Blog #4: metadata meet web 2something

Weinberger's basically been a big Web 2.0 Propagandist to this point as far as I'm concerned. He's constantly making references to the big-name web-based companies that have been associated with "web 2.0" principles since the buzz-word was first used. Flickr, Delicious, eBay, Google, Amazon, Apple, Wikipedia, he's referencing them with every step he makes, and these are the big online entities that have been tagged (no pun intended) as "Web 2.0" proprietors. His profession that data isn't limited, its duplicity and the relevance to tagging is also talked about, and with the same reverence, in O'Reilly's article. Points that both O'Reilly and Weinberger both discuss include but are not limited to:

• The complexity of the web and its structure
• How large corporations are revolutionize the way we've done things in the past
• The changing politics of knowledge- how its users are gaining importance and experts are losing ground
• How every individual is responsible for adding value

In several cases the examples they use are the same: iTunes changing the structure of music, Wikipedia's users making it more valuable than traditional encylopedias, companies using users to make more profit, and Amazon's recommendations exposing new ways to buy things.

Where they differ should also be noted. O'Reilly was discussing the web in relation to itself as they very title suggests. It's not just the web, it's Web 2.0, or its Web squared.. O'Reilly's point was that the Web is improving and changing business and the social world. Weinberger isn't just discussing the web; he's discussing far more epistemological implications about organization, our worldview, and categorization. Weinberger's book is far more comprehensively approaching our society and how it organizes things. He looks not only at the Web and how its getting better or revolutionizing business, but how it is different from the physical world and the way we have organized things before the web existed. This is not a primary consideration of O'Reilly's, who focused mostly on the development of the Web and the development of it for fiscal purposes.