Mark Maher interviewed Tommi Pelkonen on the trial they are running with Martijn van Welie.

1) Does Web 2.0 really exist – or is it a handy catch-all title for what, in fact, has been a largely incremental evolution?

When Tim O’Reilly invented the term “Web 2.0” to market his conference of the Internet’s future, I’m sure that no one ever considered how much hype that term would get in the following two years. It’s a real buzzword. Yet I think that it is good that we have a common name and topic to talk about. There are major changes happening in the online medium, we are really starting to live online, not only use online services. If 1997 was the initial boom year for commercial internet, I think 2006 and 2007 will be remembered as the years when Internet broke through as a normal part of our behavior. Broadband connections allow us to have our PC’s on all the time, web 2.0-kind of apps give new speed for UI and business innovations. To conclude, I think we are in a middle of a major leap, not only doing an incremental evolution.

2) Given that one of the quite lively aspects of your “experiment” is that you have personal memories of Web 1.0 (and this seems almost to be the explicit frame of your current investigation), How does it feel? That is, are you successfully touching on something akin to those long-ago peak moments of your (digital youth)?

Heh, nicely put. Maybe this experiment is also an exploration into my mind and memories. There are so many things to have had a “wow” during the last years. First, in 1994 our business university had Unix-based color screened machines which had great Mosaic-based first browsers. I recall accessing a Canadian site and viewed streaming video of a airplane flying. Boy, that what something – moving pictures from Canada. 2) Second great memory also involves streaming media – now using “multimedia PCs” (P60+sound cards, huh) to listen to online radios and short lousy quality video clips from the US. Again, felt like an radio amateur when being able to browse through the growing number of streams.

Third, I think we really had a breakthrough in mobile innovation at Satama, when we had our first SMS-voting system trials in early 2000. The base stations at Hernesaari (Satama HQ) area crashed and Sonera was upset about how we could send so many SMS’s at one go. Well this lead to using the maxi screen in I think hundreds of events that we have been participating in during the last six years. Finally, I think in 2003 when my wife and I bought the Philips’s Streamium device, we really connected our home online. Suddenly we had the online streams (radios and videos and images) in our living room and we were also able to look at videos-on-demand. This was once again quite mind-blowing.

I think the great thing about web 2.0 is that it once again brings media-based innovations back to the mainstream. With mash-ups companies and individuals can innovate faster than ever. They can use features and resources that earlier in this decade would have been all too expensive or difficult to develop. The time it takes to make things happen is shorter than ever due to this. Yet, as an industry early bird it is difficult to twist my mind into the new settings. If it was not possible to realize some things three years ago, it no longer means that it is still not possible.

3) Your earnest me2web2 blog reminds me a bit of serious European art students who have read a lot about post-modernism and resolve to attempt the creation of some post-modern works of art. Isn’t the true spirit of Web 2.0 simply to do it and live it?

I think the only way to internalize web 2.0 is to try to live by its principles. There was a recent study of Finnish teens from Espoo who use as their preferred medium messagers, IRC’s, My Spaces; upload images straight to blogs from mobiles, consume much more time online than in front of TV, maintain multiple blogs etc. I think their behavior will not ever “return” to the one that we, “30-40 somethings”, have. They will be different, think differently, behave differently, innovate differently. Thus, for me to keep up at least to some extent with this radical change, I try my best to able to, at least, talk of the new things through my personal experiences. Yet I will think that I will never be totally Web 2.0. This is due to a simple reason – my peers (in same age group) are not doing the same. Thus, there will never be a situation in which I would be reaching my friends all the time online. They just simply are not there.

Running through this trial is probably more a journey into to uncomfortability zone, i.e. to an area which I do not master, maybe ever. Yet, in my experience the best way to develop, learn new things and actually have fun later is to expose oneself into these kinds of circumstances. And, hey, to be a pro in digital media, one just better have to do what one preaches. At least try to do with all humbleness and honesty.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 4:20 pm and is filed under Perspectives. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.