The main risk that I took was to attempt to isolate three key phenomena of Web 2.0:

1. the read/write Web – the first time since before the agrarian age that humans have had about equal opportunity to contribute to the shared corpus, as we do to access it
2. social computing – it’s about conversations, not content and there is a person inside the computer (there’s a credit missing there – who said that?)
3. decentralised computing – small peices, loosely joined

Of course, it isn’t hard to find 20+ year old technologies that meet these criteria. FidoNet and UseNet, for example. The difference, of course is adoption, and hype.

The one I have most fun with is the The Museum of Modern Betas because it keeps changing, blog-style and has such a cool name. Dion Hinchcliffe’s list is a classic (and has logos) and he has now added more. The eConsultant Web 2.0 directory is huge. I’d like to see some Aotearoa (NZ) links pop up on Innovation Map. The listible list (where you can add and rate items) is Web 2.0 itself. And the Web 2.0 Awards illustrate some of the criteria for success. And LOGO2.0 provides a retinally overloading graphical representation.

There is no shortage of lists of Web 2.0 sites. There are even lists of lists.

Now, to see if we can get ourselves added to some of these.

The question that we explored was the relevance of the digital age to the five competencies that have been cooked up by the OECD and are being adopted into the NZ curriculum.

Here are some things that I learned on this weekend…

Not everyone is as optimistic about the online world as I am. To some people, the idea of deep human contact occurring online just doesn’t make sense. To them, the idea of people substituting online relationships for physical ones is appalling. Collaboration in MMORPGs seems like people “ganging up and killing things”.

I got to thinking about the notion of positive feedback received from a computer (say in a single player game) being somehow as nourishing as that received from people. It seems slightly shocking, even to me. What about the self-esteem building that can occur shooting baskets in the yard or hitting a fence-post with a stone? Of course, the inanimate objects are simply mediating social phenomena. Stone-throwing was once (and in many places still is) a highly valued survival skill. Shooting baskets can provide entry to the good team which then gangs up to try to beat the others.

Have you ever noticed how cut-throat sport is? Sure there’s collaboration within each team but there is no second prize at the end of the game. It often horrifies me how even kids’ teams will keep racking up goals when they are obviously mismatched with their opponents. And it horrifies me, the callousness with which players sacrifice pawns and even bishops in the abstraction of war on the chessboard.

To me, the gore of killing monsters in a computer game is actually less shocking than some of those things.

I am not an unqualified optimist, however. I know that psyberspace is a boundaryless and uncertain place. I know that inhumanity can occur here as much as humanity can. One area that particularly concerns me is the shortage of public space on the Web. OK, I can blog here and you can come and go. This is pretty close to public. My photos, however are on flickr and I don’t know that I could get them out. OK, I’ve got copies but not of my tags. My daughter spends lost of time on MSN where she has photos, blog posts and message archives (though I don’t think she can access those). To her it’s all free and just works. What is the price that she pays?

I want to use our software to build public spaces, a commons on the Web. I want it to be as easy to take your content out as it is to put it in. I want people to stay because they want to and not because they are locked in.

OK, there are ideas for some other posts here but this is what I have returned from the Symposium thinking.