Web 2.0, Free Markets and Free Culture

Martin in mediatope offers a cumulative Web 2.0 definition, which he says is Mainly based on the proto-definition work of richard mcmanus' read/write web, still the most important resource for Web 2.0".

At ONLamp, Andy Oram says, The Commons Doesn't Have a Business Plan. He explains,

Once somebody can figure out how to turn a social trend into a moneymaking operation, he or she can raise capital, get a product on the shelves, and collect revenue. A business plan certainly isn't child's play, but at least there's a process in place.

The short answer to that is, The Commons doesn't need a business plan, because it's not a business. It's a place. More importantly, it's the free marketplace where business and culture both happen.

But that's not as obvious at it ought to be. And it won't be, unless we get some clarity about the very different ways we understand and speak about the Net, the Web, and everything that happens on both, especially commerce and culture. Until then too many of us will be talking past each other.

So, since Web 2.0 is a hot concept, let's lock our new understanding to that meme. For that, I propose a goal: Make Web 2.0 the best possible commons for supporting free markets and free culture.

Here's a stab at it.

As I explained in a series of talks (Les Blogs, reboot7, Personal Democracy Forum and Syndicate, to name just four), we understand and speak about the Web in terms of four different metaphors. Those metaphors describe four very different Webs:

1. When we say we "move" something called "content" through a "medium", addressing or "feeding" or "enclosing" it for "delivery" to "consumers" or "end users", we are saying the Web is a shipping system.
2. When we "architect," "design," "construct" and "build" things called "sites" with "addresses" and "locations" (sometimes in a "commons") that get "visits" from "traffic," we're saying the Web is real estate.
3. When we "write" and "author" things called "pages" of "hypertext" that we "post" or "publish" so others can "browse" them, we're saying the Web is a library of journals. Since we tend to group publishing with speech, the Web we talk about here is a place for expression.
4. When we say we "perform," and we want our "audience" to have an "experience," we are saying the Web is a theater, or a place where entertainment takes place.

Of course these Webs overlap. When we "deliver" an "experience", for example, we combine 1 and 4. When we describe the Web as an "information highway," we combine 1 and 2. Same with "home pages." When we speak or 'cast over the Web, we combine 3 and 4.

All these are Web 1.0 concepts. Remember, Tim Berners-Lee conceived the Web primarily as a publishing system, but built it on a shipping system. TCP/IP was fundamentally about transport, and the moving of packets. The Net is still a vast matrix of flowing packets.

Early in the history of the commercial Web we got the idea that it is a marketplace, and a "space," or a collection of "spaces" (as a synonym for category) we were working with the locational framing of #2.

When we started talking about markets (and other things) as "conversations," we were also working with #2.

Even transportational notions like telephony were more locational than transportional. We go on the Web like we go on the phone. We don't say "Lets go through the phone today." The phone is framed as a place. We talk in places. Even when they're virtual. Distance becomes zero.

In fact, this is how Craig Burton described the Net a long time ago: as a hollow sphere, a three-dimensional zero, comprised entirely of ends: an end-to-end architecture. Or, as David Weinberger and I later described it, a World of Ends.

It is in the interests of Hollywood and the copyright-extention absolutists (of the Sonny Bono school) to frame the Net as a shipping system, and to discredit its end-to-end, peer-to-peer nature. That's why labeling file sharing as "piracy" was such a brilliant move. Pirates attack shipping.

Hollywood doesn't have much of a problem with the locational notion of the Net as a place, as long as it's understood as a place where the Great Distribution Systems, and the First Source Entertianment Empires hold the privileged positions to which they became accustomed before the Net showed up and relocated their businesses to a virtual world they didn't understand.

The two keys are free markets and free speech. These are concepts about which conservatives and progressives agree. They are also essential to the peristence of the Net we love and understand as a place that's built to support both.

That's why I say here that the metaphors we need to unite are 2 and 3: place and publishing.

If we make clear that Web 2.0 is about free markets AND free culture, we'll win a lot more arguments about both.