Web 2.0 is led by technology geeks

I’ve been struggling a lot to understand the exact definition of the so called “web 2.0″. Basically it is a new way of designing websites based on new ways of coding (like Ajax), new designing techniques that use advanced CSS and “pure” layouts (more spaces, nice logos, brand oriented) and also probably on the feeling of community.

But the main aspect is probably the fact that the new Internet services are now “user centric”. It’s like bringing the democracy concepts to the Internet. People can now contribute, give their opinions and decide whether a story is interesting or not.

The user of the web 2.0, the one that register to the service and really use it is the main reason of the success of web 2.0 to my mind. But who is this person ? After studying the web 2.0 websites and the profile of their users I always come to the same conclusion: it is a technology geek profile.

Ok ok, don’t take offense. Stay cool please. I might be a geek either and I don’t want to have all the Internet community hate me. Thus I will try to argue my opinion.

The thing that get widely spread over the web is often a “geek” thing. Let’s take an example. If you look at the top Digg stories for the last 365 days (at the time I’m writing this article), you’ll find out that the 5 top stories are:

I know these may not be very representative but the stories that follow are, for the most part, also referring to “geek” topics.

Let’s have a look on another well known website: Delicious. The 2 first popular stories (at the time I was writing the article) were:

It seems like the interesting stories are very often describing a computing aspect or a technology product.

Will the Internet “buzz” world only focus on new technology news, the last released gadget or the last version of a popular software? I don’t think so because I’m pretty sure “real life” (this word might not be the best one) people would appreciate to see other topics get to the top 10 web pages of the new social networking websites.

Ok I can guess you’re not yet convinced.

Also as I was saying at the beginning of this article, Internet is learning more and more from the democratic logics. I would compare the new social networking websites to a representative democracy. Let me explain that. The representative democracy is having people’s representatives acting for the popular sovereignty. In the Internet case the people are the ordinary web visitors that just “visit” the website and the representative are the intensive participant of the social networking site.

What happens is that the regular users of the social networking websites are the ones that have the power and that decide if a story is important or not. The profile of people that spent lots of time in front of a computer on the Internet is often referred to as a “geek”. Thus if you followed my thinkings, the ones that have power on the social networking websites are the “geeks” themselves.

Of course anyone can argue against the social networking websites as we would do it with the representatives of a democracy who usually do not come from the same social level than “the people”. The difference here is that being legitimate on the Internet is not based on the same process than for politics. You become an important member and thus your vote or contribution have a better weight if you are an active member. To reach the top members list you “just” need to contribute, vote or comment a lot more frequently than the average. This fact gives an advantage to the ones that have enough time to spend on the Internet. But more important the promotion is not based on any knowledge, competence or diploma and that makes a huge difference with the way democracy works in modern democracy governments.

I might be going too far but I let you think about that as the Internet is taking more and more space in everyone’s life.

What I exposed applies also to many new websites based on web 2.0 principles that offers services that relate to computing, technology, software and so on. Examples are the application to test your website, to download libraries, to validate your coding, etc.

Sometimes you need a kind of computing expertise to get your content online . Good examples are the video sharing applications like Youtube or Dailymotion. Making a home video and upload it to the right format on your computer is not that easy (I don’t think I know how to do it). A big part of the success of these applications comes from “geeks” people.

To conclude, I strongly believe that this is changing as more and more Internet newbie people are learning about web 2.0. They will probably get more interested in participating even if they don’t belong the “technology aware” people. The improvement of the websites’ ergonomics and accessibility will be a great help to reach that and the logic of web 2.0 is going towards this direction. That will hopefully lead to rich content offering on the Internet.