Okay all you NET12ers out there, I’ve finally made a start on the material. Here’s the proof: this smart YouTube video clip on web 2.0 done by Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology in Kansas State University, raising some interesting issues and questions. I’ve just got to watch it again.

So HTML as many of us know, was designed for structurally marking up the document content. Then those nasty bold and italic tags came along, paving the way for content formatting. In the HTML wedding, document structure and format were married, inseparable until death.

Next uncle XML, the perpetual bachelor of structure, entered the reception describing data AKA content. Like all good drunk uncles, the XML stories are told again and again (the data is exportable). Picture a team of broken record players playing that embarrassing song over and over - uncle XML remembers every detail and the nephews and nieces are continuing to regurgitate the stories verbatim, all in their own accents of course (that’s RSS to the rest of us).

It was easy for the nieces and nephews to create their own stories too. Unlike HTML who’ll never divorce the divine formatting, Uncle XML made blog engines possible, he’s like a stud on Viagra. So with a blog born every half second we begin to wonder about single child policies. More on that later though…

The creative parents birthed all forms of content, more text, photo, video, and geographical; WordPress and Blogger, flickr, YouTube and Vimeo, and Google Earth just to name a few. Uncle XML also encouraged us to party, mixing our different contents together to form some delicious cocktails such as flickr maps.

Finally a way of classifying… As Jerry McGuire said, Help me… help you. Help me, help you. The machine needs our help here. We all give tags to the children because we found categories too box-like and didn’t cater well for the many permutations. ABC News stories give us the opportunity to tag. Through XML, your tags and mine, we create a database of all the content. This collaborative management is helping the machine to help you in your research.

Hypertext is not just linking pieces of content together. Web 2.0 is linking people, people sharing, trading, collaborating, and doing… Up for consideration are dozens of issues:

• copyright
• authorship
• identity
• ethics
• aesthetics
• rhetorics
• governance
• privacy
• commerce
• love
• family
• ourselves