Kathrin and I joined 3 days surf-school in Byron-Bay. Byron-Bay is really one of the coolest spots I’ve ever been.

The people are layed-back, the food is great and the waves are perfect. Time seems to slow down at Byron-Bay.

I read Netocracy by Alexander Bard and Jan Söderqvist. After I checked the first release date I figured out that this book was before its time. There was no Web 2.0 when Bard and Söderqvist wrote this book and published it in 2000. I think it’s more relevant now than ever.

The book describes the shift between feudalism to capitalism and now the ongoing shift to informationalism. Bard and Söderkvist describe how the value of property in feudal times changed over night as the capitalistic view on valuing property differed radically. Estates were previously valued by the distance from the royal residence (and weren’t for sale, obviously). In capitalism, the estate was suddenly valued on other standards – size, style etc – and now had a price tag. The feudal way of valuing estates was rendered useless and not accepted, and in time it disappeared completely.

The netocracy, say Bard and Söderqvist, will be the new power elite, controlling networks – both social and digital – and displacing the bourgeoisie as the ruling class. Its members will understand that equilibria and static positions are boring and artificial approximations, and dynamic fluxes are neither. And that interesting logical structures are not tree-like hierarchies, but are interconnected in potentially very complicated ways – what Deleuze called the “rhizome” – just as Web pages, genes and friendship networks are.

Long story short: This book is breath-taking, controverse and radical. A book for reflection.

Web 2.0, a term posted O’Reilly in 2004, describes to a second-generation of Web based communities and hosted services.

What makes or defines the Web 2.0? Long story short:
Social networking sites, wikis and other communities featured with mash-ups, podcasts, long tails, AJAX, weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, RSS feeds, social software, Web APIs, Web standards and online Web services. Web 2.0 supports the collaboration and sharing between users. Web 2.0 is an improved form of the World Wide Web.

Key principles of Web 2.0:

1. The web as a platform
2. Data as the driving force.
3. Network effects created by an architecture of participation.
4. Easy to pick up by early adopters