Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us – On What the World Wide Web Was Ever Meant to Be?

Tags: Social Computing, Web 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Michael Wesch, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Collaboration, Communities, World Wide Web, Deus

Remember when not too long ago I mentioned how I was actually quite content with having, once and for all, my blogroll updated over here and how I said we are all what we read? Well, I am really glad that I have made that statement, because in the last few days I have been reading from quite a few of the folks that I get to read on a daily basis an incredible video clip of under five minutes that tries to explain, and succeeds big time!, what Web 2.0 or social computing is all about.

Yes, I am talking about the fascinating YouTube video that Michael Wesch, from Kansas State University, shared under the title Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. Goodness! If all along most of us have been struggling all over the place about explaining key concepts related to Web 2.0 or social computing, Michael has just managed to do that in under five minutes. Fan – tas – tic !

I know that plenty of people have been linking to this video from all over the place. And I guess some folks may be starting to get tired of it,  so reading through this again over here may not be the best use of your time, nor mine. However, there is a reason why I wanted to share it over here. Yes, that reason is that you can never link too little to such incredibly helpful resources as Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. That is right. There may be over 55 million weblogs out there, but the number of Internet users is way higher than that, so we all need to keep spreading the message. The faster, the better.

The more Web end-users get exposed to key enlightening resources like Michael’s video on social computing the easier it would be for us all to take things into the next level: empowering knowledge workers to share their knowledge and collaborate with their peers in much more meaningful ways, even if that means we need to rethink "copyright, authorship, identity, ethics, aesthetics, rhetorics, governance, privacy, commerce, family, love …". In short, "ourselves".

And if on top of that you put together as well some really nice tunes to go along with it I guess "there’s nothing impossible", is it? So let’s keep spreading the message:

If the World Wide Web was ever meant to be something, I guess it will not be getting any better than this. That is for sure.