Web 2.0 marketing. Some food for thought. And your OPINIONS are highly encouraged...

Take a look at the top 10 websites in the US and tell me if you see any web 2.0 stuff there....

-Yahoo
-Google
-MySpace
-Microsoft
-eBay
-YouTube
-Facebook
-Wikipedia
-Craigslist

They are all places where people can share ideas, discussions, binary files, form communities of like minded individuals...

Hey wait a sec...

Back in the early 90's when there was only roughly 25-30 million people using the Internet (compared to the 600 million today), we didn't have to worry about spammers as much. There were business groups on the USENET where we networked, shared files (binary newsgroups), and forums for discussion on just about any topic you could imagine. That's where I first, virtually met, Paul Myers. He used to be one of the moderators of one of the business discussion forums I subscribed to.

Well, the point is, by the marketers definition of Web 2.0, I think the Usenet would fit the description too. Does that sound about right to you?

Me, I think over the years the Internet has evolved into becoming more interactive simply because now a lot of people can have a voice without being a programmer, and the programming languages have progressed and developed over time. But I'm not ready to slap a new moniker on it just so I can market to people who don't know didley squat about the web and sell them the same old goods and services re-branded as Web 2.0.

Jim Rapoza, eWeek writes:

"When I first looked at these supposedly new and radically updated products and services, none of their improvements struck me as being all that major. And, in the past, when products went through much more radical changes, no one saw a need to rename or reposition whole product categories—for example, back in the 1990s, when classic enterprise systems became Internet- and Web-capable.

But then I realized I was thinking like a technologist and an IT guy and not like a marketing and sales guru. Sure, an IT guy looks at these products and thinks, What's the big deal? You added some common-sense capabilities, and now you act like it's this whole new thing?

But these savvy Enterprise 2.0 companies aren't pitching their products to IT professionals. Smart and capable IT people tend to be a little boring when it comes to enterprise systems. They are more than happy to stick with an older but solid system rather than move to some newer system for fairly minor new capabilities (especially for capabilities that often easily can be added through third-party and free open-source products).

Instead, the Enterprise 2.0 pitch is directed at businesspeople, who often are not very technology-savvy but are increasingly controlling the IT spending at their companies."

You can read the full article here:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2089495,00.asp

If you don't mind me being blunt, "Web 2.0" is the new buzz word, old and tired marketers are re-branding themselves to -- trying to make themselves look like they are on the cutting edge of technology with the same "must have" products and services they peddled the last few years.

Best Regards,
Steve MacLellan