Is the internet still revolutionary?

In its early phase, the Net ignored business; Internet audiences simply weren’t interested. And the feeling was mutual. Business ignored the Net for a long time, not seeing it as what it thought a media market should look like, which is to say television. This mutual ignorance served as the incubator for a global revolution that today threatens the foundations of business-as-usual. – Chris Locke writing in Cluetrain Manifesto, 1999

I italicize the last sentence because it goes with my latest cynical streak about the internet 10 years after Cluetrain. Now that no one–business especially–is ignoring the internet, nothing good can ferment unbothered. Any hint of a revolution will be immediately covered in techmeme and monetized ASAP.

This whole Web 2.0 thing, and even Google, came about precisely because people were ignoring the net for the first half of this decade. No one cared about links before PageRank, so Larry and Sergey were free to crawl around and make something cool. Blogs were made by people who really wanted to share their thoughts. People made cool shit just to share it with the community, which would cause little ripples of excitement in places like MeFi and MoFi. From this milieu emerged the categories and services we now take for granted: blogs, tagging, photo sharing, comments, avatars, etc.

Woa, seems I’ve fully descended into nostalgia and crankiness! The bottom line is, we won, and as Brad Burnham summarized last week over coffee, we are victims of our own success. Perhaps next revolution is probably already brewing, and I’m ignoring it.