BusinessWeek

It's A Whole New Web
And this time around it will be built by you

". . . At many new Web sites and services, the creative energy of countless souls virtually crackles off the screen. They're cobbling together their own services from customizable Web sites and Lego-style pieces of Web software. By the millions, they're gathering and disseminating their own news with blogs and podcasts, creating customized article and photo feeds from their favorite sites and even annotating them with helpful text tags that others can search for on the Web site del.icio.us. They're producing their own entertainment on video, social-networking, game, and photo-sharing sites such as Yahoo's Flickr. At MySpace.com, some 21 million monthly visitors spend up to several hours a day sharing their thoughts, photos, and music with friends on personalized home pages. Ditto at Cyworld, which claims almost a third of South Korea's 48 million people as members.

'The Web isn't so much a place anymore,' explains Ross Mayfield, CEO of Palo Alto (Calif.)-based startup Socialtext Inc., which offers services to create collaborative Web sites called wikis. It's more of a doorway into services, from the user-written reference site Wikipedia to the community organizing service Meetup to the folksy classifieds site Craigslist. As Mayfield noted in a recent blog post, 'They Google (GOOG ), Flickr, blog, contribute to Wikipedia, Socialtext it, Meetup, post, subscribe, feed, annotate, and above all share. In other words, the Web is increasingly less about places and other nouns, but verbs.'

Harnessing Change
This potent new do-it-yourself trend is shaking up a raft of industries, from software and telecommunications to media, marketing, and entertainment. As people individually and collectively program their own Web, they're increasingly calling the shots. In the process, they're challenging the way media organizations cover and distribute news and entertainment, the way advertisers target pitches at them, and the way tech companies design and sell their products and services. Most of all, they're rapidly changing their minds about what they will pay for and how. That's disrupting long-established business models, from newspaper subscriptions to television advertising. . . "

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