Sometimes a difference in perspective makes no difference

This would normally be considered blasphemy chez fivechimera, but I was just reviewing the little bookshelf in my office (an "office" that looks suspiciously like a guest bedroom with a messy desk in the corner) with an eye to what can be culled. Dennis is more into Flex/Flash than I these days, so I flipped through Getting Started with Flex 3 for a sense of whether it's too elementary for what he's doing with the language.

Page 81 bore this gem:

Web 2.0 is all about the media; images and video. So, it's a good thing that Flex makes it so easy to build Flash applications that use heaping helpings of both.

I wish I were making that up. (Grammar-Nazi aside to Mr. Harrinton, Ms. Kim and their clearly-asleep-at-the-wheel editor(s): Know the difference between colons and semi-colons. Also, commas are more effective when used sparingly.)

More to the point: Even as a programmer, I take exception to the idea that replacing words with images--animated or not--can be considered "revolutionary." in any sense. Throwing back to illuminated manuscripts or the block-prints that lived cheek-by-jowl with movable type in the hands of Guttenberg, Aldus Manutius, et. al., there's absolutely no demarcation. In the case of the post-Usenet internet, history clearly repeats itself. The difference between 1.0 and 2.0 isn't about how many bytes you can stream at your users; it's about how many bytes they can stream back. And--more appropriately--how many bytes they can stream at each other.

I know that should feel at least somewhat guilty for what boils down to straw-man argumentation. But for the number of Marketing PHB-types who first looked at Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. and (essentially) thought: "Cool! I can use this to spam more people!", it brasses me off at least as much to see my very own cohorts committing an equivalent sin. All of you: Stop assuming that the web's about you and what makes your job seem more important. Web 1.0 wasn't about that. Neither is Web 2.0. And I seriously--yea, even mortally--doubt that Web 3.0 will be, either. In short, even when the belly-button fuzz is 100% silk, navel-gazing is still navel gazing.