Paul Kedrosky published a fascinating post today entitled Supernova and the Centrality of Paris Hilton. He noted that in twelve startup presentations at Supernova, wikis and ajax were mentioned not at all, facebook and the iphone once each, mobile, Google and Web 2.0 twice each, and Paris Hilton five times.
Sure, I have diddly use for Ms Hilton and the 24×7 coverage of her brief jail visit, but there is a deeper import here. A bunch of blogs that I don’t read, like TMZ, are newly winning the traffic wars. What such sites generally have in common is that they don’t even have passing acquaintance with technology, geek-ish stuff, and early adopters. Instead, they are oriented toward the sort of inane pablum that fills supermarket glossies, 7pm TV shows, and such. They are, in other words, all about celebrities, gossip, and entertainment.
And that is, in a word, awesome. Why? Because it is unassailable evidence of the arrival of the web as mass, popular media. When sites like TMZ rocketed past TechCrunch, et al., a year ago, it was splended and unremarked proof of why the advertising allocation to the web was low and lagging further every day. The hordes had come, and the money would soon follow.
The web as mass media remains underestimated. I couldn’t have been happier to hear Paris’s name over and over again today — and I liked my fellow panelists’ discomfiture almost as much.
(Note: Paul’s fellow panelists included Mike Arrington, hence the discomfiture. Go to Paul’s article (link above) for a compete.com graph showing TMZ vs. Techcrunch.)
People always ask me “what is web 3.0?” Maybe the right question is “What is Web 2.5?” I’ve always said that Web 1.0=Web 2.0, and that it was Web 1.5 that was a detour into the dot com insanity and the web as television. But maybe Web 2.5 will bring that consumer-focused era back again. Maybe the net will proceed via a sine wave of serious innovation and popular acceptance and inane media excess.
I do agree with Paul that the arrival of pop culture on the web means that there’s huge growth ahead for the online advertising medium. But I also believe that to the extent that people think that’s where the action is, they’ll be missing the profound technological discontinuity that lies ahead along the line of “harnessing collective intelligence,” which is the heart of the possibilities implicit in the internet. We are building the global brain. It will have its entertainments and diversions, but that brain will also get smarter, and start to think new thoughts as we connect more people and more devices (sensors and actuators) to it. Technological innovation won’t go away as attention turns away to consumer topics again. Expect it to continue, and to burst out again with shattering effect every few years.