Digital Journal — In the wake of all this buzz about Web 2.0 (the trend of Web content being dictated by collaboration and networking) we sent antisocial columnist Mike Drach to spend a Saturday trapped in the ether to discover what the big deal is. Here are his dispatches from collaborative-content hell:
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Awake! Another glorious summer day which I will spend at home alone, sitting in a pair of threadbare briefs, crouched over a laptop. Why? To please my editors, who asked me to find out why the most popular Web 2.0 sites are hotter than an Olsen twins threesome.
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10:56 a.m. First things first: I fire up MySpace (MySpace.com) to see if I have messages. News Corp.-owned MySpace is literally the most popular site in the United States and the granddaddy of social networking sites. Essentially a dating service for kids too cool to date, MySpace hosts more than 100 million member profiles — often with obnoxious hot pink backgrounds and audio clips from the newest screamo-core band.
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11:26 a.m. Enough ogling scenester chicks; I have an article to write. Something about being a “Web 2.0 addict.” Figure I’ll need a definition of the term first.
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11:51 a.m. I become bored with Wikipedia’s Web 2.0 definition within seconds: “A supposed second generation of Internet-based services that let people collaborate and share information online in a new way — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies.”
I stop right there. As they say at Urban Dictionary, “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read).
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12:07 p.m. Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com), one of the Web’s 2000 most popular sites, is a user-written compendium of slang and neologisms. Although there is an attempt at quality control here, you’ll still stumble into definitions like “jeff is a big queer & he smells like farts.”
As for the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia (consumer-generated mediadda yadda found at wikipedia.org), it’s trying to appear more legit by forcing its writers to stick citations into every sentence.
But do we really need a footnote for the assertion that, in 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Katie Holmes “played a straight-A student whose vindictive teacher (Helen Mirren) threatens to keep her from a desperately needed scholarship[46]”? I’ll take your freaking word for it.
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12:40 p.m. Decide the artificial IQ-boostage via Wikipedia was a job well done, and will accept reward in the form of self-pleasure.
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1:25 p.m. Scan through such Web 2.0 evergreens as Flickr (flickr.com), Webshots (webshots.com) and Slide (slide.com) to explore true meaning of “user-generated content”: digital photo-sharing sites, featuring clear-as-day snapshots of (for instance) giddy college girls doing body shots at the year-end Pimps ‘n Hoes party. Nothing wrong with guiltless eye candy.
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2:21 p.m. Satiated, log in to Bloglines (bloglines.com), a handy service that aggregates RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for all your favourite blogs in one place. It’s been a day since I checked up on the sites I’m following. In typical Web 2.0 fashion, there’s so much exchange of ideas and information that I find myself faced with 556 new posts to read.
Instead, I quell my hunger pangs with a takeout burrito. The bean-filled torpedo is demolished while
I watch a five-minute vidcast courtesy of The 9 (9.yahoo.com), a compendium of daily online news and trends.
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2:57 p.m. I stumble across the best 2.0 website ever: wankr (parm.net/web2.0). “wankr is a place for web 2.01 people to gather together in one humongous circlejerk so they can masturbate each other into a sticky frenzy over useless, meaningless bullshit.” Apparently, the site’s in its “zeta” stage.
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3:14 p.m. Vague sense of depression makes me want to buy things, thus justifying existence. By consuming, you see, I’m contributing. Right?
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3:19 p.m. I go to Craigslist (craiglist.com), which provides free classifieds for roughly 310 cities worldwide, and look for goodies I might need in the near future. I cleverly create RSS feeds for various searches, including “iPod nano,” “waffle iron,” “Belarusian mail-order bride,” “inflatable Olsen twin doll.”
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4:03 p.m. I notice Boston’s Casual Encounters link on Craigslist has a deluge of pervert posts from “w2m”.
Is that a good place to live? I quickly glance at beermapping.com — a Google Maps mashup that shows the availability of beer stores within a city — and decide, yes, this is a superior urban area to my own.
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4:25 p.m. Been too long without a dose of comedy. I peep the droll, socially relevant stylings of comedian Bill Maher on his new Web-based show, Amazon’s Fishbowl, found at the easy-to-remember URL of http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/16305491/sr%3D53-1/sr%3D53-1/qid%3D1152092123/ref%3Dtr%5F278881/103-0961865-6633438.
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5:14 p.m. Maher talks too much. Masturbating again.
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5:37 p.m. More vague depression and regret. Decide to join a new “semantic web” social networking site, thus revalidating existence.
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5:48 p.m. All these social networking sites — which one to choose? Friendster (friendster.com)? That’s old hat. Yahoo! 360º (360.yahoo.com)? That shit is analogue, yo.
But after reading the latest on the Web 2.0 economy, I decide to go with Bebo (bebo.com, duh). These are the guys who turned down an alleged $550-million (US) buyout offer at a time when everyone wishes they could sell out.
Yeah, Bebo. Despite the gay-ass name, they sound like rebels with integrity to spare. Rebels, like me.
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6:08 p.m. Pasted from my Bebo homepage:
-Mike Drach
-No friends 🙁
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6:21 p.m. Need friends now. Hmm. This girl sounds friendly enough, and we share a mutual interest in sports:
i lurves 2 play hockey *nods* yesh, tis troo! …espeshally mixed 4 obvious reasons 😛
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7:22 p.m. I spend the next five hours reading up on God-knows-what thanks to the exasperatingly collaborative story-finding efforts of Shoutwire (shoutwire.com), Digg (digg.com), Feedster (feedster.com), IceRocket (icerocket.com) and del.icio.us.
These sites do similar things: repurpose content from around the Web and rank them based on popularity and user votes. In this world, “front page news” might be anything from a new 9/11 conspiracy theory to a lengthy essay on “why swords are cool.”
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1:23 a.m. Been more than 15 hours since signed on. Have officially lost mind and 20/20 eyesight. Choose to ritually sacrifice pet budgie while screaming names of my Web 2.0 oppressors: XANGA! XANGA! FURL! OBOPAY! ORKUT! ORKUT! XANGA!
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1:29 a.m. Settle into the comforting darkness of sleep. But first, start a new Craigslist feed for “budgie.”
