I signed on Myspace…only to see this:

What has happened to the internet?

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This weekend I am to attend Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas with Amy, Mike, Joe, and the CEO’s son Chad. It’s a pretty big deal, and it’s all paid for by the company. There will be thousands of people there, we get to sit in on uber-important business panels about Affiliate Marketing, and I get to wear a spiffy Lunarpages t-shirt.

However, I’m obviously nervous. And right now, as I sit here with kleenex stuffed up my nostrils because I’m a baby and have a terrible cold, I think I am way too young for this kind of thing. Not that you have to be old to go (check the pictures I posted — these guys are all young), but I just feel inexperienced, immature, and unintelligent.

When I was in high school, I would have balked at the idea of me sitting in a marketing chair for some huge company. I would have gloated over the Bohemian ideal of making no money doing the thing that you love most. If Amanda and I still talked, I’m sure she would hate me. Brooke too.

Nevertheless, I’m excited about wearing big girl shoes this weekend. I mean, I get to go to VEGAS for FREE, so there’s got to be something in that, right? I also get the chance to prove myself as not just “the new girl who works with Mike” but as Tiara, Princess of Power.

Speaking of big girl shoes, I’ve been ANSWERING PHONES at work for the past week or so. It’s a pretty big deal for me, because I haaaaate phones and I hate dealing with stupid people (people who LIKE phones). But it’s been really good, mostly because I know every answer off the top of my head, which makes me appear intelligent, and if I don’t know it, I get to say, “Could you hold for just a sec?” and I get to press the HOLD button.

It’s the little things.

So after this weekend, Adriann and I are going to Vegas the following weekend to see Zumanity and blow all our change on the $1 slots. teehee, slots. And after that, Adriann, Deana, Heather, Greg, Karla, Sandra, Deana’s sis and her bf, and I are all going up to spend the weekend in a cabin in the mountains! They’re drawing straws for the master bedroom (which has a fiiiireplace!), so here’s hoping Adriann and I get lucky. ;)

So there’s an update on my life. Plus, I finally deleted info on myspace. Goodbye forever, you silly corporate entity!

The WWW is revolutionizing itself right under our feet. Or, excuse me, we are revolutionizing the way the WWW is run and the old corporate bulldogs that once black-listed any peons under their weight (AOL, Yahoo, Google) are slowly but surely being replaced by smaller-but-better underdogs who want to save the world and all of us lowly peasants beside them. Places like Myspace and Digg start out incredibly small and snowball out of control; where it took a million users, a million dollars, and a million ad campaigns to populate AOL, it takes little but word-of-mouth to take Myspace from a whisper to a shout, to bring Digg into people’s vocabulary (I was “dugg” yesterday and I shall “digg” today).

Thus is the world of Web 2.0, a world in which the masses of people run the show.

For the most part, anyway. ;) There’s always a catch, and I think the catch with Web 2.0 is the fact that places like Myspace, Friendster, Tagword, TheFaceBook are just poor clones of the original good idea. Myspace was, when it was created, a good idea. “You want to make friends?” it asked, and we all said, “well…well yeah we want to make friends!” And so it beckoned, “Then join us!” And we did. And we made friends. And we ranked our Top 8 and made it into the biggest deal in the world, citing and ending friendships on the premise of a trivial list of faces. Then, people started taking advantage of the freedom. Myspace had to sell adspace (had is perhaps not the word; maybe Myspace just did), the ads kept getting more and more terrible and annoying, and then users created accounts just to spam like always. What started as a peaceful way to meet and make friends, to keep in touch and blog for fun, became a haven for rapists, child molestors, and idiots. What began as a fun way to show who your best friends are began to be taken seriously, ranked and rated, and then expanded because Top 8 was just too few.

It’s the end of Myspace, I feel, not just because I’ve deserted it but because it’s honestly not working anymore. I read something about 40% of the people on Myspace are over 30 and it really depressed me, partially because I feel that Myspace’s innocence has been tarnished and partially because two years ago Myspace was underground, understood, and just damn cool. And now, your aunt and grandma can surf it and find out that you’re a closetted homosexual and ruin your life by telling your mom. This hasn’t happened to me, but I’m sure to many others. And not just the fact that 30-year-olds are considered “old” and that seems to make Myspace by relation just as old, but because of the ads, because of the lack of working servers, because of poor management and too much publicity, Myspace is going to die. And sadly, I won’t morn it, neither will anyone else, and when it’s packed full of soccer moms and businessfolk looking to connect, it will be a different kind of site and perhaps a little sadly, there will never be anything like it.

Or will there?

Web 2.0, as I see it, is about connection. And when connection no longer works or is severed, there’s something wrong. With Myspace, there’s no way to fix it. With the new sites like Digg, de.licio.us, clipclip, ChaCha, etc., stand a chance, but the moment their moment comes, it’s the end. So I guess 2.0 is half connection (a way for us all to have some control over this online world) and half the fury of the underground, the way it used to feel to blog and the way it feels when you stumble upon a site so precious you wish no one else could have it yet you want the world to discover it from you.

Yeah, there’s my two (thousand) cents. After being bombarded with “web 2.0″ this and that at work, I finally have my say. For the moment. I know it’s disjointed and the like, but someday I’ll refine it and clean it up.