{"id":246,"date":"2006-11-09T14:35:05","date_gmt":"2006-11-09T21:35:05","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2006-11-09T14:35:05","modified_gmt":"2006-11-09T14:35:05","slug":"web2point2_let_s_get_to_the_gimmick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/2006\/web2point2_let_s_get_to_the_gimmick\/","title":{"rendered":"Web2point2.  Let&#8217;s Get to the Gimmick."},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"juiz-outdated-message jodpm-top\">Heads up, this content is 19 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.<\/div><p>I&#8217;m chilling out in the Blogger Lounge at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.web2point2.org\/\">Web2point2<\/a> rogue <i>un<\/i>conference at the Microsoft center in downtown San Francisco&#8230; wishing you were here.  And here&#8217;s your cue to demand an explanation:  <i>What&#8217;s this about Web 2.2?  When did we move up from Web 2.0?  Did we ever even figure out what Web 2.0 <i>means<\/i>?  Is anything actually happening on the web or are we just drowning in new-tool pastel ajax overload?  <\/i>The answer is here.  Look to the man with the jeans, t-shirt, and fancy suit coat ringing the tibetan meditation bells to signal the end of a five minute conversation you&#8217;re having with a complete stranger about what you&#8217;re most passionate about in life.  It&#8217;s a gimmick.Look to the super-cute t-shirt they gave me, that looks like a Windows error message with an old-school time bomb on it.  It reads: <b>Web 2.0 has crashed, please upgrade to Web 2.2.  Click OK to continue.<\/b>Dude.  Gimmick.  Look to the registration price: $32.95, which is in total mockery of the big fancy <a href=\"http:\/\/www.web2con.com\/\">O&#8217;Reilly Web 2.0 Conference<\/a> going on simultaneously in this very city for the low, low price of $3,200.It&#8217;s all a gimmick.  Look to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.emilychang.com\/go\/ehub\/alpha\/\">all the new tools<\/a> based on business models that have existed for hundreds of years, but are now dressed up in a drag-and-drop interfaces and use <font face=\"trebuchet ms\" size=\"3\">Trebuchet MS font<\/font>.Let&#8217;s face it.  The whole internet is just a gimmick.  But I love every pixel of it.  So why haven&#8217;t I been blogging much lately, you might ask?  Truth be told, I&#8217;ve been existing in the so-called <i>real world<\/i> these days.  I&#8217;ve taken a break from obsessive monitor-staring and am paying new attention to things like&#8230; eating&#8230; and sleeping&#8230; and (dun dun DUN!) moving my body.  To top it off, I&#8217;ve been engaging in social situations where I can actually <i>see and touch<\/i> the individual I&#8217;m communicating with.  I tell you, it&#8217;s amazing, the opportunities that exist when you turn off your computer.  I feel like an toddler discovering she has knees.  And that&#8217;s exactly why I&#8217;m here, at the Web 2.2 Gimmick Extravaganza.  Their motto is: <b>The Point is (still) the People.<\/b>  I think we, in the tech industry, are chronically guilty of forgetting that <b>the internet exists for people<\/b>.  Not vice versa.  We often think that if we build a cool tool, people will come <i>for it<\/i>.  And then we&#8217;re disappointed when they don&#8217;t.  That&#8217;s what this conference is about: remembering why we&#8217;re here.And if it takes a handful of elaborate gimmicks to remind us that we exist outside of bandwidth, so be it.  Gimmick on.  The internet is a gimmick.  People are not.  Remember: <b>You have knees.<\/b>TAGGED!  <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/tag\/web22\" rel=\"tag\">web22<\/a>(p.s. Cheers to Chris Heuer and Kristie Wells for pulling this incredible mishmash of tech geek collaboration off without a hitch!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Heads up, this content is 19 years old. Please keep its age in mind while reading.I&#8217;m chilling out in the Blogger Lounge at the Web2point2 rogue unconference at the Microsoft center in downtown San Francisco&#8230; wishing you were here. And here&#8217;s your cue to demand an explanation: What&#8217;s this about Web 2.2? When did we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahdopp.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}