Written & directed by Artemas Gruzdeff

Carrier Advice

Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Some chap called William Davies wrote an article for The Register called The Cold, Cold Heart of Web 2.0 in which (I’m quoting Nicholas Carr here) “he argues that it's a mistake to assume that the technology-driven efficiencies we welcome in the commercial realm, as a means of reducing costs and, often, expanding choices, will also bring benefits when applied to the social or cultural realm”. It is, in the words of Mr. Carr, an “important essay” and indeed it scored high on my profundity-o-meter. Please, refer to the original article and Mr. Carr’s excellent commentary.

I, however, want to talk about some other point which Mr. Davies’s article demonstrates rather aptly.

When you go to the article, you’ll notice two rectangular objects seemingly unrelated to everything else on the page: one, near the top, the other, on the right. It’s called automated contextual advertising and it’s what makes the web tick these days.

Publishers like advertising because advertising makes money for publishers.

The problem is, in order for this automated advertising to work you need something called ‘content’.

Creating this ‘content’ stuff isn’t easy. You could certainly reuse someone else’s ‘content’ (the result would be called a ‘splog’), but that is widely considered bad manners. A respected journalism outlet, that is The Register, certainly wouldn’t enjoy to be called a ‘splog’.

So, it would greatly help if you could somehow make so-called ‘original content’ appear at will.

If you are an engineer or a scientist you probably find it hard to just sit down and pull some ‘content’ out of vacuum.

That’s why in order to succeed in modern society you should major in Philosophy and not in Quantum Physics.

I bet Mr. Davies did.

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Hello, friend! My name is Artemas Gruzdeff.

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Famous People about Web 2.0

You cannot make a man by standing a sheep on its hind-legs. But by standing a whole flock of sheep in that position you can make a crowd of men. If man were not a gregarious animal, the world might have achieved, by this time, some real progress towards civilization. Segregate him, and he is no fool. But let him loose among his fellows, and he is lost — he becomes a unit in unreason.

— Max Beerbohm

The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.

— Voltaire

I assure you, I’m not high.

— George W. Bush

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