Talk:Web Economy

Hi.. after some discussion among friends i realise the reasons for possible delete. So here i m proposong another take on the article. It needs citations and references which i will go about researching for the next day or so..

Red1 D Oon 15:29, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

The Web Into The 21st Century
Prior to the advent of the Web in the early 1990s, the internet has been around but its applications are comparatively minute such as email and mailing lists, confined to closed social spheres such as universitites, certain governmental agencies and closed e-business networks. Since then the Web has grown tremendously, creating sporadic and viral communities that are immensely global, highly agile that constitutes a new social economy that was previously non-existent. The massive number of eyeballs on selective web-sites allow first the borderless advertising economy to leverage in, at explosive speeds, resulting in a new breed of IPOs such as Netscape and Yahoo! and the eventual buy-over of an ubiquitous email domain - Hotmail.com. In 2006, after the crash, the dotcom age returns with a vengeance, when Google makes IPO history.

Dr. Lester Thurow has described the world economic future as undefinable and yet puts down the internet as nothing more than the telegraph wire with pictures. He pointed out that the Web is not the quantum leap, as it was with the leap from the pony express to the telegraph pole. Looking outside the box, Charles Leadbeater in his wiki-styled WeThink Book, describe the next wave as in the form of Mass Creativity that explains the phenomenal likes of Wikipedia, Open Source, Amateurs with web-cams that threaten world class organisations and shall define basically the future.

E-Commerce Revisited
Before the turn of the last century, with the advent of institutionalised payment systems and commercially supported physical delivery fulfillment, E-commerce began to take shape with domains such as Amazon.com and EBay.com.

The ease of electronic web-access and low cost of adoption by member nations, the world began to develop an addiction for dotcoms, with registrations of URLs happening every few seconds in the late nineties at a feverish rate. The bubble inevitably comes to a head resulting in the great Dot-Com Crash in the early 2000s.

As the dust settled, the famous 3 C's of Content, Community and Commerce that qualifies entry into the succesfull dotcom club, is reexamined, as it draws a parallel from the 1920s Great Depression. In those years, the sudden discovery of the automobile industry likewise kick up such an investment frenzy, that automobiles of mediocre quality began to flood the market, inevitably bringing about a chain reaction of collapse.

Come full circle, the Web Economy suffered the same syndrome of flag planting that lost touch with the community that is spread thin too fast by the explosion of web-pages that didn't do much beyond their name-sakes URLs.

E-Commerce confronted real world issues such as credit card fraud, identity theft, and consumer hi-touch culture that requires physical handling of goods before purchase.

Importance of Community & Tools
However the Web Economy remains with the main C - Community. It has since evolved and a second wave of web explosion is emerging that is more clearly defined than before. Today, as of 2006, there are about 1.1 billion web users. Domains such as MySpace and Skype reassert the true meaning of the web community, that is generally regarded as anti-establishment and highly individualistic, quickly forming closed but globally connected virtual communes.

Specialised communities that create Open Source tools and even content such as Wikipedia allow the Web Economy to reflourish unabated turning many former web theories on its head. The new order of the Web economy spawns new areas of lifestyle that has great impact on human behaviour on a large scale that permeates almost every realm.

Web-based Culture
The following are examples of lifestyle areas that are been influenced by the Web.
 * Consumerism With such a huge market now been targeted along the lines of consumer profiling coupled by more advanced statistical aggregation.
 * Production The knowledge economy now has a vast resource base such as in the case of Open Source development where a high quality of goods is achieved with seemingly free human capital.
 * Seeking employment via the web Career planning now has a wider range of choices and informational bases to draw better decisions from, aided by profiling tools.
 * Romance and choice of spouse Again, statistical aggregation comes into play to predict the perfect match.
 * Social & political behavior Surfers may be subjected to unexpected influences distinctively different from their present surrounding physical culture. Global and web based political campaigns can upstage local politics. CNN news delivered instantly anytime, anywhere, with preferences and opinion pollings.
 * Leisure and Entertainment now greatly obtainable without restriction via the Web. Materials such as pornography undermined and bypass local laws, and gave rise to new cyberlaws been passed to counter net abuse and redefined legal jurisdiction. Spam also march on in more sopisticated forms.

Links & References

 * On the WeThink Book about Mass Creativity
 * The Pro-Am Revolution
 * Web Internet Usage Statistics
 * Internet Starts To Shrink?
 * Viral Ideas
 * Peer Production

Red1 D Oon 15:29, 15 November 2006 (UTC)