Don’t call me DOM

I am by no mean good at making graphics, but I very much like the idea of turning complex ideas into easier-to-grasp graphics.

As I was invited to talk about “Web 2.0″ a month ago at the WITFOR conference, I wanted to use a graphic that would illustrate Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 in 7 points.

I started to look for existing illustrations that I could re-use, but while there are many illustrations of what Web 2.0 is in general, I didn’t find any that focused on Tim’s “official” definition; since a big part of the message I wanted to convey was that Web 2.0 was not (only) a buzzword but was actually a fairly well-defined concept, I couldn’t just re-use any of these vague illustrations.

So I started microblogging a few days ago, most probably as a result of my co-chairing of the Workshop on the Future of Social Networking – although I can’t really say there was a conscious connection between the two events.

Twitter and friends have been around for quite some time now, and microblogging hadn’t really appealed to me, despite a few experiments here and there; I had started to follow some colleagues and friends tweets by subscribing to the resulting RSS feeds, but hadn’t really found a good motivation to use it to generate content.