http://www.geardigest.com/the_web_ [...] index.html

Like it or not the Web is moving from static text and links to interactive conversations, rich media and online narratives. Mark Sigal is in the middle of the revolution.

I'm afraid to say, I'm not at all impressed with this article. I've been a computer professional for over 10 years and follow technology news and developments daily; I talk to vendors, customers, go to conferences, meet with businesses ranging from small start-ups to large corporations... I am not inexperienced or unaware of the jargon or tech-speak used in this world.

That said, I found this article to be an almost incomprehensible endless string of buzzwords, marketing-speak and catchphrases with very little meaning or content. It sounds more like a strung-together collection of corporate mission statements and jargon from press releases than a reasoned comment on the future of online community interaction.

I expect to hear "empower motivated community users to fashion informational sign posts" and "the community builder is the customer, NOT the consumer" from a low-quality marketing presentation, not from intelligent commentary on a major news site.

Perhaps I need an MBA; perhaps I need to have a degree in marketing; perhaps I just need to spend less time on technology and more time on evangelism... in any case, I should not have this much trouble understanding an article on Tom's Hardware. This subject is interesting, important and worthy of much discussion, but could we have fewer business buzzwords please?

Thanks.

For my comment on this article, please see Ozyman's statement above. I could not have said it better. I would like to add that despite what my 10 year old thinks there is more to the internet than MySpace. I sincerely hope that the author of this article, and the people he refers to are aware of that as they create web 2.0. Whatever that happens to be.

If this is the web of the future, give me a time machine. These new websites are harder to navigate, take more resources, are less efficient then web of the past, and contain less information. I hate the way the web is evolving into flash hell. Maybe if the information was easier to get to, or was easier to navigate, but that is not the case. You have to wait sometimes as long as dial days to get to the meat of the webiste, and once you get there more often then not you are met with either more flash, or a traditional website. I use the internet to get information fast, on as many topics as possible, not to wait 5 minutes for a flash presentation to load and present worthless information shielding a real website. In my opinion website design has to get faster more efficient and easier, not the other way around. Add to this the amount of advertisement you get on websites nowadays and you are just wasting time, instead of getting information from the so called "Information Highway"

it did seem to be a lot of fluff talk. This whole "the users will make your content for you and then buy it from you if you convince them it's a community they belong to" business model is based on fluff really... Evidence that the novelty is already wearing off is all around. Social network sites will soon go the way of the chatrooms that used to be so ubiquitous. Real communities are formed when like minded persons engage in collaboration on a meaningful topic of mutual interest. Sourceforge will probably be around 20 years from now, facebook won't.

And furthermore... when a single portal tries to be everything to everyone not only is that antithetical to what has made the internet so great it makes that portal nothing more than a second-rate search engine with extra advertisements.

Also, the web doesn't need a bazillion things of multi-media crammed on every single page so that people can show how creative and special they are. It nees more *real* content. Content that is available, accurate, meaningful, useful. We don't need to be watching a 6.5minute video to tell us what we could have read in 2 minutes and skimmed through in 20 seconds to realize that it didn't contain any information we cared about.

And this really begs the question of Mark Sigal: if this multi-media convergence stuff is so good and important why did you write an article? Also, on the internet, something *must* have an arbitrary URL or it DOESN'T EXIST. No arbitrary URL no CBS media portal. Period. Be a little more careful with your buzz-word tossing.

As you describe it "Web 2.0" is exactly the same as the flood of "free" services that flooded the internet back before the dotcom burst. A bunch of hype with nothing but speculative advertising money proping it up. If you make a "social networking" engine that is powerful, secure, and easy enough to use that people pay you for it, more power to you. But guess what: livejournal has been doing it for a many years. "2.0" my ***.

That article reminds me when they said 64 bit processors are going to change everything and Microsoft keeps promising that the next version of Windows is going to out do all the previously releases by leaps and bounds!

Being a graphic designer all that hype talk about video and interactive websites is nothing new. Advances in Adobe Flash, (Previously Macromedia Flash) has made this possible along with higher speed internet access to more areas.

There was really nothing in the article that made any sense or told me anything I didn't already know. It read as a pieced together statements in no particular order. And by the way, who is Mark Sigal? I've never heard of him or his company.