Cohere

When the supr.c.ilio.us blog became active, I delighted in it. Here was biting humor for an industry that sometimes...often takes itself too seriously to the point of doing some ridiculous things. On the other hand, the sting of the dot.com bust is still with many of us. So some snark is undue pessimism and software politics such as the posts on Dave Winer.

But humor and critical sites like Geek Entertainment Television and 37 Signals' Signal to Noise blog serve an important purpose of

• Deflating overzealous Web 2.0 descriptions and predictions
• Chiding the industry to make their language accessible to the uniniated

The big challenge is not only to create compelling and useful technology. But to make it comprehensible to those outside the biz. That's what Steve Jobs excels at in helping develop and promoting products like the iPod. And that is what Web 2.0 evangelists need to do when describing the net developments.

The other aspect is people's sight tends to be linear and short. They either see great happenings in the last few years or very little has changed. Whereas technology tends to be exponential in it's impact, but has a long period of algorithmic increase until it "explodes". Ray Kurzweil shows data on this in his book, "The Singularity is Near". In "The S-Curve of a technology as Expressed in Its Life Cycle" section of Chapter 2, Kurzweil identifies the technology life cycles as:

1. During the precursor stage, the prerequisites of a technology exist, and dreamers may contemplate these elements coming together...
2. The next stage, one highly celebrated in our culture, is invention, a very brief stage, similar in some respects to the process of birth after an extended period of labor...
3. The next stage is development, during which the invention is protected and supported by doting guardians (who may include the original inventor)...
4. The fourth stage is maturity. Although continuing to evolve, the technology now has a life of its own and has become an established part of the community...
5. Here an upstart threatens to eclipse the older technology. Its enthusiasts prematurely predict victory...
6. This is a short-lived victory for the aging technology. Shortly thereafter, another new technology typically does succeed in rendering the original technology to the stage of obsolescence...
7. In this stage, which may comprise 5 to 10 percent of a technology's life cycle, it finally yields to antiquity (as did the horse and buggy, the harpsichord, the vinyl record, and the manual typewriter.)

Kurzweil goes on to explain these life cycles for the phonograph, compact disc, piano, book, etc.

My view is that net technology is in the third stage of self-protection. That prior dot.com period was the invention of net technology with irrational exuberance. The current place is a self-protective development of the technology on the way to maturity and widespread use.