More Web 2.0 Goo for You?

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I just have to shake my head and laugh at how silly buzzwords have become. Buzzwords, particularly on the Internet, have gotten to the point where they've replaced the human ability to actually observe and think -- with patterns of "brainwave gibberish" that evoke images of the classic Pavlovian doggie-style "knee jerk on demand" reaction.

Case in point: "Web 2.0" What IS this God-awful Horseshit? Yes, I know all about the O'Reilly conference and them laying out all the groundwork and guidelines about what is and what is not "Web 2.0" and I really couldn't care less!

Look, A web site is a web site.

It might be good, it might be bad. It might have a lot of snazzy features, and it might not. It might be useful, and it might not be, notwithstanding the previous items. You wanna put a snazzy label on it to make you "feel all good"? -- knock yerself out!

Did you know that if you search Digg on "Web 2.0" (all time) you come up with 393 pages worth of this utter CRAP? That's 5,895 entries, mostly about nothing at all.

It really doesn't mean a damned thing to me. It could be Web 2.0, it could be AJAX, it could be Web 3.11. It's just a fyookin' WEB SITE, man! I'll figure out whether I like it or not, and I'll decide whether it's useful to me. Its the CONTENT and its usability that's important, not the curvy corners and funky logos and the AJAX - SCHMAJAX! And especially not that fact that some moronic "self proclaimed Web 2.0 Guru" put his label of approval on it!

All your stupid acronyms and buzzword labels SUBTRACT value, IMHO -- they only serve to elicit this Pavlovian "no need to reason" response rather that leading the user to really think and use their brain for a change.

This pretty much sums it up for me:




I can't help it. I am a programmer, and as a programmer I understand the first inalienable right of programmers is - we get PAID TO THINK!

Cripes! Oscar the Grouch knows more about Web content than you Web 2.0 morons!
Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Robbe Morris4:32 PM

    Web 2.0 is so old school. I'm already on Web 4.0 where the site writes itself.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown7:32 PM

    Having a bad day Pete? Haha, well I do agree that there are a lot of never-ending acronyms that people create but it's not just a tech industry phenomenon. Creating labels can help people to communicate more effectively and productively..so at least there are some positives when they actually get used, as long as the users understand the underlying meanings ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Van Tronic9:49 AM

    Web 2.0 happened when AJAX was commonly accepted and used. All of a sudden we are not stuck in the world of the gawd aweful postback and individual elements on the page can talk to the server. The least that this technology shift deserves is a new version! I have seen GUI's on the web that play nicer that smart clients. Your griping doesn't hold up with me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. peterbromberg6:29 PM

    AJAX (Remote Scripting) was invented by Microsoft in 1998 (that's last century, BTW...). While there could be some reasonable debate over when it became commonly used, I doubt that it qualifies as a basis for a new buzzword for whatever is on the web that uses it. Now when XAML / HTML 5.0 become in wide use, maybe we can talk about a new version number.

    ReplyDelete

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