web 2.0 is for suckers

No, not really.

But I love the overblown bullshit that rags like Time spill out about this new phenomenon. They named "you" as the Person of the Year for 2006, which is ridiciulous to begin with, but their reasoning just kills me:

"And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you. "

Yeah, well done. You busted your ass making movies for absolutely nothing, and the founders of YouTube sat back and collected 1.6 billion dollars. I hope you feel empowered for creating WEB 2.0! We appreciate your free creativity, suckers.

It makes me both optimistic and depressed at the same time to watch all this miraculous input that the new web allows. It's all powered by people contributing to the movement, and that makes or breaks the new generation of websites, but the root of most of these sites seems to be hoping that other people will create cool shit and then asking for money for the eyeballs.

On the other hand, it's not all bad. Companies are opening up design contests and all sorts of other neat things that don't boil down to people poorly lip synching songs in their underwear for pageviews. There's something cool coming out of this whole mess after all.

Web 2.0 has so much potential. I'm going to start playing with APIs over the next few weeks, I've got a few ideas for neat things that I'll share if I can get them working. The tools we have before us are so exciting if we actually do something with them. I think one of my 2007 goals is to stop being a link-passing zombie and actually CREATE something. So much of our existance has become showing other people's clever things to each other, and I've started to miss how I used to actually make things..