COMM 150, 207: 'Next big thing' on the net?

Cross-posted to The Mackerel Wrapper and my cleverly named http://comm207fall06.blogspot.com/ blog for students in COMM 207 this semester.

Here's kind of a breathless, "gee-whiz" story about the latest round of innovations on the World Wide Web, that also gives a nice profile of Silicon Valley. It was in today's London Observer, the Sunday paper affiliated with The Guardian. I'll just post the lede, the nut graf(s) and an interesting observation or two that came further down in the story, by David Smith of The Observer.

The lede sets the scene:

The people spilling out of Ritual Coffee Roasters on to the San Francisco sidewalk scent more than coffee beans. Inside there are twenty and thirtysomethings, most of them male, working intently at laptops and harnessing the power of the internet. They are not merely logging on to look at MySpace or YouTube or The Next Big Thing. They plan to be The Next Big Thing.

It's boom time again in Silicon Valley and there is opportunity around every corner. Each month $180m (£94m) is invested in technology companies aspiring to change the lives of every person on the planet. A combination of youth, entrepreneurial spirit, technical insight, financial muscle and the American Dream, flavoured with West Coast utopianism, has formed a perpetual motion machine that is driving the information age. The brilliant brains of students and geeks, businessmen and scientists, angel investors and venture capitalists are feeding and thriving off each other, sparking the kind of electricity one imagines filled the air of northern England during the Industrial Revolution. A whole new world wide web is on the horizon.

'If you like the idea of going to a coffee shop and everyone works in software and in the conversation next to you someone is starting a company, this is the place to be,' said John Merrells, 37, who emigrated from Harrogate in North Yorkshire and runs a mobile phone software company here. 'Everyone you bump into is potentially something. The physical concentration of people is phenomenal. Like in the City of London, the continual rubbing up of people is how ideas come about.'

To British readers, the references to Yorkshire wouldn't sound "ye olde English-y," of course. They'd be no more exotic than Decatur or Bloomington.

Did you spot the nut graf, by the way? It's that second graf, that begins "It's boom time again in Silicon Valley ..."

A lot of the story is just a catalog of new ideas. Some, no doubt, will pan out. Others, I am sure, won't. And I wish I could say it held my interest better. But interspersed with the new product reviews are some good insights. Here's one on user-generated content like we see on YouTube or Flickr:

The idea of the moment, over-hyped perhaps, is Web 2.0. Before it, according to the definition, the web was a 'lean back' experience like television, in which official content providers' websites would be passively consumed by the rest of us. No one quite agrees on the meaning of Web 2.0, but everyone thinks it has something to do with social networks and content generated by users - a 'lean forward' experience in which consumers become creators. There are more than 1,000 such sites with prime examples including Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia written by users; Flickr, a photo sharing site; Facebook, which enables social networking; and Digg, in which the community selects and prioritises news stories like an editor.

Web 2.0's unprecedented army of contributors is capable of providing more detailed information about your special interest or geographical location than any traditional organisation could dream of. The race is now on to turn it into a commercial proposition.

Which leads into one of the clearest explanations I've seen of how they're changing things: "Each of these sites, and their many imitators, is taking something as old as human civilisation - word of mouth - and formalising it in a single space, giving consumers once unimaginable access to the recommendations of friends and the 'wisdom of crowds'."

There's also a very clear explanation -- again, the clearest I've seen -- of the "semantic web," and how it's expected to work. But I'll let you read that.