The Social Web

I couldn’t agree more with Josh Bernoff from Groundswell in his article Why Social Media Sucks. “Social Media” is the wrong way to describe something that is open, participatory, and collaborative. Something that is grounded on the open web. Media is a one way conversation, the web is a two way conversation.

The web has been around for decades, the world of traditional “media” has been around even longer.

Only in the last few years have we begun to build social technology that enables people to connect and share through the open web. The web is not about information or media, it is about people. People creating, collaborating, connecting, sharing, and participating. It is the power of social participation through the web that creates information and media.

Thus, this movement should be called The Social Web.

Today, David Recordon, Scott Kveton, and I are hosting the second annual Social Web Foo Camp at O’Reilly Headquarters in Sebastopol, California. This is the second annual gathering of the brightest web minds working to make the technology building blocks of the Social Web possible.

Last year, we called it Social Graph Foo Camp. This year, we’ve renamed it to encapsulate the identity-brand-meme that we all identify with the most:

The Social Web.