To me, the most compelling question isn’t “What are the white collars writing?” I expect that content to be up to a certain standard. What I find more interesting–because I see it as a real measure of our society–is how the active-ware model will affect the quality of non-regulated online content. That is, content on the level of the chat room messages Hamilton mentioned.

To me that is more indicative of where the future of content is headed. It’s a cliche, but those kiddos are the future. If they grow up in a world where misspelled words are the norm, how will THAT impact not only the quality of future content, but communication and society in general?

I agree with you that we often forget content quality when talking about all the whizbang things we can do with technology.

For this article, I chose not to discuss quality (other than the aside about chat rooms) because I didn’t want the article to get too big, and I didn’t want to divert attention away from the categorization.

This article is a distillation of a larger section in my upcoming book, Managing Writers . In the book, I do discuss writing quality and the differences in writing style required for the different categories.

Incidentally, I butchered the sentence about chat rooms.  Here is what I meant to say, “To some degree, this is happening already. For example, in a chat room, no one thinks twice about bad writing unless the meaning is completely obscured. This trend is likely to expand as Active-ware matures.”

As a toolsmith, I can spend hours combing the web for just the right obscure piece of info. Yes, there is some poorly written content in Web 2.0, but I’ve also seen some fairly sharp stuff contributed to wikis, blogs, and the like. 

One example is the developer wiki run by WebWorks (http://wiki.webworks.com/DevCenter).  What makes it good is that WebWorks developers (particularly Ben Allums) contribute useful information to the site.  The posts are well-written, occasionally humorous, and—most importantly—very informative.

When a company uses active-ware (Web 2.0) as an information-delivery solution, most of the information on that site will be contributed by people who care deeply about the product.  That includes information developers, trainers, and engineers inside the company and very involved users on the outside.  Information developers and trainers should create well-written information, and if the engineers care enough about their contribution, they know where to get editing help.  That leaves only the outside contributers who may need editing or other guidance. I would look on the resources needed to provide this support as a minor cost of Web 2.0 (depending, of course, on the volume of contributions).

Active-ware may be part of the problem. And it may continue to be so into the future. But it could also be part of the solution. Sure, tweens are butchering the English language in chat rooms from here to Timbuktu. But at least they’re writing. And reading. Better than sitting motionless in front of a TV, right? Maybe these are the first faint stirrings of life after the golden era of television.

That said, if the internet follows the evolution of the printed word, we’re right now heading into the online equivalent of the television age. As technology advances to support it, video is becoming more and more mainstream online. Active-ware is inherently a more interactive model, but soon the “active” component will be talking into a web cam, not typing on a keyboard.

In ten years, who knows if we’ll have written web content. Maybe all the current content writers will be script writers. There’ll be “web actors” who specialize in emoting for online media.