KEY POINTS:
It was with great anticipation that I settled into a seat at the Paramount Theatre in Wellington this week to listen to a bunch of internet experts debate a very live topic - whether the new wave of websites gathered under the Web 2.0 banner is "all fizz and no substance".
The debate could have gone anywhere and indeed it ranged widely.
"People just aren't that technology savvy," argued Radio New Zealand producer and head of the "fizz" team, Mark Cubey.
"Second Life? It's that versus House on a Tuesday night. Yeah, Second Life just doesn't have the dialogue. We're talking about stuff that is real and you can't tell me Web 2.0 is real," he concluded.
Cubey's opponent, Philip Fierlinger, a former dotcom entrepreneur and now developer at accounting software maker Xero, said the money paid for Web 2.0 ventures such as MySpace and YouTube, spoke for itself - essentially, there was substance where there was money.
"Is US$500 million [$658 million] substantial? Is US$1.5 billion substantial?" he asked.
He has a point, but as the first dotcom boom showed, the big investments on the web haven't always been in big ideas that have substantial staying power.
Austrian database architect Sandy Mamoli cleverly worked away at Web 2.0's biggest weakness - its ability to create online worlds for its users that are detached from reality.
"We don't share our tacky tastes or our boring personalities," she said.
"Web 2.0 creates a huge gap between the online persona and who we really are. Web 2.0 makes it much easier to be fake."
Brenda Leeuwenberg, online producer at NZ On Air, saw it differently.
"Sometimes there are moments of pure joy in what people put out there on the web," she said. They are both, of course, quite right.
Web developer Mike Brown sees the rise of Web 2.0 as a giant conspiracy to advance the cause of the letter "R", which indeed defines a fair number of Web 2.0 website names - Twitter and Flickr being just two on Brown's list. "You might think it's just a case of letter jealousy, but R wants to be an A-lister," said Brown.
And so the arguments bounced backwards and forwards for an hour or so mirroring the global debate about the value of Web 2.0 services and intensifying as web sceptics hone their argument.
The anti-Web 2.0 arguments have perhaps been best articulated by the British web entrepreneur and author Andrew Keen who in his new book The Cult of the Amateur suggests that the proliferation of user-generated content that's central to the Web 2.0 way of doing things is killing culture.
Others are saying similar things. Take US technology commentator John C. Dvorak's dismissive take on the newest of the Web 2.0 players Twitter, a "micro-blogging" service that allows you to post short updates during a day to keep everyone abreast of your activities - no matter how mundane. Dvorak sees no substance in that, other than to provide a record for the sociologists of the future.
"All of these sorts of networks should provide a trove of insights into society - if the entire system is archived and turned over to the sociology departments of some major universities," he wrote recently in a PC Magazine column about Twitter.
"I'm afraid that the people who implement stuff like this never think in these terms."
Dvorak admits he was also dismissive of podcasting and blogging when they were introduced yet he himself has since become a podcaster and a blogger.
Which just goes to show how hard it is to pick where the Web 2.0 movement will lead us.
For the record, the team pushing the argument that there really is substance in Web 2.0 won the Webstock debate by a slim majority. That wasn't surprising given Webstock's audience, which text messaged in votes for the teams and was filled with web developers.
There are 140 web development companies in Wellington alone. The industry has rapidly geared up for the local impact of this new phase of internet development. There's plenty of fizz on the local scene in everything from online retailing to insurance, but there's also a fair bit of money floating around.
One web executive told me a fairly modest local website selling information that is freely available elsewhere on the internet was generating $2 million a year.
I think the debate came out how it should have, despite the "fizzers" presenting a more compelling and humorous argument than those with substance.
Above all the inane chatter on Twitter, the annoying music blaring at you from MySpace pages and the flying penises in Second Life, there's something powerful going on in these new web communities.
Whether they will all live on remains a moot point, but one thing is for sure, the new makeup of the internet is seriously changing our approach to information use and social interaction. Whatever price you put on that, such transformation in a few short years has been nothing but substantial.
* petergnz@gmail.com
On The Web
www.myspace.com
www.secondlife.com
www.twitter.com
www.webstock.org.nz
