Web 2.0: Not just for startups

While there's a lot of focus on the startup frenzy around Web 2.0 (and especially some of the feel good aspects like participation and rich user interfaces), it's important to remember that the deep trend of which Web 2.0 is a manifestation is the move to a more fully networked society. This trend is going to continue, and like all trends, it's going to show up in some unexpected places.

Connecting the dots (OK, clearing the tabs, in the radar tradition set by Nat!), here are three stories that caught my eye recently:

• A fabulous op-ed by Austan Goolsbee in the NY Times recommends a technology update for the IRS. "The Internal Revenue Service filing deadline is almost upon us, forcing us once again to fill out exasperating tax forms. Spurred on by the grumbling, Congress will most likely make noises about introducing tax reforms that never come about.... Rather than rehash the same old debates, though, we would do better to aim at the middle and ask why most Americans have to do their taxes at all. You see, many people do not have a complex tax situation. They don't itemize. They get income only from simple places — like wages from their job and interest from their bank. And here's the kicker: this information is already sent directly to the Internal Revenue Service by taxpayers' employers and banks. Indeed, for many Americans, literally every line they fill out on their tax return is information the I.R.S. already has.... And yet these same people are forced to spend hundreds of millions of hours and several billion dollars each year preparing and filing their taxes. That expense in time and money is as much a part of the tax burden on Americans as the check that goes to the federal government.... With a small adjustment in processing procedures, the revenue service could send you a tax form already filled out with the information it has for you — a Simple Return — rather than a blank tax form. You would simply check the numbers against your W-2 and 1099 and then sign it." Web 2.0 you say? Well yes. If Google were running the IRS, it's what they'd do.

• EWeek has a report on a new tool from Microsoft Research tool used "to help pinpoint large-scale typo-squatters that are known to be gaming pay-per-click domain parking services. The lightweight prototype, called Strider URL Tracer, builds on the work within Microsoft's Cybersecurity and Systems Management group to keep tabs on a sophisticated typos-quatting scheme that uses multilayer URL redirection to make money from Google's AdSense for domains program....The tool uses five programmatic typo-generation models—deliberate missing-dot typos, character omission typos, character permutation typos, character replacement typos and character insertion typos—to pinpoint potential domain-registration structures that are being used to steal traffic from large brands." Bit by bit we see the world of Neuromancer emerging, with cat and mouse games played out in an electronic in-between that didn't even exist a few decades ago.

• The Wall Street Journal reports on a new startup called IMMI: "Integrated Media Measurement Inc. is using specially adapted cellphones to measure what consumers listen to and see. The company has developed software that helps the phones take samples of nearby sounds, which are identified by comparing them against a database. Besides television and radio, IMMI, as the San Mateo, Calif., company calls itself, says the technology can track exposure to CDs, DVDs, videogames, sporting events, audio and video on portable gadgets and movies in theaters." OK, this one is a startup, and it's verging on Web 3.0, the sensor-web, in which the architecture of participation will be an automatic byproduct of the devices we carry around with us.