ClappingTree’s Web 2.0

THE FIRST annual “Open Media 100″, a list of key players (in five categories: Pioneers, Trendsetters, Practitioners, Toolsmiths and Enablers) in the online blogging and social networking field is out — thanks to AlwaysOn and Technorati (which tracks more than 11.5 million weblogs and over 1.2 billion links).

Although many of these folks may never grace the pages of the high-gloss pubs, they will most certainly be keeping an independent eye on those who do. As we’ve all witnessed, this is already happening. Both Dan Rather and CNN news chief Eason Jordon were handed their walking papers after being busted by bloggers.

(2007-03-01 note: The AlwaysOn link above is now broken. See The 2006 AO 100 instead.)

In “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”, a marvellous story by Lewis Carroll (1865), Alice and the Red Queen were running very fast hand in hand, and still the queen kept crying “Faster!”. The most curious part of the thing was that the trees and the other things round them never changed their places at all: however fast they went, they never seemed to pass anything. When they finally stopped, Alice protested:

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else–if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

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