We are the machine

I never left the Internet. Or so I thought...

After all, I read emails almost everyday for the past 15+ years, and thanks to Google with its free I-never-have-to-delete-any-emails 2900MB-and-growing inbox, I now know that a single person like me is able to amass over 30,000 emails in three years (since I first migrated my primary inbox to Gmail in late 2004) -- That averages to 1,000 emails per month, not including the 5000 spams that got filtered out to spambox every month. (Of course, I never get to actually open 60% of those 1000 emails/month.)

It turned out that things were moving faster out there. True, over a hundred million of Internet users out there have embraced Web 2.0, or have at least used one of plethora of these recently unleashed beastie applications. So, what happened to the other 800+ million Internet users? Is Web 2.0 an exclusive party?

I know I was in the dark myself for a couple of years while completing my postgraduate studies in a cyberzone-status institution. I have been blogging, social & business networking, participate in poll & surveys, syndicating contents to portals & blogs, and crowdshopping, yet until early this year, I wasn't aware that such activities can be grouped into a 'classified' global phenomenon. Last week, in a seminar I attended filled with nearly a hundred ICT entrepreneurs, when a speaker asked if anybody is using Web 2.0 applications, practically nobody bother to raise hands. But when asked if they were using Friendster (which commands about 20% of its users from Malaysia), many hands were raised this time.

So, how do you make an elevator pitch on what constitutes a 2.0 to an average Internet user? You can be creative.... or you can just borrow and share Michael Wesch's "Web 2.0 in just less than five minutes" piece:



Nasir
Malaysia