Ed Moltzen

The Chart

October 26, 2005

Nicholas Carr has caused a mini web-storm over his essay that tries to take down the sometimes strained predictions of greatness for Web 2.0 – the emerging framework of technologies that has improved Internet-based communication and web services.

Carr attacks the new openness, accessibility, efficiency and community-mindedness of the new era of web technologies. He attempts to undercut the social and commercial power of web services, blogging and collaboration tools now available. To make his point, he takes his shots at the quality of the community-written Wikipedia, the at-times sloppy, but open, web-based encyclopedia as a case in point:

Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time.

You can feel free to believe that “free trumps quality all the time” -- if you’re reading this on a PC that’s running FreeBSD instead of Microsoft Windows. But let’s also take a look at the numbers, to see if they back Carr up:

Despite declining sales of its bound editions, Encyclopedia Britannica is still a $225 million-a-year business (according to Hoover's ) which now has more opportunities to sell and deliver its content and intellectual property than it has ever had, thanks to web technologies.

While the encyclopedia publishing industry has shrunken dramatically on a revenue basis from the early 1990s (Britannica used to be a $650 million-a-year company, after all), they aren’t bound by past limitations of getting their product to market.

(How many of you reading this come from a family where the encyclopedia was purchased in one volume a week, each week, during a local supermarket promotion?)

With the web in its current form, there is plenty of room for both Wikipedia and Britannica. But the Britannicas will have to be a lot more savvy and imaginative if they want to keep making money. They have started. Britannica sells its bound edition online. But it also sells three tiers of subscription service to its online edition. It also sells dictionaries, Great Books of the Western World, software, videos and DVDs online.

Now, imagine if Britannica began using RSS feeds to distribute some of its content, provided a blog or blogs to discuss its products and material, and gave its readers and subscribers a place to comment. Imagine if Britannica – with all the quality that Carr misses in Wikipedia – embraced Web 2.0 and gave its subscribers the community and two-way communication Wikipedia provides. Would quality and community trump the merely free?

At least some companies are trying to find out.

Charlene Li, the Forrester Research principal analyst -- in a video presentation called "Social Computing -- Bubble or Big Deal?" spells out a number of cases of businesses embracing Web 2.0 technologies to develop communities in addition to selling things. General Motors’ vice chairman, Bob Lutz, has begun developing something of a community on his own company blog. Whirlpool, through blogging and podcasts, has also engaged customers and potential customers in a variety of ways.

And even a company as big as Hewlett-Packard is responding to customer complaints which are left in the comments on executive blogs.

Said Li:

It’s not about technology…It’s about the relationships you build on top of the technology.

And those relationships can either be friendly, or they can be the David-and-Goliath kind, as "Instapundit" Glenn Reynolds describes in his forthcoming book. But they are definitely there.

Carr concludes with this:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

There’s another option: Look not at what it will be, but what it actually is right at this moment.

It's always a good rule of thumb to ignore the hype. But in this case, you might want to ignore the naysaying as well.