Friday, October 19, 2007

The powerful and obnoxious odor of mendacity.


With apologies to Tennessee Williams and Alfred Lord Tennyson, The Charge of the Bullshit Brigade is galloping fast in our direction and in its van is a banner with these words emblazoned on it: Web 3.0. Oh, Heavens to freakin' Mergatroid.

Web 3.0, aka "the semantic web," is supposed to do more than understand how pages are linked together. Supposedly it will allow us to better understand what people are doing while online. That's fine. I hope it works. And more power to the developers who are challenging the status quo.

But what I am dreading, and I know it's coming, is the horde of no-idea-men who will trumpet the technology and proclaim said technology a creative solution. Yes, dear client, all your problems will be solved if you just adopt (and allow us to charge you millions for) a user-interface that employs the best of web 3.0. I can hear the affected British accents now lecturing to those still wallowing in the muck of web 2.0.

You know what? Communication is communication. And 99 out of a 100 ads or marketing messages don't even get the basics of "please" and "thank you" down right. Trumpeting web 3.0 as a panacea is akin to saying the secret behind a good movie is the lensing of the camera.

2 comments:

Tore Claesson said...

Talking about lenses. One of the big photographers lectured at an arts college.
"What lens do you use", asked one of the students.
"My eye", said the photographer.

george tannenbaum said...

that is beautiful. the difference between fake and real. between knock-off and original.