Rethink: Web

The ideas here sound right in a sense. I generally find that an overly academic tone that reeks of liberal arts degrees applied to web paradigms often makes itself overly fancy without delivering on the philosophy it espouses.

In other words, yes, the web does need to be more community centered and a re-imagining may help that process. Of course, it did not take me long to say that very thing. Function and convenience dominate the web because that is what people have voted for over connections to other human beings in a meaningful way.

How do you then get people to "re-visit" that principle when all the world seems to have voted for it?

Cool, an english-major type essay about how the web sucks now. But what does this do to fix the web?

Other than the flowery language there are some good nuggets in here like the links to the "banal" sites and the concept of the Collective Web. Escaping commerce simply means affording users a way to give back as they consume and Webmining does just that.