Michael Wesch
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2022–2025
4:32 · 12M views · Jan 31, 2007
Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.
Cited as a classic, compact explanation of the read/write web and open data, invoked in threads on the semantic web and open APIs.
3 comments from Hacker News
Just going to leave this gem of a video[0] here. Whilst I agree the web has been walled gardened into various silos like social media, and people think Facebook and Twitter are the Internet, it's still read/write. The blogosphere is still ticking along nicely and last time I checked it's thriving. Yes, people have gamified Google and search to get traffic and the blogosphere of old has largely been co-opted by profiteering gluttons, but there's still hope. Surf Hackernews enough and you'll find little gem posts that don't have an ulterior motive and are not 'monetizing' their content and sprinkling it with affiliate links and ADs. They just want to vent, exchange techne, and share knowledge. Then there's Wikipedia which has remained AD-free for as long as I can remember (apart from their donation banners which I don't mind). Wikipedia is the coolest thing ever and my IQ has probably gone up a few notches over the years because of it. It is the closest thing to getting home-schooled without going through formal education, and you can verify all the claims made in its entries by going to the footer section and reading various citations usually written by esteemed scholars. The web is in a sorry state due to the commercialization and walled garden silos, and also because of the proliferation of smartphones which are mere consumption devices IMHO and not designed for producing any meaningful or substantial content, apart from maybe uploading photos/videos to Instagram or writing
Long live the dream of the semantic web. For visual learners there’s a great YouTube video explaining the semantic web here: this video
> it’s APIs we did not have Isn't that what we had about 20 years ago (web 2.0) until they locked it all up (the APIs and feeds) again? ref: this video posted 18 years ago: this video (Rewatching it in 2025, the part about "teaching the Machine" has a different connotation now.) Maybe it's that the protocol is more universal than before, and they're opening things up more due to the current trends (AI/LLM vs web 2.0 i.e. creating site mashups for users)? If it follows the same trend then after a while it will become enshittified as well.