Some people are pretty enthusiastic about the idea of Second Life as a next-generation world wide web. I attended one talk at WWW2007 (part of Monday’s WOW Tutorial) that included a large segment on Second Life and its potential as an online marketing medium for business.

I got the impression that the speaker was just a big fan of the game. There is certainly some potential for marketing in the game, however there are also a lot of drawbacks to doing so, such as malicious users or unscrupulous competitors doing anti-social things with their virtual characters in front of your virtual storefront/presentation/sales-pitch/whatever.

A significant difference between the web and second life, that was not pointed out, is that Second Life is a virtual environment that is owned by a single company that controls all aspects of that environment. The web is decentralized and free. That is what makes the web special. If some open-source and distributed model that were similar to Second Life could emerge, then maybe there could be some resemblance.

Until then, however, I think that second life is really a fringe thing for people who really like their second lives, or who don’t much like their first ones.

Professor Bebo White was one of the speakers at the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) tutorial that took place this week at the WWW Conference here in Banff. I found his talk on Web 2.0 very informative, so I thought I’d share my notes from the talk. I’ll add links to official resources to the bottom of this article.

What Web 2.0 Isn’t

Bebo started by telling the audience that if they could define Web 2.0, they knew more than him. I think he was being a bit facetious, because he proceeded to elaborate on a pretty good definition. He started out with a description of what Web 2.0 isn’t:
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Hi Everyone! It took way longer than anticipated to get this blog out the door, and at this point its only barely ready. I’m editing the default ‘Hello World’ post in Wordpress at 16:05, May 9th, 2007, from the WWW conference here in Banff. As you can see, the timestamp on the post is April 29th! It was installed a month ago, but I just had to customize the CSS before making it public.

I’ve been trying to squeeze out some time here and there to work on my new website, but its been tough. I finished a small client project last week, and I’m getting a major project for another client ready for release this month, on top of getting a significant Ruby on Rails project off of the ground. Despite that the site wasn’t ready, I decided to launch it anyways, 404s, worts, and all. I figure that having something out there is better than nothing, and I’ll be more motivated to make time to work on it.

I found a few minutes to work on the site right now, as I’m waiting to meet with Bill Cullifer from the World Organization of Webmasters. I took WOW’s Current Best Practices in Web Development and Design Tutorial on Monday. Speakers Bebo White, David Leip and Brent Norris had some really interesting things to say about Web 2.0 and where things are going on the web.

I just got a text message from Bill saying that ‘he’s here’, so I’ll pick up on this WOW/Web2.0 thread later.