Increasingly, we have been encountering new movements directly triggered by Web 2.0 ideas. They range across the spectrum of human endeavor. For example, a few years ago Law Practice Today, a journal of the American Bar Association, ran a detailed story on Web 2.0 and its tie-in with the law.[116] Why do lawyers care about Web 2.0, you ask? As it turns out, Web 2.0 has spawned a relatively full-blown movement: Law 2.0.
Law 2.0 is a conceptual departure from the law business of yesteryear. Like other aspects of Web 2.0, some claim it’s in beta right now. There is already a Law 2.0 application called Wex,[117] (a legal wiki encyclopedia available to everyone). Document management, a common challenge for lawyers, is evolving rapidly into document engineering. Integrating existing technologies such as PDF into document-centric processes has been a key focus of evangelists such as Lori Defurio (Adobe) and Bob Glushko (Berkeley University), who cowrote what we consider the definitive book on the subject.[118]
Law 2.0 is built on the premise that current law practices are insufficient, as they describe problems to be solved and the solutions to those problems. In theory, law should reflect its real-world, multidisciplinary existence and should rely on more than the treatise-reporter-practice law triangle,[119] an established pattern within the law community. Law 2.0 is really about building law practices that recognize the capabilities that technology offers society today.
A primary example of a case where law did not reflect reality pertains to a struggle over copyright of content for the popular cartoon series “Dilbert.” While existing copyright law made it impossible for someone to serve up a website with a Dilbert cartoon from a server that was not authorized by United Feature Syndicate, Inc., a clever user wanting to get around the logistics just had to serve up a web page template that referenced the Dilbert cartoon from United’s server. The existing law was totally unprepared to deal with this in 1999, as technically no physical bytes representing Dilbert cartoons would ever be placed on the user’s server. The owners of the Dilbert franchise have since readily embraced Web 2.0, and at http://www.dilbert.com you’ll find things like mashups, Dilbert widgets, blogs, and various examples of harnessing collective intelligence and other Web 2.0 patterns. Perhaps this is Cartoons 2.0? The movement seems to be spreading; companies like Pixton.com are already building user-generated comic strips into platforms and deploying them to the Web.
Law 2.0 and Cartoons 2.0 are just the beginning. The interrelated, mutually reinforcing concepts in Web 2.0 (such as true disintermediation, customer self-service, and harnessing collective intelligence) are resonating with many other industries, as shown in Figure 8-1. As it turns out, these industries are all in the process of being transformed by technologies that facilitate the relentless collapse of formal central controls, pervasive web usage, rapid technological change, and more. These communities seem to crave a new model for collaboration, relevance, and usefulness. Web 2.0 gives them a beacon to rally around, as well as a useful set of practices that they can use for constructive reinvention.
The following list of Web 2.0–related movements offers a sampling of what other communities are striving for. Although some, such as Library 2.0, are well underway, other movements, such as Media 2.0, are still quite nebulous:
- Identity 2.0
Widely covered by numerous periodicals and even at the Web 2.0 Conference, Identity 2.0 is an intriguing concept most commonly identified with Sxip (http://www.sxip.com) and its CEO, Dick Hardt. Dick gave a keynote presentation at the 2005 O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON)[120] in which he outlined several key advances in identity management that represented disruptive influences on the existing identity industry.
- Library 2.0
Library 2.0 is a very Web 2.0 view of library resources that emphasizes the two-way flow of information between library users and the library itself. Library 2.0 embraces many of the patterns and technologies described in this book (specifically, Participation-Collaboration, Mashup, and SOA) and has many proponents. You can read more about it at http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6365200.html.
- Media 2.0
The Web is revolutionizing the content-delivery models of newspapers, magazines, and other print media (and not only for the better, in some cases). Still, some folks believe in a second coming of media—both old and new—known as Media 2.0. This new media conceptually embraces issues such as democracy, distributed aggregation, identity, and contextualization. We described some of these issues in the preface and in Chapter 1 of this book; however, the body of knowledge far exceeds the scope of this book. A good starting place to learn more is http://media2.0workgroup.org.
- Advertising 2.0
Advertising 2.0 is a Web 2.0 approach to participatory, scalable advertising. Like the Media 2.0 movement, it embraces many of the core concepts of Web 2.0, such as knowing your users and harnessing collective intelligence, along with such specific patterns as RUE and those we discussed in Chapter 1. Even the core models for television are changing from sequential display of advertisements (you watch a show, which is interrupted to display some ads) to a model of concurrent display of advertisements (ads are splashed up on the screen but do not entirely displace the television content).
- Enterprise 2.0
Large enterprises are trying to engage more robustly with their target audiences. Enterprise 2.0 is a recognition that today’s web users demand more and will not be as forgiving as they were a decade ago. Enterprises that are scared by how rapidly young startup companies can upstage incumbent forces (e.g., MySpace.com becoming the most popular web destination within three years of its launch, followed by Facebook’s similar trajectory) are studying the patterns in this book to see how they can adapt, and which patterns they can adopt.
- Government 2.0
Years of pressure on governments to share more information with their citizens and the 2009 arrival of the largely sympathetic Obama administration in the U.S. have fueled efforts to reinvent government. Transparency—“sunshine”—is a key ingredient of most Government 2.0 efforts, but developers are also looking for better ways to gather and present citizen input for government processes.
- Democracy 2.0
A grassroots attempt to repair perceived problems with old-world, representative democracy, Democracy 2.0 is working to ensure that a wide range of individuals can contribute to the creation of our nation’s laws through Web 2.0. Although perhaps idealistic, it is an interesting exercise to try to understand what laws would be made if a truly democratic country were created today.
- Music 2.0
Music 2.0 is more than just a revolution in how we distribute and listen to music; it shakes the existing music industry to its very core. The rise of small, independent providers of audio content from independent artists is a trend that will likely continue. Even the creation of music, which historically has been done in a recording studio with audio tracks laid down one at a time, is being challenged by startups such as Mix2r.com and MixMatchMusic.com, where people can go online and contribute audio tracks to existing works or remix other people’s audio tracks to essentially create new pieces of music. Combined with democratic licenses and community features, this movement is embracing most of the core patterns of Web 2.0 in this book.
What do these offshoots have in common? For starters, they all embrace one or more of the patterns in this book. In all cases, people seem to be questioning the status quo, asking “What can we do differently?” or “Why are we currently doing this [function, task, or activity] the way we are?” The evolution has started a revolution.
In the IT world, the pendulum is swinging rapidly away from centralized IT command and control (the push model of management) and toward a more scalable and effective decentralized model of IT self-service (the pull model). The push model is one in which digital information or functionality is provided by a centralized authority and fed outward. The pull model, by contrast, is a versatile pattern that is closely aligned with web services’ basic request/response model, in which decentralization is a key feature.[121] Thanks to their modular design and decentralized platforms, pull systems connect a far more diverse array of participants.
The offshoots described here are all about the pull model: they all use a form of marketing, termed “viral,” in which participation spreads rapidly based on a model of outsiders wanting to join in. The push model, a relic from broadcasting days, is expensive by comparison and is the least targeted in terms of reach and true connections. Whichever model you choose, it is hard to ignore that it would take millions of dollars to rival the success of something like Twitter or Drupal, and even then your success is not guaranteed. Understanding what makes something a target for viral adoption is a holy grail to many in the IT industry.
Readers might want to ask themselves, “What can happen in my industry?” or even go further and ask why their industries exist today or whether they will exist in the future. Some industries might dwindle if disruptive new models become the norm for society. However, regardless of what industry you’re involved in, some things never go out of style. We will study one of those things in the next section.
[118] Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services, by Robert J. Glushko and Tim McGrath (MIT Press).