We finally have something to be excited about during these dark days of the current economy. Back in the dark ages of the internet, when most people still had to "dial in" while listening to some strange device making weird sounds in order to go on the net, there were services that allowed people with absolutely no knowledge on web design to create and host webpages. One of those services was GeoCities.
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Member since:2006-01-16
Yes.
That's the whole deal with Web 2.0.
1. Create cheap web site
2. Build up a community
3. get some impressive numbers like usage stats, member amount, etc.
4. ????
5. PROFIT == get yourself sold for fantasy prizes while you can
And like the 2.0 says -- it's actually history repeating. Second internet hype after new market crash. But this times its not the stock market, but the big players who buy.
Edited 2009-04-24 15:48 UTC
Member since:2005-07-07
No huge spike in NASDAQ this time though. :-)
http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=max...
Member since:2006-04-22
$3.6bn!? You can only laugh at how grossly overvalued Geocities was. $3.6bn for a bunch of worthless page from people with no particular web development skill. And when the fickle crowds move on to the next thing, where's that value then? I see MySpace, Facebook even being just as laughable in 10 years time, when we've all moved onto the next more cooler, better thing.
I could not agree more, this has been my sentiments exactly. People just catch on to what ever the latest fad is. Now ALL we here is twitter this and twitter that. Personally I find blogging, even the name, just completely idiotic. It has come to a point where every moron has a soapbox, yet not everyone really has anything important or interesting to say. Worse is the attention give these bloggers as if they are "journalists". Well, most journalists are professionals, who have ethical codes (well not all), who most importantly rely on sources. For bloggers it's "huh, who needs sources".
I know things have gone down hill when my newspaper now devotes a whole page in the editorial section to the bloggers. Uggh.
Member since:2007-12-08
I know things have gone down hill when my newspaper now devotes a whole page in the editorial section to the bloggers. Uggh.
Eh, science news is what I really care about. And at the moment even so-so science bloggers are better than the top science reporters at the major papers.
Member since:2006-06-02
Think on the history of printing and journalism - we call high-falutin' newspapers broadsheets, and these evolved from the ballad-filled broadsides that appeared in late mediaeval and early modern times.
Broadsides were soapboxes, and more akin then to what blogging is now than they are to what they gave birth oo- so called 'expert' journalists, who, as anyone will tell you who has ever had a brush with them, distort even the plainest and most mundane facts (and this has happened to me).
Take the case of Minerva in South Korea now - the blog which has made uncannily accurate predictions of that country's economy, so much so that the authorities wanted to shut it down: the same spirit that informs Facebook et al informs that type of free and direct expression to the populace.
Or would you rather we were still ignorant, depending on a priestly caste communicating their 'higher' thoughts in a dead language, as was the case before Gutenberg published his vernacular Bible? You are blogging yourself in a way here, and I expect that you have therefore a reasonably high opinion of yourself and your views - why deny the right to publish to others? After all, they are just as fallible, or infallible, as you.
Member since:
2005-11-10
I preferred the BBC News article, it has a quote from ZDNet editor Rupert Goodwins.
"It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet, but after the initial exuberance on what the web could do, it turned out to be more complicated than just giving them free hosting.
I don't see any fundamental change here in web 2.0. How is Twitter going to fund itself? How are any of these services going to float, if nothing is certain anymore.
$3.6bn!? You can only laugh at how grossly overvalued Geocities was. $3.6bn for a bunch of worthless page from people with no particular web development skill. And when the fickle crowds move on to the next thing, where's that value then? I see MySpace, Facebook even being just as laughable in 10 years time, when we've all moved onto the next more cooler, better thing.