Honest it is a great way to make money and be successful

More hype factoring in the Web 2.0 system this weekend, and Andrew Keen from ZDnet Blogs as usual takes a hard look and goes “what the…” this morning.

At this week’s On Hollywood, for example, start-up after start-up presented identically orthodox ideas about how to create value from the democratized Internet. This poverty of innovation amongst Web 2.0 entrepreneurs is stunning. It will require another cycle, what some people are now calling Web 3.0, to successfully implement the business potential of Web 2.0 technology. Given the cyclical nature of things, don’t expect to see this till around 2015. Source: ZDNet

People need to be coming up with good ideas that are unique and that have a way to make money, but are not just knockoffs of what is currently there. If anything shows that there is a dearth of imagination in modern business, if you are looking at the same company idea from 18 different companies in one night your eyes are going to glaze over.

Consumer generated content is going to be capricious, in that you never know what is really driving the adoption of a web site, or what the customer really wants or is really thinking. You might have some good ideas what they are thinking and what they may want, but customers are fickle. If you make it difficult or do not meet their expectations, then you are pretty much so going to have a non-successful site.

Digg, Reddit, YouTube, MySpace, and others are successful, but they were there either first, or had a better marketing campaign.

If you make another site like this, you are already going against the majors, so there is a higher bar, and you are going to have to deal with the customers trying to game the system so that they can get better stats. In addition, those include all the fun splots, exploitative sites, and get rich quick sites.

Not that I am not saying don’t do it, what we are saying is come up with something new, where do these sites not serve the customer, and then put that spin on your site to get new people on board. Oh and make sure you have made a plug in that works with all the major blog platforms, and then have some marketing dollars to back that puppy up. There is a reason that people redesign things annually, people are fickle.