Real quick post today. I apologize for not going too far in depth. There is lots going on and I am a blogger. That means a person, not just a PR factory that doesn't have to have editorial integrity because it's a blog. Any editorial integrity I lack is because of opinionated personal bias. Not a paycheck I just got from Nike. That brings me to my first reason:

1. The Blogosphere And Commercial Publishing Merged

Take a good look at my site. I don't have a single ad on it. "How Old Fashioned" you might say. Editorial integrity is hard to balance with paid content. Would you like Android, watch Warehouse 13 or believe there is such a thing as a HelioSphere if I was paid by Google, the SyFy Channel or NASA? Probably not. But what is now referred to as "the blogosphere" is completely different from the Blogosphere of even 2005. PaidContent.com has an article in which Richard Jalichandra (former TribalFusion Ad Network Whiz turned CEO of Technorati) makes a tragic distinction between "Hobbyist" and "Professional" bloggers. Turning the knife in the gut of the citizen press that once looked to Technorati to measure it's authority and now only measures potential effective CPM
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-technorati-raises-2-million-more-unve...

2. The Open APIs Are Gone
Flickr, Youtube, Google, Facebook all require developers to conform with their competitive strategies. Turning the app developer of Web 2.0 into the weapons manufacturer of the a web @war

3. At The Web2.0 Summit They Tried To Call It Web Squared

You can't type it and #websquared is too long to tweet and is so un-hip it makes me wonder which PR firm got the contract to dream that one up, I just checked and it was TechWeb.com, a division of United Business Media (http://www.unitedbusinessmedia.com/ ).

http://www.web2summit.com/web2009/

4. The Commons Are Now Commodity.

Sites that were once buzzing with new and interesting people and content are now measured by metrics like "content items generated per day" and "announcements per second". The business of the web is focused on creating content because content creates traffic and traffic creates ad clicks which people buy with money.

The end of cooperation and the descent into volumes of terrible content with no authority metrics all bowing to Googles search algorithms to earn a nickel for existing is a million f*#king miles from the phenomenon that Evan Williams and a few brave and un-paid writers created with love when the internet bubble of the 90's burst in the summer of 2000.

Now the inheritors of the reigns have set the internet again down the road of zero-sum war. Lets stick to brass tacks now. I cal this era the Web@WAR or the @WAR because that's how history will see this time. The first time in human history that 4 Virtual Nation States made up of billions of people staged a war for influence over consumer behavior and ownership of their recorded life stories.

Every day, whether you like it or not, you spend most of your time in the @WAR. Watch it all in realtime here: http://thetechnologist.tv/webatwar/