Wired's Chris Anderson says Web 2.0 is dead!

Remember when Web 2.0 was all about creating, sharing and collaborating to produce Long Tails that favoured small players at the shallow end of the bitstream? Well, now Chris Anderson says the World Wide Web is dead. Goodbye "Free", hallo value.

Browsing and Web searching are yesterday's stuff, the next big thing is "getting" things from major suppliers on the internet via apps for a fee. In the words of Anderson and Michael Wolff in the latest Wired:

"Now it’s the Web’s turn to face the pressure for profits and the walled gardens that bring them. Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy of peer production. But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits. Much as we love freedom and choice, we also love things that just work, reliably and seamlessly. And if we have to pay for what we love, well, that increasingly seems OK. Have you looked at your cell phone or cable bill lately?"

As Anderson and Wolff say, consumers will pay for convenience. How else can we explain the success of iTunes selling otherwise free music for 99 Cents a pop? And therein lies the secret of the internet.

Rather than professional content becoming valueless, it has risen - or is in the process of being resurrected - once more to become the most valued commodity of all in the media, distribution and consumer world:

"After a long trip, we may be coming home."

Explaining how this works out in business terms, they say:

not in the content business

What does this mean for PRs? Well, for starters the old top down model of influence still applies on the internet. PRs are going to have do some rethinking about how they advocate conversations, crowd sourcing and word of mouth PR. Some old-world notions of brands, reputation, quality and service are going to come back in to play (they never really went away). But at the same time, as Anderson and Wolf point out:

"...the so-called generative Web where everyone is free to create what they want, continues to thrive, driven by the nonmonetary incentives of expression, attention, reputation, and the like. But the notion of the Web as the ultimate marketplace for digital delivery is now in doubt."

And, as Anderson and Wolff also note:

CompeteYuri Milner

"Milner sounds more like a traditional media mogul than a Web entrepreneur. But that’s exactly the point. If we’re moving away from the open Web, it’s at least in part because of the rising dominance of businesspeople more inclined to think in the all-or-nothing terms of traditional media than in the come-one-come-all collectivist utopianism of the Web. This is not just natural maturation but in many ways the result of a competing idea — one that rejects the Web’s ethic, technology, and business models. The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back."

So it's not yet a done deal when it comes to who controls what and how. However the trend is certainly clear. The utopian dream of paradigm shifts is over. Welcome back to familiar reality - even if it is virtual and digital.