Nick Carr wrote a great piece, The Amorality of Web 2.0, intentionally throwing cold water on the Web 2.0 party. His central point, to my mind -- after suggesting that Web 2.0 is a cultish mindset, that Wikipedia is inadequate, and amateurism leads to shoddy products -- is the contention that Web 2.0 is amoral:

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

But, here, Carr is really howling at the moon. All technological advances that are driven by individual user adoption are chaotic, and unreflective. Individuals decide to move farther from the center of town, pushing urban sprawl, increasing our collective reliance on fossil fuels, and causing traffic jams. And our society zigs in a direction that some applaud and others lament.

His arguments are true but not helpful. The individual choices that are being made -- for example, individuals opting to upload pictures to Flickr or creating tags in Technorati -- are not explicitly attempting to put librarians or newspapers out of business, and they are not reflecting on the potential long-term impacts that could arise from seemingly modest and personal decisions made to better their own lives in a small way. Not do I think that thundering from the pulpit about the amorality of the eventual impacts -- if indeed they turn out to be so -- will make a whit of a difference.

Om Malik read Nick's piece, and attacked the same issues in a different key, arguing about ownership of all this volunteer effort in enriching the web with web 2.0 gestures:

[from Om Malik’s Broadband Blog — � Web 2.0, Community & the Commerce Conundrum]

if this culture of participation was seemingly help build businesses on our collective backs. So if we tag, bookmark or share, and help del.icio.us or Technorati or Yahoo become better commercial entities, aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!

Here, Om gets down to something I think is potentially amoral: the appropriation of the new commons -- our shared space on the web -- by the folks that create the web 2.0 tools that are allowing us to populate it.

It is essential that we devise some point of leverage, perhaps a mechanism something like creative commons or copyleft, for the myriad social gestures we are strewing across the web. Yes, I would like Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr and others to be able to aggregate my tags, comments, links, and mutterings wherever I leave them on the web. But to the extent that they dream up ways to make money from them, I would like my share. And most important, I don't want to have to pay to gain entry to the world that we all are creating.

Om is dead on: "This is something we need to discuss."