9 Things that Web 2.0.09 Has Taught Me

(17:32:33 CST)

9 Things that Web 2.0.09 Has Taught Me

I'm sure that Web 2.0 has taught me a lot more than 9 things this past year, but here are my 9 favorites:

1. What makes you cool in society is creating the new thing. Using old things is bad. Very, very bad. The duration something is allowed to exist is inversely proportional to the square of its length and directly proportional to the square of its annoyance. See also: "This", "Really?", and "Your mom". No, seriously, short and annoying? I'm talking about your mom, dude. As a consequence of this, by the way, you should be disgusted by anything over two weeks old, unless you are using it ironically. If it is over two months old, you can use nostalgically. That's a borderline "use it to be hip" moment. Use your judgement
2. The word meme has stopped having any meaning. Other words that have stopped having any meaning: "obsolete", "irony", and "self-respect".
3. Far too many people on Twitter write slightly worse grammar than your average SPAM bot. Maybe it really was just a concerned woman trying to show me her large, virginal breasts so that my penis could get larger and I misunderstood because she misspelled "vergen", "brest", "cokc", and "go0d tiem". By the way, have you noticed that pretty much the whole of the Internet probably needs to be followed by [sic]?
4. All philosophical debate about intellectual property theft boils down to straw-men argument about some imaginary "price point", a red herring argument based in-name-only on the rights of consumers, and a firm "But I want to!" In other news, I torrented this awesome collection of out of print Doctor Who novels last night. Because I wanted to. See how easy it is to admit that? This is a notch better than political debate, which boils down to using fictional versions of Hitler, The Nazis, and the Founding Fathers to win everything.
5. We still do not understand Wikipedia. Dude. DUDE. Anyone can edit it. Unlike the rest of the Internet, which is written by, you know, anyone. We live in a world where people trust About.com over Wikipedia. We live in a dark, dark world.
6. All of these self-congratulatory Web 2.0ians have never, ever heard of UseNet. You see, users now contribute information to the Internet, instead of, um...whoever used to do that...who WAS it? Was it the government? Anyway...oh, and geeks used to run the Internet, now it is us, the little people! Except...you know...
7. Despite giving over tons of personal information to them, allowing all forms of personal discourse to pass through them, and pretty much requiring certain websites to function as a human; your average person has no clue how they work or why. Turns out the geeks still run the Internet. Just now they know your birthday and the lies you've told about your love life. Also, while I am ragging on this fictional but seemingly existent average person, your average person can be lulled into giving you anything if you just tell them that it will be "encrypted".
8. Too many people get far too brand loyal over products they had nothing to do with except paying too much money for or spending too much time on. I payed $260 dollars for a Kindle, sir, so you can take your nook and shove it. By the way, Droid does and you can step off my Digsby interface. It's just like we are trying to justify being consumer whores or something.
9. The best places to talk about how destructive Web2.0 is and how silly it is? Blogs, Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, etc. You will triple your traffic if you write yet another post about the difference between "You're" and "your". As a bonus, if you can be insulting to specific subgroups, it is sure to get passed around and make you successful, which is the only reason people write self-flagellating posts like this to begin with, I think.

Si Vales, Valeo

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