Andrew Orlowski

Collected Journalism

Tag: web 2.0

  • Web 2.0 firms lobby for £100m gravy train

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    If the Web 2.0 hype is running out of steam, a healthy injection of public funds should kick it back into life. New media companies in the UK are lobbying for the establishment of an institution which could spend what critics call a £100m “jackpot” of public money each year.

    The new agency, which Ofcom calls a “Public Service Publisher” or PSP, would play a “gatekeeper” role in commissioning new media concepts. These range from interactive websites to participatory games … Read More

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  • On the Web 2.0 bubble

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    To London, where the web utopianism has a name (“Web 2.0”) and is a rage amongst marketing and media people. I reiterated a point I had raised two years earlier:

    &ldquo”Let’s acknowledge what the Web has been successful at: as a presentation layer. But the Web 2.0 kids desperately want to write system apps on their “global operating system” – only they don’t have the cojones to do system level thinking. Real engineers look at where systems (and humans) fail … Read More

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  • John Doe blogger is ‘Person of the Year’

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Time

    Few publications in the world take themselves as seriously as Time magazine, and Christmas each year finds it at its most unctuous and self-important, as Time chooses its “Person of the Year”. This year, the award for newsmaker of 2006 is given to “You” – the internet user.

    But perhaps not you or me. The kind of internet user lauded by Time doesn’t do what most of us do – window shopping on eBay, adding bon mots to Popbitch or … Read More

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  • Whatever happened to… The Wisdom of Crowds?

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Future social historians looking back at the web cult – which met in San Francisco this week for a $3,000-a-head “summit” – may wonder what made them tick. Scholars could do worse than examine their superstitions. We’ll bet that lurking on the bookshelf of almost every “delegate” was a copy of James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. It’s as ubiquitous as Erik Von Daniken books were in the 1970s.

    In Silicon Valley this year, “collective intelligence” is the mandatory … Read More

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  • The mobile web: 2.0 into one doesn’t go

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    Andrew Orlowski

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    Hoping some Californian magic pixie dust might fall upon the sleepy world of telephony, the Symbian Smartphone Show organisers devoted an afternoon of presentations to the topic of “Social Media”. Would Web 2.0 make it to the phone?

    It had a bit of your Dad at the Disco about it, and even Symbian’s no-nonsense research VP, David Wood, had been caught up in the excitement.

    In his briefing notes, David posited that “in Web 2.0, the network itself has intelligence, … Read More

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  • Management consultants on the march, powered by Junk Science

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    Andrew Orlowski

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