The Complete Online Marketer

Depending who you talk to, Web 2.0 is either a blessing, a curse, or a figment of your imagination.

I feel obliged somehow to contribute to that observation by paying homage to the voices that have forged such a misunderstood "movement." For what it's worth, I can't help wonder who will have the most influence in defining this current drift - the fathers, or the legacy...?

Enjoy the brain dump.

"I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means." - Tim Berners-Lee ('Father of the Web'), Web 2.0 = a piece of jargon

"Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral ... It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad." - Nicholas Carr, Rough Type

"There is still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom." - Tim O'Reilly

"'Web 2.0' is all the thing at the moment. Silly, silly name if you ask me. And no, I'm not going to explain it because I don't really know myself. I think Web 2.0 represents a change, that's all. Not only a change in the way the internet works, and is driven, and interacted with, but a change in the industry itself." - Mark Boulton, Web 2.0 Journal

"We have: SOA 2.0, enterprise 2.0, grid 2.0, VoIP 2.0, voice 2.0, BPM 2.0, Office 2.0 and - outside of pure technology - advertising 2.0 and marketing 2.0 (both - naturally - taking advantage of Web 2.0's social networking technologies), business development 2.0 and - subverting the genre - hindsight 2.0 and lunch 2.0." - Gavin Clarke, Berners-Lee calls for Web 2.0 calm

"...It was going to save the world from stupidity. But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. Not only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into." - Kevin Kelly on Ted Nelson 10 years ago

"The lack of a crisp definition is a feature, not a bug." - Chris Anderson (Editor-In-Chief, Wired Magazine), The Long Tail

"The phenomena of the empty buzzword called Web 2.0 ... owes its existence to software and development methodologies already established in open source." - Free Software Foundation chief legal counsel Eben Moglen

"Now, for better or worse, anyone at all is a publisher, editor, evaluator, deleter, pundit, cynic, sharer, prophet, detractor, tattle-tale, ignorer, lier, pathetic, apathetic - all of which anyone has done in their own personal or local sphere for as long as there was Knowledge 1.0. Now that sphere of knowledge interaction has no surface tension or bounds, it is only an inclusive shape." - Dana Gardner, Scrap Web 2.0, yes, but embrace Knowledge 2.0 surely

"It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes." - Lev Grossman, Time's Person of the Year:You

"There are two common problems with Web 2.0...The first is the desire to characterize Web 2.0 as unique technology with unique consequences for business. The other problem if you peak behind the Web 2.0 blog and wiki curtain, is that you'll find the man pulling the levers is either an enterprise vendor or an analyst eager to sell to business customers." - Gavin Clarke, Berners-Lee calls for Web 2.0 calm

"I just wanted to say how much I've come to dislike this Web 2.0 faux-meme. It's not only vacuous marketing hype ... the whole thing still feels like a shaky early beta to me ... a lot of us are already on 3.0." - Tim Bray, Not 2.0?

"The Web 2.0 meme has become so widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it means. The question is particularly difficult because many of those buzzword-addicted startups are definitely not Web 2.0, while some of the applications we identified as Web 2.0, like Napster and BitTorrent, are not even properly web applications!" - Tim O'Reilly

"Memes are almost always "marketing hype" -- bumper stickers is a better way to say it." - Tim Bray, Not 2.0?

For all the critics out there, I leave you with Tim Berners-Lee's reply when asked about his hopes for the Internet and for the Web, and their anticipated place in our lives in the coming decades:

"In general, I hope that we as humanity can learn to use this information space to understand each other, that we can form ourselves into groups in lots of interesting ways so that between us that sort of just tangled web of human groups spans the world and makes that so that it's not ... you aren't too many clicks across the social Web from any one person to any other one person, so that start really pulling together in the world and solving the huge challenges which we've got without being distracted by fighting each other.

"So I suppose scientific progress and world peace -- and the things that we've all got in the back of our minds -- have always got to drive us. And I think anybody, in fact, who does Web development, when you ask them about what they're doing for a few minutes, they'll end up back at those fundamental human desires."

Chew on that for a minute or 2.0...

And then, think about the effect that social marketing is having on your online business (or not). Apart from having an opinion that is little more than soapbox fodder, I suspect you'll appreciate the need for making yourself aware of self-promotion techniques that fall under the guise of Web 2.0. There are few resources out there that effectively paint an accurate no-holds-barred picture of how you should be fulfilling your marketing mandate so when an opportunity comes along to educate yourself in a responsible manner, you should at least think about it.

The Social Marketing Playbook is thee most economical and informative resource that I know of, short of joining a membership site or mentor club. A $27 investment that's worth a look.