A couple evenings ago, I had the opportunity to talk with roughly 150 members of Chicago’s C-SPIN (Chicago Software Process Improvement Network) and CQAA (Chicago Quality Assurance Association) about Web 2.0. Here’s a link to the CQAA website; here’s a link to the C-SPIN description of the evening’s meeting; here’s a link to a very gracious summary and commentary on my talk, from Andy Lester, whose “day job” is QA & Release Manager for enterprise-wiki vendor Socialtext; and here’s a link to the 8.73-megabyte PDF-based Web 2.0 mind-map that I used for the presentation (I was delighted to see, by the way, that I won a few more converts to the concept of mind-maps; see my April 25, 2006 blog posting “Sayonara Powerpoint” for a discussion about the benefits of mind-mapping).

Interestingly, the Q&A session was almost as long as the presentation: for a full hour, people peppered me with intriguing questions, comments, and observations about the current and future state of Web 2.0, the Internet, corporate/business reactions to Web 2.0, and the impact on individuals and communities. Since I was doing my best to respond to the questions, I didn’t have a chance to write them all down; but I’ve remembered about a dozen of the question/response interactions, and will summarize them below; if you attended the presentation and happen to remember any of the other questions or comments, please add them to the comment section below, or email them to me at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com. Interestingly, the Chicago questions were somewhat different than the ones I got in New York City after a September 19, 2006 Web 2.0 presentation to the local SPIN group; for more about those questions, see my blog posting, “Web 2.0 questions from the New York City SPIN group.”

Before I summarize the Chicago questions, though, I want to mention a couple of interesting statistics, based on a couple of informal “show of hands” surveys that I conducted during the evening. First, I asked how many people felt they were reasonably familiar with the concept of Web 2.0; though I didn’t make a precise count of the number of hands that went up, it appeared to be roughly 10-15% of the overall audience. Next, I asked how many people had blogs of their own; the response was about the same, though it was a slightly different group of people. Finally, I asked how many people regularly read one or more blogs about whatever topics they were interested in; that drew a slightly larger response, but it was only about 20%.

I suppose you could argue that this was simply the result of a self-selected audience — i.e., it’s arguably more likely that someone who was already familiar with Web 2.0 wouldn’t have bothered coming to a presentation that chewed up the evening hours of 6-9 PM, and it’s more likely that someone who was willing to give up his or her evening would be a person who (a) didn’t know what Web 2.0 was all about, and (b) for whatever reason, felt that he/she really should find out.

Still, it’s a pretty sobering set of statistics: after all, everyone in the audience was not only an IT professional, but a sufficiently dedicated professional that they belonged to a professional computer society focusing on quality assurance and/or process improvement. Most of the attendees appeared to be in their thirties, if not older; there were plenty of gray hairs, bald heads, and scars in the audience.

So, if the level of awareness of, and involvement in, the Web 2.0 world is this low in an experienced, professional IT community, what’s it likely to be in the broader population of IT organizations, and business organizations in general? And, notwithstanding Time magazine’s choice of Web 2.0 (or, to be more precise, “you”) as the Person Of The Year for 2006, what are the chances that the average citizen really understands what’s going on in the Web 2.0 world? Sure, almost everyone has heard the term “blog,” and almost every teenager can rattle off the names of a dozen social-media sites; but it seems like we still have a long way to go before a reasonable percentage of people have a coherent overall understanding of what Web 2.0 is all about.

Anyway, here’s a quick summary of the questions and comments that occupied all of for the hour after my formal presentation ended:

1. Someone asked “What will Web 2.0 mean to large developing nations like China and India?” We could easily have devoted a full hour (or more) to this topic alone, and I doubt that my response did justice to the importance of these two huge markets. I responded that I had read somewhere recently that 2007 is supposed to be the year that China will have more Internet users than the U.S (it was only while I was writing these notes that I remembered that all of this came came from a March 1, 2007 blog posting, “Next Five Billion Internet Users,” on Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs blog). And I reminded everyone that while a substantial percentage of Americans access the Internet/Web through traditional laptop and desktop computers, a much larger percentage of Indians and Chinese use some form of smart-phone. Lots of people have been predicting that mobile computing will be a big part of the future of Web 2.0; and I think it’s quite likely that China and India will lead the way. There’s a brief discussion of this area in my November 9, 2006 blog posting on “Web 2.0 Summit, General Impressions;” also, see my August 4, 2006 blog posting on “Wikimania: Day 1, general comments and observations” for some comments about the political aspects of Web 2.0 (and, in particular, Wikipedia) in China. Meanwhile, it’s important to remember that China and India aren’t the only developing nations in the world; I suggested to the audience that the proliferation of Web 2.0 around the world — including smaller, more primitive developing nations — would not only be facilitated by smart-phones, but also by Nicholas Negroponte’s “$100 laptop” project; for more about this, see my April 14, 2006 blog posting on “Ubiquitous Computing.”
2. Someone asked whether Web 2.0 was being used to help solve “important social problems,” like cancer or AIDS. My initial response was the SETI@home project (though my mind went blank for a moment, and I couldn’t even remember the SETI name; fortunately, someone in the audience helped me out of my misery). And I mumbled something incoherent about other, similar projects that I had blogged about at some point in the past. It turns out that I was trying to remember the title of an April 17, 2006 blog entry entitled “Idle CPU cycles,” and an April 23, 2006 blog entry entitled “Idle CPU cycles, part 3: the Majestic-12 Project.” Also, take a look at my July 19, 2006 blog posting on “Tom DeMarco’s Recommendation of ‘Games with a Purpose’.” This isn’t an exhaustive coverage of the concept of large-scale communities tackling large, serious problems, but it does convey the flavor of the idea.
3. Someone asked whether Web 2.0 was being used to provide solutions, tools, and resources for the professional IT community — aside from such obvious examples as Linux. I mentioned SourceForge as the primary example, and someone in the audience launched into a passionate endorsement of how wonderful and useful SourceForge is. Amen to that.
4. Someone asked whether Web 2.0 was all about entertainment — whether in the form of YouTube, downloaded music and photographs, social media, or multiplayer games — as opposed to more “serious” things. I acknowledged the importance of entertainment as a source of interest (and revenue) in the Web 2.0 world, but I think that Web 2.0 is much more than that. Since I was speaking to a group of serious, practical-minded IT people who work in traditional, profit-seeking corporations, I urged them to investigate blogs and wikis as mechanisms to facilitate wide-scale collaboration both inside and outside their organization. I recommended Don Tapscott’s new book, Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything, as a good source of material on this topic; take a look at my December 28, 2006 blog posting “Wikinomics: Introduction to the new book,” for more details. As for collaboration involving entertainment (specially, music), see my February 23, 2007 blog posting on “Sellaband.” For Kevin Kelly’s perspective on the importance of collaboration in the evolution of the Internet, see my (very long) July 9, 2006 blog posting on “The Next Web: Kevin Kelly’s Keynote.” Also, take a look at my May 9, 2006 blog posting on a terrific presentation by the inventor of Wikis, Ward Cunningham, entitled “Cutter Summit: Ward Cunningham on Wiki, Software, and the Changing Nature of Work,” as well as a May 9, 2006 blog posting about a talk from Harvard Business School professor Siobhan O’Mahony about the practical, corporation-related examples of “outward-bound collaboration,” entitled, “Cutter Summit: Siobhan O’Mahony on Open Source and Collaboration.”
5. Someone asked about the impact of Web 2.0 on education. My immediate response was MIT’s Open Courseware project, but of course, that’s just one example of one small aspect of the “world” of education. I forgot to mention such examples as Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, which I discussed in an October 2, 2006 blog posting entitled “Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning” — and of course there’s much, much more. I think a lot of parents are probably more interested (and/or concerned) about the impact of Web 2.0 — especially such ubiquitous things as Google and Wikipedia — on the education that we’re providing high-school and elementary school children; see, for example, my June 7, 2006 blog posting entitled “Should Children Learn to Function in a World Without Google?” And interestingly, discussions like these can easily wander into the realm of politics; see, for example, my January 1, 2007 blog posting on “What happens when an entire country is blocked from accessing important Internet resources?“, which discusses Wikipedia’s decision to shut off access to the entire country of Qatar because of spamming problems. Also, see the February 1, 2007 New York Times article entitled, “A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source.”
6. Someone asked whether the Web 2.0 companies springing up in Silicon Valley (and everywhere else) had a plausible business model for generating revenue and profits, other than (a) advertising on their site, or (b) desperate hopes of being acquired by Google or Yahoo or Rupert Murdoch. We had a general discussion about this area, but I was intrigued to see that almost nobody felt that we were on the verge of a “bubble” of the sort that we saw a decade ago with Web 1.0. I emphasized to the audience that one of the big differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is that today’s companies require much less of a financial investment, and are thus not likely to be so desperate to start generating revenues right away. Unfortunately, I got a little carried away with the “poster child” example of Digg, and claimed that Kevin Rose had started his extremely successful venture with a modest investment of $48. I don’t know where on earth I got that ridiculous figure, but as I noted in an August 24, 2006 blog posting entitled “Digg: all the news the people think is fit to print,” the actual figure was more like $3,500. Still, that’s a pretty small number, compared to the gazillions of VC money that was poured into Web 1.0 disasters like Pets.com and Wine.com.
7. Someone asked what I thought would be the “mainstream” Web 2.0 technologies in traditional business organizations for 2007. This was in response to my having noted that analyst firms like Gartner were beginning to predict that some Web 2.0 technologies would become mainstream this year, and that CIO Magazine had noted that corporate IT departments would “reluctantly” begin using such technologies in 2007. In fact, I don’t remember the details, but it comes from a May 10, 2006 CIO Insight study entitled “Are CIOs Ignoring Web 2.0 Technologies?” See for yourself.
8. Someone asked whether the “Long Tail” concept, which I discussed during my presentation, would eliminate Hollywood blockbusters, and mega-stars like Tom Cruise. Short answer: no. But it will decrease the dominance of the “blockbuster” mentality, and the blockbuster business model; it will encourage innovative companies to focus more attention on “long tail” niche products and services, and it will provide opportunities for niche producers who previously had no opportunity to exist in the marketplace. Someone in the audience suggested that we still need blockbusters, to enable social communities to have common experiences they can talk about — e.g., if lots of us watch Monday Night Football, or American Idol, or the World Cup, then we can all get together the next morning and thrash through the details together. But the “long tail” concept gives us a new opportunity: “niche communities” of perhaps only two or three lonely people, who can come together via the Internet to share their common interest in some obscure product, service, movie, or music. As the discussion and audience continued, someone emphasized a point that I had made in passing, during my formal comments: the “long tail” concept works best in industries where distribution costs are almost zero (think iTunes, NetFlix, Amazon).
9. Someone commented that while all of the business, social, and cultural aspects of Web 2.0 were interesting, it was important to remember that they all depend on a technological foundation — e.g, Ajax, broadband Internet connection, powerful mobile devices, etc, etc. And indeed, that’s important to remember: as several pundits have observed, many of the concepts generally associated with Web 2.0 had been envisioned and discussed a decade ago … but it was almost impossible to implement those concepts with Intel-386 PCs, Windows 95 operating systems, primitive Web browsers, primitive versions of Java, and 56K dialup modems. But here we are today, in 2007, with the reasonable expectation that technology improvements will continue for at least the next decade or two — which means that we can be confident that we’ll have the technological foundation for Web 3.0, Web 4.0, and whatever else lies beyond our current usage of the Internet/Web. For the best commentary on all of this, I suggest that you take a look at Kevin Kelly’s vision of the future of the Web, discussed in my July 9, 2006 blog posting entitled “The Next Web: Kevin Kelly’s Keynote.”
10. The discussion and commentary about communities, long-tail, and collaborative “open-source” development efforts led to an interesting conclusion, which I happen to believe in very strongly: in the future, we’ll see more and more situations of a Dilbert-style world where people spend their 9-to-5 workday in jobs they hate, working for bosses they hate, occupying cubicles and work environments they hate, with clunky, obsolete, highly constrained technology they hate (e.g., a 4 year old computer, running Windows 98, and a non-GUI client-server application that has no access to the Web) — but where they then go home to use their own up-to-date computing tools, and high-speed Internet connection, which allows them to participate in open-source projects they love, regardless of whether they make a penny from such activities. (Imagine, for example, the Microsoft employee who spends all day toiling away on Vista as part of an army of 4,000 other Microserfs, and then comes home to spend his evenings working on Linux.) Some things haven’t changed: twenty years ago, lots of people hated their jobs, their companies, their boss, and their work environment; but when they came home, their only option was to get drunk, and/or watch mindless TV. And some things have changed: now they can come home, eat a low-carb, dietetic dinner, and then do something fun, stimulating, and meaningful. I think that’s going to change the world; indeed, it already is changing the world.

As the commentary above illustrates to at least a small degree, the discussion was lively, and the audience was quite involved. Interestingly, there were relatively few discussions or comments about technology (someone asked me afterwards why I had mentioned the Ruby programming language without giving equal prominence to Python, but that was about it). And there was little or no angry debate; nobody was yelling and shouting that Web 2.0 was a hoax, or that it was entirely over-hyped.

Also, I sensed little or no interest in the use of Web 2.0 for political campaigns or political movements; maybe people are just sick of politicians, or maybe they just haven’t seen enough mashups like this one of George Bush speaking the words to U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” while giving his State of the Union address.

And, curiously, there seemed to be relatively little interest in the impact of Web 2.0 (or technology in general) on the younger generations of people, who may be in college, high school, or elementary school today — but who, in a very short time, will be entering the work force, and whose perspective about traditional computing tools was summarized in my August 2, 2006 blog posting entitled “30 Boxes: not your father’s Oldsmobile … er, uh … calendar.” Well, who knows: maybe people are interested in this area, but just didn’t feel like asking any questions or offering any opinions about it.

Anyway, that’s it for Chicago; I’m now back in the Big Apple. I’ll be giving an updated version of this presentation in Boston and New Jersey later this spring, and will let you know if I get another batch of interesting questions….