Lately I have been questioning the value of Web 2.0 applications and sites and along those lines I have to question some of the services that many people are offering. For example, the idea of someone blogging for your company site and isn’t an employee seems ridiculous to me. We all know the value in blogging and most of that comes from the knowledge of what you are talking about. But then again, everyone who has a blog is an expert at something right?
And if they are, would you be willing to pay anyone with a blog a specific amount of money for services rendered? What’s the ratio of people who talk about design vs. the people you would actually pay to design a site for you? Or say you were really looking for a Web 2.0 consultant (they have to exist somewhere right?), how many Web 2.0 blogs exist vs. how many of those people would you be willing to pay to help you out with your application?
Many professionals have started blog networks or whatever they are calling them today, but how many of them would you trust to run a true media company? Now maybe that’s an insult to say that these companies aren’t true media companies already, but that’s how it came out in my mind so it must be right because I am an expert at these things since I run a media company myself.
As much as I love the independent web I have to wonder at the job it has done of pushing out the true professionals and experts that I used to read. Is it still possible to really become an expert at anything when you already have 100 people writing on the same topic? Remember when Zeldman, Shea and Bowman were the shit? Now how often do you hear about them? I have no doubt they are happy doing what they do, but where are those professionals now?
Maybe we have become so spread out all over the place that there isn’t a need for experts anymore. With 100 articles daily on design one of them has to be of expert status right? We laugh at newspaper journalists for complaining about how damaging blogs are to their industry, but now I kind of understand where they are coming from. Blogging has made things a bit too easy, similar to how Cliffs’ Notes ruined great literature and analytical thinking.
As great as the web is today, there are some qualities of the past that I miss. I don’t like forgetting how great it is to sit down with a great book and reflecting on it when I am done. I’ve replaced that with browsing the titles in my RSS reader to see if anything is good out there. I don’t like that I’m not sure if the person I am currently reading is really an expert in his field and whether or not his opinion is valid. That isn’t to say that all opinions by bloggers aren’t important, but everyone seems to think that their opinion is always valid.
1,000 monkeys with a 1,000 typewriters was always supposed to be a joke I thought.
Originally posted on September 7, 2006 @ 2:08 pm