Raiding the Community

This is a rambling diatribe about AJAX, Tech news sites, and Web 2.0. Oh, and I beat the word “community” into the ground with a dead horse. Please read with tongue caressing cheek.

I’ve actually used Ajax in a project now. As it turns out, Ajax is very simple. If you already know HTML, some javascript, and the server-side language of your choice then you can learn Ajax in under 10 minutes. After finishing the new feature in less time than I alloted for researching Ajax, I spent a few minutes laughing about all the Ajax articles I skimmed over in the last X months. I suppose if I’d look for tech news beyond CNET, I’d probably have tried Ajax long before now instead of writing it off as a fad (which is a sensible response to seeing anything on CNet’s Tech News). Which leads me to an overview of tech news and Web 2.0.

Tech news sites can be broken into two large categories, one-topic and everything-tech sites. One topic sites easy to find because often search-engines will lead you to these sites. Two examples of everything-tech include CNet’s Tech News and Slashdot. CNet hires professional(?) writers to write clueless articles which gloss over details. Slashdot is run by non-professional writers that mostly give you a link and a small blurb. Both sites allow comments, CNet’s comments are sparse and useless whereas Slashdot’s comment’s are dense and ever growing but equally useless. Many a time my eyes have accidentally read Slashdot’s comment section and the results were nearly fatal. Thankfully, I’ve always forced the browser to another site before clawing my eyes out in self defense. Slashdot (and it’s audience) has a very noticeable bias. It was because of the groupthink and the comments that I quit reading Slashdot on a regular basis many years ago. My CNet habit is harder to break because anything that eats RSS feeds includes it as a default. Slashdot does deserve credit however, before Slashdot, comments on websites usually took the form of “guestbooks” and it was the first site anything like a weblog that I remember back then.

Ah, web comments, the building block of web communities. I think in was sometime in the ’90s (early or late, I don’t remember) the big buzzword for ten-minutes or so was “community”. Sci-fi stories hailed the human race as community builders. Websites sprang-up around any community. Websites sprang-up wanting communities to form around them. You could download naughty pictures as long as you “complied with the standards of your community”. I still hear people use the word “community” a lot, it usually means they sell something and the word before community is their target market. At a funeral recently, during the testimony section, a woman talked about the “biker community” — she was, of course, owner of a motorcycle shop. I’m jaded I know, but it seems people use that the term “community” are either damaged in some way the requires them to feel like a part of something larger or they are trying to make money off “the community”.

Now it’s 2005, we’re already repeating history with a lemon twist. “Community” sounds old-hat or even bad if you are like me, so they needed new buzzwords. The winners are “social” and “web 2.0”. Now “social” is almost the same as “community”, but instead of disposable income, and gullible investors it’s comments, clicks, or votes and “mind-share”. Google taught everyone that a link is a comment or endorsement of a site. Many of the “Web 2.0” sites, like reddit and digg, use clicks or votes and link submission for their social aspect. Reddit and digg are “link aggregators”, which serve the same purpose as Slashdot only without the blurbs and comments. In today’s internet, anyone can a start weblog for free. Instead of writing clueless, half-baked comments on Slashdot, you can post them on your weblog (like this half-baked article). Reddit and digg store the links with a sort of ranking like Slashdot’s moderation but without the parent topic to support the whole thing. The content is selected and voted on by the audience, which means you’ll find a lot of articles that reinforce that audience’s beliefs (or criticize those beliefs, negativity is a good way to mobilize the troops and karma whore at the same time) and very little actual news. It seems digg is slightly more useful as it has categories (or tags) for links and a (possibly) larger audience. Reddit’s audience seems to be comprised of Lisp programmers (now mad because Reddit switched to Python), GPL zealots, and some political weenies. Del.icio.us (henceforth referred to as “dumb.name”) can spew links like Reddit and Digg, but the primary purpose of dumb.name is to store bookmarks (shared or not). The quality of dumb.name’s links is slightly better because the nature of bookmarks means one might read the content of a site more than once.

But what about “mind-share”? Mind-share is how much you think about something. Mind-share in aggregate (I’m beginning to despise that word as well) equals popularity. A site gets popular enough and a search engine (or any other company that wants to “service the community”) will acquire it as Yahoo! did with del.icio.us. This is the difference between “Web 1.0” and “Web 2.0”, not Ajax, not remix-able web services. “Web 1.0” startups (and the VCs that funded them) where out for IPO money. “Web 2.0” startups (and the VCs) are out to be acquired by the giants. Web 1.0 hurt stock investors. Web 2.0 will hurt the giants that acquire more and more to gain coolness and more page-views. Good thing for the search giants that the Web 2.0 sites are relatively cheap to acquire, at least currently. None of “Web 2.0” sites really require a lot of code, Reddit was recently rewritten in a different language in the course of a few days (as opposed to months). The work comes from the users of the website, its community. Flickr would not be very interesting if no-one posted pictures to it.

The basic “Web 2.0” business plan reads like this…

1. Spend a weekend writing server-side code.


2. Spend next three weeks trying to find a dumb name that will a) stick in people heads and b) not registered already.


3. Get VC funding (Might be step #1 in some cases). Gotta pay those bandwidth bills somehow.


4. Market yourself somehow.


5. Hope that you become the next craze with a target demographic that the search engine giants find attractive.

It seems like a good scam, minimal cost of development, support costs increase with popularity, and most of the real work is done by people who use the service for free. Better yet, some users may even pay for premium services. When the site sells out — if they are funded by VCs and become popular, they will sell out even if the VCs have to push the founders out — they don’t even have to share the profits with the largest part of their workforce, their users.

If you’ve read this far and are still looking for the point, I’m very sorry. Welcome to Web 2.0, the point must emerge from the users. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to rawk out with Pandora.