Below is an excellent video by Michael Wesch — Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University — describing in under 5 minutes the concept of web 2.0.

While this is a nice explanation and the content is worth noting, of more interest to me was the form it was presented in.

First this is a great example of how well video can explain concepts — in this case much better than I have seen in an article or book (although not with the same detail so it supports rather than takes over other formats).

The way he takes a sentence and then restructures it, is very poetic. By that I mean, he plays with the sentences and does so in a way that makes meaning more understandable.

Once you’ve watched the YouTube video, take a look at the Mojiti version where viewers can put comments into the video. To make this really useful it needs to be more flexible, but that is happening. Think of the potential for commenting on documentaries.

I have a keen interest in autism. Partly because I connect with it on a very personal level, but also because it is a communication issue.

Today, I came across an example of two communication technologies being used extremely effectively. A combination of a YouTube video and a blog. It’s not an unusual combination, but the juxtaposition of the two in this scenario is particularly noteworthy:

There’s a myth that you can tell a lot about an autistic person by looking at them. I’ve been trying to break down that myth by juxtaposing my appearance with my writing.

It is a provocative combination. The beauty of writing in this case is that it can be totally divided from appearance. It’s a direct look into a mind and even if you have already seen the video, it’s still easy enough to separate the two in your mind; but not so much that you would miss the message.

This is the kind of thing you can say:

That would be ten years of doing incomprehensible things, for reasons I could not understand, with a vague fear that something awful would happen if I stopped, and being continually bombarded with more information than I could understand or handle. This is not to say there were not good things going on in this time period, but outside of specific incidents, I mostly remember a blur of shapes and sounds and words and pain. (Severe physical pain, which went untreated for more like 20 years.)

And through video:

Her blog is here.

Seth Godin has written an excellent piece on what he calls web4. It’s particularly excellent because it describes exactly the kind of thing I’m starting work on now. This is the best part:

LinkedIn tends to make networks that are sprawling and weak. Web4 is about smaller, far more intense connections with trusted colleagues and their activities. It’s a tribe.

Exactly. Digg is next to useless for my use, because it is too big and full of people I don’t trust. It’s not that they are necessarily untrustworthy, I just don’t trust that they know what to recommend to me.

If Seth Godin says he has read a great new book on marketing, I’d be sure to take notice. If he recommends a good book on painting, I’d probably ignore him.

My article on ‘Socialising the eBooks‘ gives an example of how this could work for one example.

Seth’s article is here