The Blowfish Blog

OTAKU MAnKO: Web 2.0 — Now With Faster Implosion!

Blogger, writer and porn director Audacia Ray reports on her blog Waking Vixen that she and four of her coworkers had been laid off from newly-minted social networking site The Peeq. Says Dacia:

The company, they say, is out of cash—though it’s still marching forward with a redesign of the site and they are planning on doing some rehiring when they have money. Essentially, the plan is to let the site sit live but un-updated until the new version is up and at ‘em, and then renew efforts at promotion when the re-design and cash flow allow.

“The Peeq is a sex-centric community where like-minded adults learn from and contribute to a shared philosophy that dares us to explore the quirky, humorous, embarrassing and sublime sides of sex,” we’re told at ThePeeq.com/About. Not much of a downside to learning from and contributing a shared philosophy that dares me to explore the qurky, humorous, embarrassing and sublime sides of sex — I am seriously down with that, which is why I felt a small amount of excitement when I started receiving notices about The Peeq about two months ago.

Why only a small amount? Because I lived through the tech boom implosion, also known as the dot-bomb, our clever slang term here in the San Francisco Bay Area for that moment in 1999/2000 (it varies from person to person) when we all realized no, in fact, we weren’t going to be jet-skiing in the Bahamas this time in 2004, and nobody cared except us, in fact the rest of the world couldn’t even be bothered to laugh at us.

For me, that moment came a few weeks before Christmas, 1999 (and therefore a few weeks before the Millennium Bug crashed us all into a new rat-eating urban stone age, which at the time I was both dreading and looking forward to). That’s when I was informed that the online magazine I was working for, GettingIt.com, would be shut down before our first-class content could even be given a chance to recognize a viable revenue stream. In that case, there had been a year of aggressively acquiring, skillfully editing and proudly publishing deeply meaningful content about Spider-Man, the Dysfunctional Family Circus, selling peoples’ kidneys, paranormal sound recordings and the Semen Warriors of New Guinea before somebody realized whatever they realized and decided to shitcan the enterprise. (GettingIt, which exists as an archive, displays as its motto: “Party Like It’s 1999;” a more appropriate motto there never was, which I suppose makes Prince a prophet as well as a slut.)

The Peeq, on the other hand, is a perfect and promising example of Web 2.0: User-generated content and community, sharing between users, the empowerment of the individual. What could be a better forum for sexual freedom, education and expression?

At the forefront of Web 2.0 are sites like Wikipedia, which believes that everyone knows a little bit about something, Tribe, which believes that everyone has friends or wants to, and Yahoo’s Flickr, which believes that everybody’s pictures are beautiful, as long as they don’t cause nipple erection. Less famously, Web 2.0 includes such collaborative info-digitization projects as Project Gutenberg, which aims to make all public domain books available as text by utilizing volunteer scanners and proofreaders, and Librivox, which aims to do the same with audiobooks by enlisting the support of people with microphones and time on their hands, not to mention blogging platforms like LiveJournal, Wordpress, Blogger and Typepad. Of course, probably the most famous Web 2.0 site in the US is one owned by a right-wing Australian-American zillionaire; I’d rather not link to it.

The idea of Web 2.0 is to engage the user, to make the Web not about reading web pages but contributing to them. With Web 2.0, you’re given the opportunity to upload your photos and video, write down your brilliant opinions and comment on everybody else’s brilliant opinions, most of which you could do in Web 1.0 — that would be “The Web,” I guess — but only with a slightly greater investment of time and money. The mission of Web 2.0, if it has one, might be ultimately spiritual or sociopolitical, but it’s really about the convenience of creation.

All this has the collateral effect of making content itself free, though it costs a lot of development dollars before you’ll bother to upload your photos and/or video of your ferret taking a bath, the UFO you saw in Bakersfield and/or your friends belting out drunken karaoke.

ThePeeq offers interactive content like chat, polls, photo galleries, quizzes, forums, personal profiles and the like alongside content by high-profile creators like Anka Radkovich and Steve Diet Goedde, not to mention Audacia Ray, who is the Community Manager. ThePeeq looks nice and has a lot of features. Its art is pretty; I love quizzes, polls, forums, and user profiles, so I’m down with all of that. According to Dacia, the plan at ThePeeq is to continue marching on with development and renew marketing and promotion when cash flow allows.

Most worthy enterprises have their fits and starts, and ThePeeq definitely looks like a worthy enterprise. But I’m reminded that I am and will forever be Web 2.0’s most fickle lover: I love it and hate it, because Web 2.0 represents the promise of democratic information exchange and the reality of new media’s challenges. It’s the place that creativity is going, and I am both down with that and unspeakably tired of it.

Web 2.0 holds content and community in the palm of its hand, and sometimes Web 2.0’s a butterfingers.

Thomas Roche is the managing editor of Eros Zine, teaches at San Francisco Sex Information, and also blogs on sex, drugs and cryptozoology at thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 6 November 2007 at 4:41 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.