#web 0.0

WEB 0.0

Web 0.0 - Biancoshock

On previous posts I discussed the corporation ownership of web services and the way corporate agenda is bad for users of those services (us). I also contemplated the necessity of private ownership of web services and came to the conclusion it is not really necessery for us to use corporations in order to share our thoughts and content.

The million dollar question is - "Is it possible to do it in a different way?" and i would try to answer this question in the following article.

Well... This one is a lot about "What if?"

What if we will dedicate revenu to improve service and content quality? What if we reward moderators for tagging and moderating content? What if we reward content contributors for their content? What if we allow developers to offer new services for a well established community and reward the service developers?

The Web 0.0 model consists of three major principles :

1. Implementation of a cooperative economic model. Everyone who contributes to the community is a partner, and therefore eligible for revenue share adequate to his relative contribution. If you post something that attracts traffic - you should get your realtive contribution share, same goes for content tagging, service development, web design and so on. The most important attribute of Web 0.0 is that all revenu is invested back in the project, there is no owner or shareholders that benefits from doing nothing.

2. Decentralized development and design. Code and design are opened for changes and competition. Users are able to choose from different designs and services for displaying and uploading content (same as Facebook aps or Tumblr themes).

3. Independent, moderate, advertising. Thw Web 0.0 model does not reject the concept of making money out of traffic. However, the money made from ads is designated for the community members benefit. It is used for developing services and improving service quality. There is a specific space appointed for ads, this space is a small square in the upper right or left side of the navigation bar. Ads are a simple text string with a link. No popups, popdowns or other intrusive advertising technics. Ads should not interfier with user experience.

That's about it... Implementation of these three principles would result in a clean, user oriented, self improving web service, with no corporations involved.

Clearly, it is difficult to understand exactly what i'm talking about without seeing any live example of a web 0.0 site... 

And what I do now is exactly this... Building the first ever web cooperative.

If you find this project interesting or important (and also if you don't) i would appreciate your feedback.

On the pervious article we discussed corporate agenda and its affect on the world wide web. To make a long story short - it is fairly easy to recognize that a web service controlled by a corporation would be "profit oriented" rather than "user oriented".

But that is definitely not the end of the story...

I spent a lot of time thinking about it, and the more i thought about it, the more it became clear to me that web services does not really have to be controlled by a corporation.

Unlike the monetary system, or other large scale industries, the corporations behind the biggest web services out there (Facebook, Youtube Etc.) does not exclusively control neither means of production nor essential resources.

The Facebook script (brilliant as it may be) does not contain anything out of the ordinary. I personally know at least 5 highschool students that can code something simular in less then a month... I mentioned Youtube earlier so on the same line of thought - is there really something complicated involved uploading a video to the web or managing content? There are at least 100 open source content management systems that can do the same thing.

My bottom line is that there is not really any financial or technical or legal barrier that is obligating  any of the large web service providors to be a money-making greedy machine.

Private ownership of web services is not a necessity, it is simply an application of the way we are used to do things on the real world, to the way we are doing things on the virtual world.

There is absolutely no reason for us not trying to make things in a different way. The only obstacles are our prejudices and fixations.

I argue that it is possible, advisable and even necessery to form a new model for content sharing and socializing over the web. A model in which the term "profit" is taken out of the equation and surplus is being invested back in the community to create better content and service.

I call this model Web 0.0 because it involves recreation of the web starting over from nothing.

The Internet is rapidly transforming from a network of people to a network of corporations.

I used to think of the world wide web as a global community of people who help each other, but it seems that gradually this concept is being replaced with corporate agenda.

And when I say "corporate agenda" I mean the constant effort to make money out of traffic.

You can argue that there's absolutely nothing wrong with corporations taking over, but it is very easy to spot the greddy footprints everywhere :

- Excessive & annoying ads showing a clear trend of becoming more and more intrusive (Youtube pre-roll ads are a very good example)

- Privacy issues such as widening exposure of member information, data mining, inability to voluntarily terminate accounts, photo recognition and face tagging (to name a few)

- Intellectual property being stolen using legal tricks hiding under the "Terms&Conditions" small letters

But the most dangerous aspect of corporate agenda controlling the web is none of the above, it can't be spotted as easily because it involves what we can't see...

It is the hidden potential being wasted, the seeds of ingenuity and innovation neglected and deserted.

We all know traffic makes money... Advertisors pay for their ads being exposed to traffic. But these huge profits are invested in creating new ways to make money or just transferred into someones's private bank account rather than being invested in creating higher quality service and content.

Can you imagine what would have happened if Facebook had invested 50% of its profits to improve the user interface?

(you can't imagine... and I can't either... because we have been trained to socialize in a way which is comfortable for 3rd party corporation to make profit out of out socialization)

Can you imagine what would have happened if Google had invested 50% of its profits to reward content tagging?

(Hint - it would have turned content search the easiest task on earth, and changed the web upside down)

So ok... money is being wasted... our privacy and intellectual property are being compromised... we're being hassled with annoying ads... so what?

What makes it different from any other aspect of our lives?