Changing Technology...Irrational Exuberance?

Newsweek put on its cover this week The New Wisdom of the Web.   Are Greenspan's words returning to haunt everyone who remembers the dot.com crash?  Is it all irrational?   Is everyone cashing in?  No. It is the push and pull of all the new exciting technologies converging to make online apps user-friendly and more open.  It is called Web 2.0 and as much as the term is hated, it brings lots of promise and excitement and it will last.  The pendulum is just swinging.  Here's a little general micro-look at the macro-issue...

My Mother wrote this letter on her IBM Selectric II in 2005, just after I gave her a digital camera (click to enlarge).  Even though she emails now more often than writing letters, this is one she wrote the old-fashioned way and it came inside a stamped envelope. 

In just over a year she has learned how to use word processing on her new Mac computer.   She knows how to upload her photos from her camera into iPhoto and order prints through Shutterfly. 

Kodak is no longer part of the Dow Jones index.  Google is the newcomer on the Dow Jones.   

Mother still plays her vinyl records...sometimes.   Our albums left us in the big 2005 garage sale.  Should we have put them up on ebay?  Or purchased one of the retro record players?  Framed the album covers as art?  Put them onto CDs and then into iPods?  Paid to store them?  How will the older items be retrievable archivally?  What is being lost through the changes?  If either trash or treasure, where does this detrius go when it dies? 

Here's some of the blog chat about the irrational state of web 2.0 right now: iPlot writes that media are referring to the surge as a "boom" (in quotations); Mindjet notes that bloggers are debating about the terms of web 2.0.  One of the best writers on the subject attracting social bookmarking attention: Don Hinchcliffe's Web 2.0 Blog.