Nick Carr on the growing communist tones in Web 2.0. He’s not the only person to have seen it. You can see it in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail book as well. Web 2.0 shouldn’t be about ideology in terms of being a purist pursuit, it should only be about freedom of choice and anything that empowers the user. Whether or not YouTube allows downloads of clips or not is totally irrelevant: at the end of the day they empower the user, the consumer, the individual who wants to upload their own videos, and for me that makes them a Web 2.0 company. The flip side of the debate however is a dire one, because if the Web 2.0 purists win it will actually result in driving people, and for that matter companies and capital away from Web 2.0 in the same way the red flag waving in the Open Source community scares corporations away from embracing everything from Firefox through to the various distributions of Linux. Web 2.0 should be about inclusiveness, and in deed in practice it is a broad church. Let’s hope that some of those ideologically driven types dont win the day.
I see red
