Since I attended the ASAE Technology Conference last week, I have really gotten bitten by the Web 2.0 bug. It’s not that I hadn’t been aware of it (I have been blogging and participating in open source development for a number of years) but I guess I simply decided to avoid the hype. In the 2004 publication “Online Communities in Business: Past Progress, Future Directions” Jim Cashel from Forum One Communications was quoted as saying: “There seems to be an inverse correlation between how much attention a technology receives and how impactful it is.” This pretty much sums up the way I have felt (until recently) about all of the attention the Web 2.0 phenomenon is receiving.

Part of my reluctance to embrace the concept probably has more to do with my experience with the “dot.com” boom and bust and seeing online businesses create a ton of media hype and raise gobs of venture capital with no tangible product or service to show for the effort while they made millions in the process. However, this time the revolution appears to be built on a much stronger foundation. Without going into too many details, I would go so far as to say that while there has been a substantive amount of hype similar to the first so-called internet revolution, this wave of innovation appears to be the mirror-opposite. Admittedly, I still don’t like the term “Web 2.0″, but that aside, I also have to say that it is more than just hype, rather I think it is transformational.

Bill Thompson, an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service program Digital Planet wrote an article today titled “The mash-up future of the web” that I think really captures the transformational nature of how we are interacting with the web today.

When the web was young we were happy just to see words and pictures on the screen in front of us.

All backgrounds were grey, all fonts were Times and anything other than a static image required a “helper application” to be loaded and run, so that video clips and sounds played in separate windows on screen.

Compared to the text-based internet of the 1980’s it was heaven, but it was only the beginning.

Since 1994 we have seen the web turn into an all-singing, all-dancing multimedia experience, with the simple page layouts we once delighted in replaced by interactive services and web-based tools, while embedded video is everywhere.

He describes how services like MySpace, Flickr, Google Maps, and Wikipedia have caused a shift from a “read-only” to “read-write” interaction, an improvement over where we were, but not a full realization of the true potential of the web. He suggests that the real break through:

…comes from having the ability to take other people’s content and then filter, refine, recombine and reuse it in interesting and innovative ways.

He cites Yahoo!’s Pipes, an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator that can be used create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant as a prime example of the promise of mash-ups made simple.

I have been using pipes for the past week-and-a-half and I have to agree. Pipes is by far one of the easiest and user-friendly online tools that I have used and the results are definitely hinting at something much greater down the road. Granted it does take some learning to get used to, but the beauty of the application lies in its design. Even from the beginning, the worst result that I have produced is a feed with no data but nothing as catastrophic as causing a server to crash or a database to fail. Now, I am not proclaiming to be an expert and believe that my pipes have just scratched at the surface of what is possible, but even so I think that it is really well done. Below are before and after screenshots of my pipe building experiment.

Here is a link to a pipe that I created whichtakes the feeds to over 15 association related blogs that I read along with the feeds from a handful of association and non-profit technology related sites, limits the number of titles that are output from each feed to 10, orders them all by date (most recent first) and then presents the aggregated results. If you visit the pipe yourself, you can even change the number of results returned and then subscribe to the output in your preferred feed format. Truth be told, it took me longer to collect all of the feed links that I needed as inputs than it did to create the working pipe. Pretty cool indeed.

What I like best is the fact that it reduces my reading list for these sites into something that is far more manageable than even my netvibes page could provide. My next step will be to integrate the output into this site to make it even more convenient for me to stay caught-up on my daily association-related reading from my favorite bloggers.

I will close with Bill’s final line from his article:

Yahoo! has given us a glimpse of the networked future, where the world’s information is not only at our fingertips, but available to be mixed, mashed and filtered on demand, giving us what we want, when we want it - and from wherever we can get it. There will be no going back.

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