New York Times is accurate than that found in a “supermarket weekly.” I constantly see, however, totally bizarre absurdities presented as fact on the Internet. There are some sites such as

Random Notes on the Further Explosion of Web 2.0 by John F. McMullen