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When blogs die

Some recent comings and goings in the world of marketing [...]

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Big Orange Slide

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

When blogs die

Digital
February 26, 2010 by Ian Mackenzie

Illustration by Brian Ross

Some recent comings and goings in the world of marketing blogs:

15 ideas
After more than 400 posts, Proximity Chicago Creative Lead Kevin Lynch says he’s shutting down his 15 ideas blog. That’s bad news for the blogosphere – especially since he’s blaming it on something he said at Big Orange Slide. Goodbye Kevin’s funny blog. Sorry about that.

Applied Arts Wire
The Applied Arts Wire blog has unveiled a sleek new look to put it in line with the recently relaunched AppliedArtsMag.com. The tag is “Your window into the Canadian creative community.” Recent action includes campaign profiles (ZAK’s eating disorder campaign), portfolios (Mike Grandmaison), industry surveys and a big community-building push on Twitter.

The Ad Contrarian
Bob Hoffman posted twice this week about the latest Edelman report – the one that says consumers don’t trust their friends anymore. In so doing, he offers faint praise to Patricia McDonald of BBH Labs: “Unlike most social media proponents, [McDonald] at least can think straight and write a coherent sentence. She doesn’t write in clichés and jargon and she’s not in denial about the facts, like most agencies will be. (You can bet agencies won’t be showing the Edelman report to their clients any time soon. Too much money to be made in social media.)” Oh, snap! Except he’s wrong. We shared the report with our clients right here this past Monday.

Church of the customer blog
“There’s a lot marketers can learn from artist and musician Lady Gaga,” says Jackie Hubb. Among them: “Give fans a name . . . Make it about something bigger than you . . . Develop shared symbols . . . Make your customers feel like rock stars.” Good call.

iSearch – Part 3

Digital
February 23, 2010 by Matt Rogers

iPhoneApps_ctv_charmin_bell

iPhone apps created for brands: What’s out there? What’s working? What’s not? And who’s thinking differently? Just some of the questions I’ll be asking, and hopefully answering, in an ongoing series for this here blog.

$1.99 is a rip-off!

I was initially going to be reviewing the CTV Olympic app, but as I started reading its reviews, I became intrigued by something else: the incredible animosity towards it.

The CTV Olympic app promises to be “everything you will need on the Games from Canada’s official broadcaster”, and when you first open it, that seems an accurate description. The extensive navigation menu has News, Live Blog, Photos, Medal Count, among other things.

But as soon as you start going through the app—looking for who won the China vs. Denmark women’s curling match, let’s say—you come up against a screen telling you to upgrade to the premium service for $1.99. And this upgrade notification comes up repeatedly. Want to check out one of their blogs or get real time results? Sorry Bub, gotta upgrade.

The upgrade is making a lot of people angry. Of the app’s 1,170 ratings, a resounding 692 are the lowly one star.

Based on the comments, most of the animosity is the result of what some describe as the bait-and-switch tactic of listing the app as free but then tacking on a two buck upgrade when people want to access any content of substance.

I do think it’s ridiculous for CTV to charge $1.99 for content that’s also available for free on their own website (among hundreds of other sites covering the games), but what I find more fascinating is the larger issue of the value of things in the app economy.

$1.99. Not a lot of money, really. It’s a coffee, a couple of songs, an hour of parking. How many times a day do you drop two dollars? But within the world of branded apps, $1.99 better buy you a kidney—or else. The culture of free has become so entrenched in the App Store that you become painfully reluctant to cough up a lousy two bucks for anything.

Certainly, people are paying for some apps, but of all the top paid apps on iTunes, most are games and the only branded app on the list is for Martha Stewart recipes. (It’s $0.99.)

The belief that branded apps should be free seems to follow this logic: Branded apps are created by big rich corporations, so why nickel-and-dime me on price. And even if a branded app is helpful or entertaining, it’s still a form of marketing. You should be paying me, dood!

It’s hard to argue with that logic. Yes, Charmin’s Sit or Squat gives you the incredible utility of consumer reviews of public toilets, but it’s still just an excuse to hock toilet paper.

For CTV, the promotion of their status as official broadcaster and providing thousands of people with a handy little Olympic app wasn’t enough. And the public have responded. Not surprisingly, the Vancouver 2010 Guide—run by Bell—has much better reviews. But it may just be because of its price…free.

Too young for Twitter?

Digital
February 2, 2010 by Dave Hamilton

Illustration by Brian Ross

Admittedly, I’m not sure what my marketing angle is on this post. Perhaps, as a new father, I’m simply wrestling the privacy concerns this little idea might raise versus the obvious charm (and by “charm” I mean “marketability”) of receiving tweets from the fruit of one’s loins.

The Twoddler is a prototype device, developed by a team at Hasselt University in Belgium. Essentially, it interfaces a Fisher Price toy to a Twitter account, such that when the toddler performs different actions, the account is updated.

Here’s how the team describes it:

“The software captures sensor data from the activity centre and tries to select a predefined text that is related to that sensor data. We are extending the system so it becomes easier to relate certain patterns of sensor readings with a set of strings.

“For example: when Yorin plays with mommy’s picture for over three minutes, a Twitter message will be posted saying, ‘@mommy_yorin Yorin misses mommy and looks forward to playing with her this evening.’ Or when Yorin is hitting the doorbell button four times in a row, a Twitter message will be posted saying, ‘Yorin is showing off his music skills with a new tune.’ We hope to even support dynamic composition of new strings in the future.”

See this diabolical/charming little project in action.

The case against testing commercials

Digital
January 25, 2010 by Ian Mackenzie

Illustration by Brian Ross

We’ve added some awesome blogs to the Big Orange Slide’s blog roll. Here’s what and why:

15 ideas
Ignore the “About” page writeup. Kevin Lynch’s 15 ideas blog has nothing to do with “rock drills, jackhammers, and rock drilling accessories.” It’s actually a miscellany of pithy insights on advertising and visual communication. For example, “. . . if there’s one thing we in marketing are good at, it’s patting ourselves on the back and handing each other trophies.” And, “one of the things I love most about traveling is, you can wear the same clothes you did the day before without anyone knowing.” This is also your gateway to Lynch’s @fifteenideas Twitter feed, where you’ll get up-to-the-second news of his year-long quest to find the missing glove.

Makin’ Ads
This one’s “For students of advertising, portfolio school hopefuls, and anyone else putting their book together. Please remember: Everything written here may be wrong.” Modesty aside, there’s lots to love about this blog and its regular updates by U.S.-based copywriter Jim Bosiljevac and Geneva-based writer Greg Christensen. The recent Not Closing the Loop post, for example, offers a persuasive case against testing commercials.

bannerblog
“Where banners click.” A constantly updated collection of some of the world’s best online ads. The archives have hundreds of banners going back to 2005, many of them with the requisite “thinking outside the big box.” Of the banners shown recently, I like Barnardos for its innovative use of video.

Ads of the World blog
Ads of the World is an online archive and community that showcases campaigns from around the world. Recent highlights on their blog include 21 suggestions for a successful advertising career: “#17 Be decisive even if it means you’ll sometimes be wrong. Timing is everything in advertising.” And The next generation of truly transparent ads: “What would it be like if with every ad you saw online, you knew exactly how and why it found its way to your screen?”

The digital “why?”

Digital
January 14, 2010 by Jacoub Bondre

Illustration by Colin Craig

I went to a portfolio viewing recently to scout for potential creative interns. All of them featured integrated or 360 campaigns in their work. As I went through the portfolios, one by one, the students would explain the thinking behind what they did. One after another, they showed good thought on their print pieces, out of home, and broadcast storyboards. But when it came to their online offerings it was an entirely different story. The work seemed flat, as if a train of thought started down the tracks and then ran out of steam.

One campaign featured windows opened in unusual places with unusual things on the other side of them. For example, you would see an open window on an industrial building, but inside was green grass, and bright skies. When we turned to the online (banners), it was simply the print work pasted into a thin dimension. When I asked the student what the online was about, they replied, “I don’t know, it seemed to fit with the campaign.”

The integrated mistake
The above-mentioned students can’t really be blamed for the drop off when it came to the digital portions of their work. They’re suffering from a common mistake/misconception, which is that a good integrated campaign consists of messaging that is consistent across multiple media. To give an analogy, the belief is that if you take all the pieces of a integrated campaign, stitch them together and lay them flat, you could run your fingers across them and not feel the seams.

In broadcast and print, the consumer value attached to the advertisements is external. They get a TV show or a magazine article served up alongside their ad. In the interactive realm, the audience consumes the advertisement because it, in itself, offers them value. This has obvious implications for integrated campaigns. Agencies will often devote significant time trying to make sure there is a consistent message across all media. Although this is an important part of creating an effective campaign, it simply isn’t enough to make all aspects of the campaign effective. You also have to make sure that each medium in the campaign has value. So how do you make sure your interactive initiatives have value in the eyes of your audience?

The answer is “Why?”
“Why?” is a question we ask all the time in the advertising world. We use it to help us define problems and devise creative solutions. In the more mature media – such as print, out of home and broadcast – the biggest “why” is answered for us: “Why is our audience viewing/reading this?” With broadcast and print the answer has to do with subsidy. It’s an exchange of the audience’s time for subsidizing something they value.

Why does someone watch a commercial? Because without the commercials, the TV shows we love would be too expensive to produce. Without commercials, there would be no House, or Grey’s Anatomy. And although you might get up to get a snack during commercials, odds are you will sit through several during the viewing of your favourite show.

Same goes in the world of print. Our own Dave Hamilton explains, “I love The New Yorker, but if there were no ads in it, it would be way too expensive to buy.”

Advertising subsidizes the salaries of the writers, and offsets the price of production. Readers of the magazine will at least see the ads in the magazine. In the digital space (web, mobile and such) the answer is not as obvious.

Why in action
A few weeks ago someone sent me the Elf Yourself link. I spent a good 20 minutes using the application. I found images of my family. I cropped them out. I uploaded them. I chose a theme. And then I spent several minutes waiting for the application to process it all. Out popped a video of my wife, kids, and myself singing and dancing as elves. I then spent another 5-10 minutes sharing the video, giving it further exposure.

The question is “Why?” Why did I invest 30 minutes of my time (specifically half of my lunch) using an advertisement for Office Max?

The answer is that I interacted with the ad because it, in itself, provided me with value. In this case I knew my boys (ages 2 and 4) would love to see themselves dancing and singing as Santa’s Elves. I also knew that some of my immediate friends would find seeing my wife and I dancing as elves entertaining.

This is the digital “Why?”

There is no formula for creative value in interactive advertising. It simply requires a lot of thought and imagination, combined with putting yourself in your audience’s shoes. You need to imagine yourself as a member of your audience, and ask, “Why would I do this? Why would I participate? Why navigate? Why read?”

If you can come up with great answers for all of these questions, you’re well on your way to coming up with an effective piece of digital advertising.

The death of Flash?

Digital
December 17, 2009 by Jacoub Bondre

Illustration by Heung Lee

Last August Advertising Age published an article by Garrick Schmitt on the demise of Flash and rise of HTML5. Schmitt is the VP of Experience Planning for Razorfish. In his piece, he made a number of points as to why Flash will die. A lot of them were misleading or ill-informed. Also, though HTML5 has a lot of new capabilities, capabilities alone does not ensure success of a new technology.

Schmitt starts his article by defining the word, “loading.”

“Regardless of how fast our internet connections get, it still seems that we’re perpetually waiting for our digital media – websites, videos, pictures, music – to load. It’s a twisted feedback loop: faster broadband begets bigger and bigger file sizes. All of which makes accessing that Flash-heavy product microsite a perpetual exercise in patience.”

The myth that flash is heavy, and causes long load times is one I have been battling with fact and frustration for years. The fact is that an image is an image, whether it is embedded in Flash or in a web page.

The culture of loaders is a result of two things: the first is style. Creatives, and most rich media developers believe that pre-loading (loading assets upfront in a larger chunk, rather than on the fly) lends a better user experience. The idea being that the user volunteers 15-30 seconds of their time looking at a pretty loading graphic, and in exchange they get access to the experience and information without interruption.

But pre-loading is a design choice, not a limitation of Flash. Flash has the capability of loading in its assets piecemeal just like an HTML page does. And if you were to add up the total load size and time of all the assets of a Flash application, and that of an HTML application, their sizes and load times would be nearly identical (save a KB here and there). This is illustrated nicely in Schmitt’s own article where he posts some of the experiments done with HTML 5. If you follow this link you will see something interesting at the beginning.

Look, it says “loading.” But it’s HTML. I thought HTML eliminates loading?

Another thing that prophets of Flash’s demise fail to consider is the community of developers (the people that make the websites). HTML developers have had access to tools through AJAX, DHTML, CSS, and Javascript for some time now. They could use these tools to create experience-driven sites. Sites that are more about form than function.

As processor speeds increase, the limitations of Javascript as an effective language to deliver visual experiences have all but dried up. So what has been the result?

HTML-based sites still tend to be information-centric (function over form); and Flash-based sites experience-centric. The reason for this is community. HTML developers are not in the habit of thinking in terms of pure experience over content. Flash developers are not in the habit of thinking in terms of content over experience. In fact, the opposite it true. Propose a content adjustment that will affect the experience of a site to a Flash developer or designer and watch the sparks fly.

In order for HTML5 to spell the death of Flash, proponents of HTML5 will either need to change the culture of current HTML developers, or convert Flash developers to HTML5. Neither of which is likely to happen overnight.

Finally, comparing HTML5 to Flash in its present state is like Microsoft comparing Windows 7 to the last version of Apple’s OS X. Thanks for catching up, but we are already on to the next thing. By the time HTML5 is available on a large enough audience of browsers to make it feasible for professional use, Flash will no longer be Flash as we know it. It will have evolved further, along with the community.

For example, at the time of publishing of Schmitt’s article, he rightly pointed out, “Today’s Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android OS are now supporting HTML 5, not Flash.”

Since then Adobe has announced that by early 2010 you will be able to publish Flash applications as iPhone applications, and submit them to the app store. There are already thousands of Flash developers ready and able to create mobile applications starting Q1 or Q2, 2010. The number of HTML5-ready app devs is far fewer.

Who knows what Flash will look like, or what a Flash developer will look like two to three years from now when HTML5 is ready. But I can guarantee it will be very different from what they are today.

For me, the net-net is that Flash is currently the best option to create rich media and Internet applications. It is going to take more than just a comparable technology to dethrone it. It will take serious missteps by Adobe combined with a mass exodus of the community. And I don’t see that happening for quite some time.

Digital versus Traditional: The Great Agency Debate

Digital
December 9, 2009 by Dave Hamilton

Illustration by Haley Fiege

Who will lead? This is the crux of an industry-wide debate that’s getting a lot of opinion, speculation and debate right now.  The burning and potentially lucrative question being: “Who sits at the head of the table when the client calls for input on the brand plan or at a brainstorm on where to spend in the fourth quarter?”

Two recent articles in AdAge shed light on each side of the debate:

Why digital agencies aren’t ready to lead.

Why digital agencies are indeed ready to lead.

The former takes the position that digitally led shops are not ready to lead, because they “lack the balance of Exploration and Exploitation.” In other words, they perform well at the cutting edge, but fall short on consistent and predictable ROI.

The latter responds that digital is indeed ready to take pole position because its practitioners understand technology, analytics and the demand for speed as it relates to iteration of ideas as the brand/consumer dialogue unfolds in real time.

Both make great arguments. Both incited a healthy burst of reaction, as evidenced by the wealth of comments each of them received.

My two cents on the subject?

I think it’s fair to say that digital (the channel, not the shops) has found its way to the centre of the connection map – it is the new and improved CRM. And shops that respect and understand this will earn their place “at the table” – be they traditional, digital, or even design- or promotions-led.

Core competency will no longer determine where we sit at that table, the demands of a category’s specific customer/client interaction will. Beverage companies will likely want more influence from agencies closer to campuses and nightclubs (the feet on the street as Grip’s Managing Partner, Business, Bob Shanks likes to call them), while sneaker companies, for example, will inevitably turn to partners more intimate with emerging and future trends in fashion.

What clients are really going to be evaluating with respect to who is on their agency partner roster is whether you are FAST or DEEP. The former will be built to create and react to many marketing threats, in real time, 24/7. The latter (and likely smaller) of the two, will serve as brand steward, mining perspective and insight from the plethora of data and insight uncovered by the former, with the goal of helping figure out where a brand can and should invest itself long term, via sponsorships, packaging and line extensions, even R&D.

Frankly, neither will lead. That burden and/or honour will reside (as it historically has) with the CMO of a newly evolved marketing department that will in time reveal itself to be more nimble, less dogmatic, and presumably better funded.

As Anne Busquet, former EVP of American Express stated so eloquently in Sergio Zyman’s book The End of Advertising as We Know It, ” It’s not the age of the internet, it’s the age of customer control.”

Augmented Reality. No longer lame?

Digital
December 8, 2009 by Matt Rogers

Illustration by Colin Craig

Esquire Magazine’s December issue is the latest to jump on the augmented reality (AR) bandwagon. But what distinguishes it from most other brands using AR is that there’s actually some interesting content to check out.

Most of the time, it seems, AR is treated like a novelty, and rarely give users anything of real value. Strategy Magazine, for example, used AR on the cover of its November issue to reveal who they picked for Agency of the Year, despite the fact that if you just flipped to page 16 you could see that it wasn’t Grip Limited. (Sour grapes? Editor.)

Now that the novelty of AR has worn off, I find it pretty silly to be awkwardly tilting a sheet of paper in front of my webcam just to see a spaceship or bigfoot. The barrier to participation is high (go to the site, print out the image, turn on your webcam, hold the paper up to your computer), so the content better be worthwhile.

Back to Esquire. If you buy the issue (and then go to their site and download some software), you get a bunch of exclusive content. You get some Robert Downey Jr., you get a fashion spread and you get their “Funny Jokes From A Beautiful Woman” feature.

Now, this is hardly a horn o’ plenty of awesome content (and it all could’ve been easily dumped onto their site), but it signifies a notable, mainstream progression in using AR to deliver something of value to people. And Esquire is not alone.

Burger King recently promoted their Value menu with an in-banner AR feature. You hold up a dollar bill, and all the items on the BK menu that are a buck appear. Using AR in an online ad is pretty darn clever, I have to say.

The Unites States Postal Service have a virtual box simulator that uses AR to show you which size box you’ll need for your shipment. Handy.

But one of the most clever uses of AR I’ve seen from a brand comes from online clothing retailer Tobi.com. I’m not much of a women’s clothing shopper but even I found this interesting. It’s called Fashionista and it acts like a virtual fitting room.

How it works: You go to their site, you pick some clothes, you virtually try ‘em on. A slinky black number, let’s say, is superimposed on screen. You stand in front of it and can see what you look like in it. Don’t like it, pick another. Love it? Snap a pic of yourself “in it” and post it on Facebook to get your friends’ opinions (and to show them how nerdy you are).

Genuine benefit. Clever social media extension. No cheesy novelty. It’s AR done right.

Blog watching

Digital
November 27, 2009 by Ian Mackenzie

tele

Been a busy week on the marketing blogs. Some highlights:

• Seth Godin tells us How to lose an argument online. Step one? Have an argument online. “Once you start an argument, not a discussion, you’ve already lost. Think about it, have you ever changed your mind because someone online started yelling at you?” Good point. He goes on to make another seven.

• The anonymous scribe at Copyranter declares that Chinese advertising “just isn’t quite there yet.” Maybe. But the examples he gives seem to prove the opposite. See for yourself.

• The good folks at the Canadian Marketing Blog ask Has green marketing gone mainstream? Yes, apparently it has. And the change is being led by mainstream brands greening up their core products, a more demanding consumer, and the increasing resonance of “eco-friendly brand messages.”

• The Design Blog continues its search for weird and possibly wonderful objects. Among them is a three-wheeled electric vehicle, a zero-privacy tent, and the “most advanced concept vehicle we’ve seen it a while.” It’s a Kia Soul. And it’s got a front windshield with integrated LEDs that display road-relevant animations. Looks distracting to me.

• And finally, Jonanthan Salem Baskin at FutureLab drops the axe on America’s Black Friday shopping spree: “Black Friday is a contrived, customer-hostile, bait-and-switch, potentially deadly symptom of what’s wrong with bricks and mortar retailing.” Get the full vein-popping rant here.

Web X.X

Digital, Essay
November 12, 2009 by Jacoub Bondre

Image by Brian Ross

Or, how the Web was won – and branded.
The other day someone asked me if I thought we had made it to Web 3.0 yet. Good question, but I’m not sure I agree with the terms of the discussion.

Let me explain:

Web “version” is a misnomer.
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, once described the term “Web 2.0” as a “piece of jargon”:

“Nobody really knows what it means . . . If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people-to-people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”
– “Web 2.0” on Wikipedia.

In other words, the web is a continuum. Much like time, space and the universe. It is constantly changing and evolving. New technologies emerge and disappear regularly, and there is no defined timeframe for these occurrences.

Proponents of web versioning explain that Web 2.0 represents a new usage of the web that facilitates interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centred design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. This sentiment has been repeated time and again. I’m not so sure.

Social networking isn’t new . . .
Remember BBSes? Those modem-to-modem Bulletin Board Systems that were popular long before the web was? As the web progressed, BBSes turned into user and news groups, then into forums and blogs, and finally to their current iteration of micro-blogs (Twitter, Facebook).

. . . neither is the technology.
Some argue that the second version of the web is defined by its technologies. Ajax is the primary example. But what is Ajax? (Other than an acronymn for “Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”?) It is a technique in which you use JavaScript and XMLHttpRequest to update data on a page without a page refresh. The technologies used to achieve this have been around long before Web 2.0. Just ask Sun Microsystems. They introduced Java Applets way back in 1995.

The reality is the web is not a piece of software that can be defined by development cycles, but a medium. And as will all media, they change and they mature. This change is gradual and constant, much like the growth and development of a human being.

So if the web’s not new, why are people versioning it?

We wanted to be digital pioneers – again.
There are two reasons the web has been versioned. The first involves ownership.

When the web was first gaining popularity, it was a brave new world. Being a web designer or a developer was exciting and respected. The people involved in the early stages of the web were breaking new ground on a medium that would change society on a global scale. They were pioneers.

As things evolved, the mystique, and adventure began to wane. The divide between the good, and not so good web professionals grew. The digital revolution had similar effects on many related professions. Suddenly being a web designer or graphic designer could mean anything from creating a pamphlet and site for a local church, to working on rock posters, to creating compelling interactive pieces for major brands. The playing field got muddy and mixed up. And so, in the early to mid-2000s you had an industry of web professionals looking to re-capture their glory days.

And we needed something new to sell.
And that brings us to the primary reason the web was versioned. In the early 2000s the dot-com bubble burst. Faith in the miracles of Silicon Valley was at an all-time low, and the economy of start-ups and investments had dried up. Investor confidence was shaken to its foundations. People stopped buying.

Web professionals, and technology evangelists (yes that’s a real job title) could not sell the web. The web was unstable, a poor investment, or at least it was in the eyes of those who held the purse strings. Even if there was a company, service, or product that had legitimate value it was very difficult to get the money necessary to develop it.

One of the victims of the bubble burst were publisher of technology training books. Many of us can remember going into a Walmart, Zellers, or Chapters during this time and seeing bins full of discount computer training books. One of the more prominent companies had an idea. Enter Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media.

In 2004 O’Reilly Media held the “Web 2.0” conference. In one swift, simple, industry-relevant turn of a phrase, O’Reilly filled the needs of both new web professionals looking for meaning in their carries, and gave the venture capitalists in Silicon Valley something new to sell.

Introducing the all-new, completely redesigned Internet!
Web 2.0 was new, yet familiar. Business people were already confortable the idea of software versions, and had seen how new versions of software often improved on the former. Software was a technology and so was the internet. The jump in logic was easy for those with little knowledge of the industry. Combine this new term with the success of newly labeled technologies such as Google Maps, and Youtube, and investors opened their pocket books again.

Along with this new buzz word came new demand. Web professionals with 2.0 skills were in demand again. Professionals with the skill level to leverage these existing technologies in new ways could finally separate themselves from the masses. A second Renaissance, and a new bubble, was created.

Just like the first dot-com bubble, there were legitimate businesses and technologies, and not-so-legitimate ones. For every Facebook there are dozen of also-rans that get money from investors but failed to connect. The difference now is that investors are more cautious, and the failure of one start-up does not generate enough fear and panic to take down all of them.

Was the versioning of the web a bad thing? Likely no. It helped restore a struggling industry and helped all of us in the world of interactive move forward in our careers. It also helped, and will continue to help, break down communication barriers globally. But I’d argue that those benefits are just a by-product of versioning the web. The real intention was to make money, and it worked.

As for Web 3.0 . . .
Are we there yet? No, and we will likely not be until the industry as a whole needs us to be. Many people have tried to use Web 3.0 as a tool to sell new technologies and ideas, but we need to reach industrial consensus before we’ll be ready to move forward with that label. And until there is an event, whether crisis or celebration, that will galvanize the industry again, Web 2.0 will likely stand.

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