A few evenings ago, I had a chance to talk to about 75-100 IT professionals in the Boston community about Web 2.0. It was a miserably rainy evening, following two days of gale winds and downpours, so I was grateful that anyone showed up at all. The audience politely gawked at the 32-page mind-map that I tried to race through in the short one-hour period allotted to me (see my April 14th blog posting about this version of the mind-map, and how to download it); and then they asked a number of interesting questions, which I’ll summarize below.

Before I got into the details of the presentation, I asked how many felt they were familiar with the concepts, tools, and techniques of Web 2.0 — and, like the audiences in other presentations I’ve recently given in Chicago, New York, and Rome, only about 15% of the audience raised their hands. To some extent, this is predictable: why would anyone who was really familiar with Web 2.0 venture out in the rain to hear something he already knows about? But it was still surprising — especially because many of the questions indicated, as I had suspected, that people were indeed familiar with such basic concepts as blogs and wikis. I suspect that some of the self-assessed “lack of knowledge” may come from the audience’s feeling that they don’t know how all of the pieces of Web 2.0 fit together; but I think that a far more important issue is that people don’t really know what they’re supposed to do about Web 2.0. Is it just a “social” phenomenon for lonely teenagers who want to post all of the trivia about their lives on MySpace, or for narcissists who want to upload videos about themselves on YouTube — or does it have “serious” business applications?

Anyway, here were the questions that I remembered after things had wrapped up for the evening, and I scribbled some notes on the back of an envelope:

1. Doesn’t the Internet encourage the creation of a large number of “shallow” experts, who claim to know about all sorts of things they happen to have skimmed quickly with the help of Wikipedia or Google? Well, I suppose it’s a possibility; of course, one might make the same argument about people who proclaim themselves to be authorities on a subject, even though they’ve only read one or two unsubstantiated newspaper articles, or watched a 5-minute “sound-bit” news report on the evening TV news. But the possibilities are much broader with the Internet, because anyone can search for whatever shallow bits of information they want; the only relationship I can see between this phenomenon and Web 2.0 is that these folks now have the opportunity to pontificate about their shallow expertise via blogs. Okay, it’s a valid point; and it’s a variation on a point we’ve all heard about, and which we have to constantly remind our children (and other gullible people) about: the Internet is full of half-baked opinions, wild rumors, and utterly false information — as well as a lot of good stuff.
2. But don’t all of these “shallow experts” have the opportunity to demonstrate “the wisdom of the crowd” via the Internet? The short answer is “yes.” As I discussed in my April 28, 2006 blog posting, when I reviewed James Surowiecki’s book, The Wisdom of Crowds, collective wisdom can be acquired from groups (crowds) of people if four things are true: (1) diversity of opinion; (2) independence of members from one another; (3) decentralization; and (4) a good method for aggregating opinions. And what better mechanism for achieving these criteria than the Internet?
3. Isn’t Second Life an example of Web 2.5? Huh? I’m not sure what this means, other than the possibility that the animation, graphics, and “virtual world” nature of SecondLife makes it more “advanced” than most other Web 2.0 kinds of things. In any case, unable to think of anything else intelligent to say, I mentioned a recent article to the audience about the (real) FBI being called in to investigate gambling in the (virtual) SecondLife community.
4. Is there a danger of getting “sucked into” the Web, because of tempting things like Second Life? Indeed, this question came right after the previous question about Second Life, though for all I know, the gentleman in the audience had been worry about it all evening long. In any case, my response was that I felt the temptation was probably greatest for alienated kids, especially teenagers; and I said that I thought it was something that parents had to watch for (of course, you could say the same thing about video games, television, and a lot of other distractions too). I suggested the people interested in this topic take a look at Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.
5. Toward the beginning of my presentation, I asked how many in the audience worked for companies that would allow their employees to blog about their company, their job, and other work-related topics; only two hands went up. I pointed out that Microsoft has some 3,000 blogs, and that a wide variety of other large, traditional computer companies — including IBM — allow their employees to blog. Immediately, someone at the back of the room raised his hand, and said he was convinced that Microsoft would be even quicker than any other company to fire an employee who said critical or negative things about the company in his blog. “Maybe so,” I replied, “but I would expect Microsoft and any other company to exhibit similar behavior if an employee said critical (or libelous, or grossly untrue) things in a television interview, a magazine article, a newspaper story, or a YouTube video.” Blogging is just one more form of communication, and a company’s attitude toward employee blogging should be consistent with its policies in other areas of communication.
6. What do you think about YouTube’s policy of not allowing people to download videos onto their hard disk, to facilitate local replay? — Well, considering that the service is free, I don’t see how anyone can reasonably complain about whatever constraints YouTube decides to put on its download mechanisms. I assume (but have no evidence to confirm my theory) that YouTube wants you to come back to their site whenever you want to re-play a video, so you’ll be exposed to their ads. At the end of the day, YouTube wants to make money for the service it provides.
7. How do you avoid spam and inaccuracies in the Just Enough Structured Analysis wiki on your site? Short answer: the webmaster scans the wiki summaries of edits and additions, and manually deletes anything that’s obviously spam or grossly unacceptable. It’s not a terribly onerous burden at the moment, and meanwhile the list of regstered users is slowly building — to the point where I think it will become a self-policing community, much like Wikipedia, in another few months. This led to a more general discussion about the issue of trust in Wikipedia articles; it was interesting to see an article about this same topic in today’s New York Times, in an article about the extensive editing and commentary in Wikipedia’s article on the Virginia Tech massacre.
8. I mentioned the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project during my presentation, and it turns out that there were a couple people in the audience currently involved in that project — perhaps because they’re associated with OLPC via the nearby MIT Media Center. In any case, if you’d like to keep up with the current news about this project, here’s a website for you to bookmark.
9. The mind-map you’re using for your presentation is interesting; are there any tools that support collaborative mind-mapping? I’ve heard that new versions of some mind-mapping tools support Internet-based collaboration, but I haven’t had a chance to experiment with any of them. But click here to see an interesting blog posting about a new mind-mapping tool called MindMeister that supposedly does support collaboration.

All in all, it was an interesting evening, with some intriguing insights into the world of Web 2.0. I’ll be doing it again in New Jersey in mid-May, and then Albuquerque, NM in mid-June. Stay tuned…