Web 2.0 Cracks Start to Show

WIRED MAGAZINE By Xeni Jardin Oct. 27, 2005

Spam, scams and scatterbrains — the same problems that plagued the old internet are cropping up again in a new wave of technologies known collectively as Web 2.0.

But this time around, proponents say Web 2.0 has been better engineered to withstand the troubles that wrecked Usenet, BBSes and free e-mail.

The cycle is so predictable, it’s almost a natural law: Every new internet movement popular enough to generate buzz also generates a backlash.

This time, the debate revolves around the cracks that are starting to appear in Web 2.0, a term coined by O’Reilly Media Vice President Dale Dougherty to describe a post-dot-com generation of sites and services that use the web as a platform — things like Flickr, BitTorrent, tagging and RSS syndication.

While there’s no strict agreement on exactly what Web 2.0 is, much of it involves public participation and contributions from the commons.

Web 2.0 is very open, but all that openness has its downside: When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer.

These days, peed-in beer is everywhere. Blogs begat splogs — junk diaries filled with keyword-rich text to lure traffic for ad revenue.

Google’s PageRank is unfairly skewed by profit-driven search engine optimizers. And experiments in participatory media attract goatses as quickly as they do legitimate entries, like the Los Angeles Times’ experimental wiki, which was pulled after it was defaced.

Earlier tech innovations — Usenet, BBSes, free e-mail systems, even the open-source software movement — have long faced similar challenges. And many have buckled under the pressure.

Some of the harshest Web 2.0 criticism has been directed at Wikipedia, the celebrated online encyclopedia that invites anyone and everyone to become an editor. Though often good, Wikipedia is of uneven quality and has its share of bogus entries.

“A lot of participatory media is mediocre,” blogger and journalist Nicholas Carr told Wired News.

In a widely read online essay, “The Amorality of Web 2.0,” Carr slammed overeager Web 2.0 proponents as hyper-hyped.

Citing two particularly error-ridden entries on Bill Gates and Jane Fonda, Carr described Wikipedia’s contents as “unreliable,” “slipshod” and sometimes “appalling.”

“The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional,” wrote Carr. “We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity.”

Speaking to Wired News, Carr lamented the long, slow decline of professionally produced media, like good old-fashioned newspapers.

“Online, free media is one of the contributing factors to the shrinking circulation of good newspapers,” he said. “Now, traditional media is shifting away from large investments in bureaus and hard reporting, and towards cheaper content and opinion-making. It’s hard for me to imagine participatory media devoting investments to hard, investigative or overseas reporting. The healthiest scenario would be one in which both kinds of media thrive.”

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales acknowledged the online encyclopedia faces challenges, but argued there are several fixes in the works that should address quality and reliability.

“Our average quality is high, but it’s uneven,” he admitted. “We know there are areas where we don’t do the job we should, and others where Encyclopedia Britannica can’t touch us.”

Wales said Wikipedia is planning a system through which completed articles would be tagged as having been reviewed by a group of editors, just as open-source software projects are reviewed and “stamped” as stable.

“I realize our processes are counterintuitive to people who aren’t involved,” he said. “But in the future, someone’s going to look at an article on Britannica and say, ‘Wait — this was written by one person and only three people reviewed it? Whoah! How can I possibly trust that? I demand rigorous community review.’”

Tech publisher Tim O’Reilly, whose media empire was built on the forces of community creativity, said Web 2.0 might be suffering from growing pains, but its philosophy is sound.

“Wikipedia may have its problems, but the output of traditional media can be pretty crappy too,” he said. “Fox News managed to persuade much of America that we found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, didn’t they?”

The problems of Web 2.0 may have more to do with human nature, and less with the qualities of bottom-up, online media. After all, the postal system has junk mail, the phone system has 419 scams and telemarketers, and stock markets constantly attract cons.

Not all Web 2.0 endeavors are wracked with problems. Take the online photo-sharing service Flickr, which, despite its open nature and robust membership growth, has so far remained relatively parasite-resistant.

Co-founder Stewart Butterfield said the key with his system is to ensure that it remains easier to fix glitches than it is to create them.

“With e-mail, spam is much easier to generate than it is to mitigate,” Butterfield said. “You can describe Flickr as open, but it’s closed in the sense that to contribute photos, you must create an account in the system, and activity is authenticated.”

On Flickr, misbehavers still abound, but the system can easily be righted. Recently, an outbreak of “get a free Apple iPod!” spam images (“spimages”?) made its way onto the network.

“It took us one second to get rid of hundreds of them,” Butterfield said. “A lot less time than it took the spammers to generate and insert them.”

Of course, Butterfield acknowledged that mischief-makers likely will come up with new ways to game the system for profit or evil snickers.

“People try to game Flickr all the time, because the same qualities that make the system good — for instance, how easy it is to add metadata — can become vulnerabilities,” Butterfield said. “But we’re aware, and prepared.”