Call them fads, trends, or memes, there’s a type of idea that resembles kudzu. It may have evolved to conquer the requirements of a particular intellectual landscape, but eventually it becomes so wildly well-adapted that it spread way wide of its origin.
Case in point: Web 2.0. Starting as a carefully crafted intellectual framework for understanding emerging trends in the architecture of websites, it evolved into a lucrative tech conference and publishing juggernaut, and from thence into a wriggling and omni-present ecosystem of blogs, pundits, technical gurus, and commercial come-ons of all kinds.
When plants like kudzu reach truly far-flung places they begin to become a real problem, choking out native varieties and reducing the richness of the local ecosystem. At this point, the epithet ‘invasive species’ tends to get attached to them and people start to get t-shirts for participating in efforts to eradicate them.
So, in the spirit of doing a little bit of activist gardening (or at least some jocular mockery), I present:
Web 2.0 or Captcha?
It’s a quiz! Below, you’ll find ten strings of letters. Half of them are the names of Web 2.0 companies; the other half are the text of captchas I encountered on Blogger (captchas are those little distorted images of words that websites use to make sure that you’re really a person before letting you submit information).
See if you can tell which is which. When you’ve got your guesses, click the links to find out if you’re right. Ready…go!
Not that I mean to seriously argue the similarity between Web 2.0 companies and computer-generated bot prevention devices, but don’t captchas even look a bit like web 2.0 logos (especially this one)? At least a few fit in each category from The Font Feed’s ontology of Web 2.0 logo aesthetics. There are Softies, Futurists, and Classics.
Have we somehow reached a point where all of the barrier-lowering factors which Tim O’Reilly described in his original essay have actually created a kind of Web 2.0 assembly line that grinds out social networking, photo uploading, and information tagging sites so quickly and uniformly as to rival the growth of weeds? And if so, isn’t it about time for a higher form of life to emerge and get to grazing?
Greg – this is great!
I think you may be onto something here – as developers read and comment on blogs, the captchas inspire them with these names.
That must be it!!
Greg…this is great! I think there is also a sub-culture of folks who like to “read the words” and define them, which always strikes me as funny too.
BTW – Check out – http://www.mikeindustries.com/sifr/
You have cool titles and might appreicate the effect on your headers. I tried it out here:
http://theextrapoint.com and can now change my fonts very easily.
I agree with you 100%. What really gets me is the businesses who “harness” the web 2.0 “image” and advertise to their hearts content. A lot of people don’t realize that a blog is something that has been around for a long time, it’s just not been used for social interaction as it has rapidly become. Thanks for sharing!