The Internet or the mad cow disease

I often come across people who brand themselves (openly or not) as new media thinkers - very easy to recognise, they are always keen on discussing about the future of the Internet, Web2.0, the benefits of social media, the challenges of setting up business modeles in an online environment, etc .. they blog, set up their own space in second life, are subscribed to loads of feeds, online social clubs, etc.. And I am without any doubt one of them.

I was reading The Soul of Man under socialism from Oscar Wilde today, and I just realised that we are, new media people, taking the risk of spreading mad cow disease, if we keep eating our own flesh. The signs are there - people investing like mad cows in unsubstancial online businesses, developers spending hours on reinventing the wheel, bloggers who think that checking sources is waste of time getting more readers than national newspapers.

Most of my thinking about the future of the web is based on articles I read here and there, on blogs, specialist press, through conversation with other new media people.
And this is the case for the people around me - we end up eating our own meat, canibalising the Internet space with cooked ideas and concepts, quoting people who quote people who quote people who quote...This applies to anyone, even techies.

If you take the example of SEO - some techies back in 96-97 asked themselves: If search engines rank websites for a specific query, there must be a way to find out what criterias they use, and then make sure that my site meets all these criterias. There was some money to be made, and the concept had to be explained with a nice simple picture and convincing arguments to potential clients. Marketers then came in, invented an obscure jargon and drafted silly pictures and started marketing SEO as a service to businesses - they posted 1000s of resources, all contradicting each others, wrote nonsense, and ended up confusing the techies themselves who are now reading Marketing litterature in order to understand what SEO is.. they basically get to eat their own meat. Same applies to javascript (rebranded Ajax by Marketers) for instance.

In order to avoid catching the disease, there is a very simple remedy. get rid of 99% of the RSS feeds, newsletters, specialist magazines, forums, etc .. you are subscribed to, and pick up a good old book instead. The effect is almost immediate, I experienced it today.