Where the web is today...

I learned about the physicist Freeman Dyson and his passion for searching for life among the outer planets of the solar system. In so doing, I stumbled across the following quote that I believe describes the current state of web 2.0 tools and online learning. We're building thousands of weird models of applications for sharing, contributing, and networking. Many of which fail within the first few months of being launched while others are immediate solutions to the larger masses, ie YouTube.

"You can't possibly get a good technology going without an enormous number of failures. It's a universal rule. If you look at bicycles, there were thousands of weird models built and tried before they found the one that really worked. You could never design a bicycle theoretically. Even now, after we've been building them for 100 years, it's very difficult to understand just why a bicycle works - it's even difficult to formulate it as a mathematical problem. But just by trial and error, we found out how to do it, and the error was essential."

-Freeman Dyson