Oh, What a Tangled Web 2.0 We Weave!

So in case you haven't heard the web is changing...again.
The so called Web 2.0 phenomenon has become mainstream, getting increasing coverage in major news outlets. But really, what is this new wave? Well many have offered their opinions including how lame it is to call it Web 2.0. Surely new technology is at play such as RSS, MP3, P2P, programming languages such as Python and Ruby, and an amalgamation of web programming protocols called AJAX. But none of this stuff is really new, especially in geek time. Others point to how the web is becoming increasingly social, a many to many paradigm shift in how we do the web. Sites like del.icio.us, Flickr, and 43 Things point to an increase in bottom up taxonomies and collective processes. Again, sooo not new. Another interesting trend is mashing up or remixing data from multiple websites for example craigslist + google maps. Podcasting also is a combination of RSS and MP3. While this activity is new, the technology is not so new and hacking the web and remixing in general is not, just ask Grandmaster Flash. How about the emergence of a Do-it/Fab-it-Yourself, Hacker culture propogated by Tim O'Reilly's Make magazine where every cool twenty-something is geting their applied engineering groove on by embedding Atmel chips in their Chuck Taylors? Yeah, okay that's not new at all except for the (at least in theory) accessability of consumer-grade fabrication equipment. The Steves Wozniak and Jobs created Apple computers by sticking Motorola chips on hunk of plywood. Garage inventors are the backbone of innovation in this country. Not since the Russians launched Sputnik and sent us all back to the lab have we seen such an interest in engineering. I'm glad to see engineering is becoming cool again we need more engineers. Okay, how about the whole Creative Commons thing? The fact that we are greasing the way for people to gift intellectual property for the sake of innovation and free access to information and content is nothing short of revolutionary. You guessed it, not new. There are many other "new" things I didn't mention but when you look at them they're really just novel ways at using old and relativley old technologies.

So none of the stuff I've mentioned is really new and a bunch of it actually is quite old. Some of it also extends outside of the online, virtual world. So what's happening? Wha happen? I think what best describes what "it" is is what MIT professor Eric von Hippel calls Democratizing Innovation. In his book of the same name, which true to form is available free online, von Hippel makes the case with manufacturing that (from the MIT Press blurb,) "innovation is rapidly becoming democratized. Users, aided by improvements in computer and communications technology, increasingly can develop their own new products and services. These innovating users -- both individuals and firms -- often freely share their innovations with others, creating user-innovation communities and a rich intellectual commons. In Democratizing Innovation, Eric von Hippel looks closely at this emerging system of user-centered innovation. He explains why and when users find it profitable to develop new products and services for themselves, and why it often pays users to reveal their innovations freely for the use of all."

While Professor von Hippel is talking about this phenomenon within the context of manufacturing, his final chapter hints at how this idea can extend to other spheres, and clearly it already has. The Marxists should not leave the room! These ideas are extensible along the lines of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker. If we can truly democratize innovation, we will see some amazing things happen all over the place (not just the web) and it will be totally grassroots. Power to the people indeed.

(Photo credits: Night Web, originally uploaded by Katemina; Roof, originally updleaoded by taniwha; A spiders web, originally uploaded by see what you want to see)