the idea of “social software” became the hottest thing. Jack Schofield in the Guardian takes a look in an article called Social climbers. The best quote to my eye is the quote Schofield includes from Tom Coates of plasticbag.org:
But Tom Coates, from UpMyStreet. com, has reservations about the “current hysteria”. Three months before the conference, he posted a short essay on his blog, Plasticbag.org, saying: “There’s something about the abandonment of concepts of ‘online community’ and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. There seems to be a bizarre lack of history to the whole enterprise – a desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it’s patently not.”