When I was a youngster in public school, they gave us all song flutes. These were cheap plastic flutes that could nonetheless play authentic music. Except few of us mustered the talent to actually play the damn things.

Web 2.0 technologies are much like those song flutes. We're not making very much beautiful music together.

Flouting Web 2.0 is like flouting the song flute of the 1950s.

The superficial relationship with the internet means that Wikipedia - a simulation of an encyclopaedia - is only really harmful when we believe it. So the data mining will pay dividends only when you're selling superficiality - Chuck Norris jokes, for example - and is unlikely to be of much use to anyone else. Marketeers, beware.

AO, from his book review of Nick Carr's Big Switch

AO has thunder stealing capacity to make the reader wish he had written the book he reviews.

Thanks for the vote. This board has really become a focal point for some very astute criticism in the last few weeks. I'm prompted to write because to me it's clear to most impartial observers now that not only is Wikipedia unsustainable as a project, along the utopian lines on which it was founded, but as an emblem of "the information society' it's a few spanners short of a full set. In other words, is Wikipedia the best we can do?

Wikipedia has a billion articles, but only about a couple of dozen are useful to anyone. When Joe Public turns to Wikipedia, seeking anything other than a catalog of Star Trek characters, then it's found to be sorely wanting.

So I'm not so much interested in the bureaucracy of Wikipedia as the consequences of a glut of Wikipedified information. I think this is something Jason Scott picked up on in his talk recently.