First it was the Art Gallery of Ontario’s inviting “influential” bloggers to a press preview. Aren’t they press already? (Listen, I can’t tell you how many press launches I’ve been to. It’s hardly a big deal.) I rather dispute that any of the invitees save for Javanrouh and, yes, Spacing are truly “influential.” (I suppose that’s unfair. Who could really be first among equals in one of Toronto’s many mediocrities, blogging? But check the list. When was the last time any of those Weblogs “influenced” you?)
Now comes the Mesh Conference about – wait for it! – Web 2.0. Tell me something: What exactly does Andrew Coyne know about Web 2.0? And why does the promised appearance of Jason Fried fill me with confidence that obviously minor issues like accessibility will continue to be ignored? 37Signals ignores it and they are influential, are they not? (Fried gives such persuasive barnburner speeches. They’re so good even I almost buy what he’s selling.)
Does this conference not reinforce the idea that we can just roll out this entire new technology and worry about the cripples later, when it will surely be no problem at all to retrofit dozens or hundreds of existing sites that run on intricate DHTML? (“Ajax works great for me, and I’m even on Firefox. What’s the problem?”)
Why is this reminding me of the 1999- or 2000-era Toronto Web demimonde, where marketing arseholes thought that sliced layouts in Photoshop and loud Flash animations constituted “Web” sites? (Did I not spend many months in that era decrying exactly such abominations in the NUblog, which will shortly be back online?)
Really, is history not repeating itself?