IttyBiz has an insightful-yet-still-just-commonsense view of what’s happening with Social Media.  The insightful aspect is that someone’s actually got the clarity to recognize the shift right now, and the commonsense aspect is “of course, what did we expect?”

I don’t have much to say explicitly about that article, but it’s made me think a bit about the current state of web technology and ‘Social Media’.  Social Media (note the caps) is getting a lot of play these day, and seemed to be everyone’s ‘secret’ for a while.  I still get people sending me emails saying ‘please digg my article so I can get on the front page’.  Perhaps they’re doing it for their own content, or for the content of a client.  However, the days when you could just ask a few people to digg something and have it go to the front page are, for the most part, long gone.  People will try to tell you they can do it for you, for a fee.  Sounds remarkably like SEO snake-oil from the late 90s, no?  MAN! THAT WAS 10 YEARS AGO!  We’re going through the same stuff as 10 years ago, but with rounded corners, trackbacks, RSS, digging, shared bookmarks and other ‘web 2.0′ technologies.

There’ll be something else which will be the next wave of innovation and everyone’ll game that system for awhile, then it’ll hit mainstream, won’t work anymore, and we’ll reinvent the cycle all over again and again. 

Note, I’m not overtly negative about this, it seems almost a natural evolution of the state of things, likely mostly due to the influx of ‘new’ generations of people on the web.  Many ‘web 2.0′ entrepreneurs of today were probably not even in grade school when I was first doing websites back in 1996, and they’re now bringing a new perspective on society, cultures and technology which will bring up new spins on old problems.  And ultimately that’s good, but it does feel a bit like dejavu sometimes. 

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