Hello! Its Sleb 2.0....

There is a fascinating article here from Paul Kedrosky about how the Web is being colonised by the Vox Populi, and the Geeks are being sent back to the corner, as connoisseurs of tat consume Paris Hilton's jail-break and all the other necessary ingredients of modern mental bubble gum.

To quote:

Sure, I have diddly use for Ms Hilton and the 24x7 coverage of her brief jail visit, but there is a deeper import here. A bunch of blogs that I don't read, like TMZ, are newly winning the traffic wars. What such sites generally have in common is that they don't even have passing acquaintance with technology, geek-ish stuff, and early adopters. Instead, they are oriented toward the sort of inane pablum that fills supermarket glossies, 7pm TV shows, and such. They are, in other words, all about celebrities, gossip, and entertainment.

We are witnessing the move from Web 2.0 to Sleb 2.0..............and the main points are that:

- these sites' traffic are blasting straight past TechCrunch, Huffington Post et al - Web 2.0 has hit the mundane mainstream (if you stop and think about it, it is odd that nearly all the top blogs on Technorati are around geek porn, PR tipsters and suchlike - this is not representative of humanity at large).

- cometh the masses, cometh the Ads

Mind you, talking of inane pablum - geekdom doesn't really have a leg to stand on ( coming from a community that is agog over Twitter for example ) - and we're all decamping to Facebook anyway apparently

(also picked up on GigaOm and O'Reilly and here )