Nielsen punctures the hype

Jakob Nielsen, in his latest Alertbox, takes a pin to burst the bubbles of what he says are the overhyped stories of Web 2.0.

• Will AOL team up with Google or Microsoft? Irrelevant, he says.
• Will "citizen journalist" bloggers wipe out MSM? Newspaper executives ought to spend more time worrying over what's happening to their classified advertising.
• Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica? The only true measure, he says, is whether either is usable for what people want to do and misses the fact that much of the Web has too-often lost its promise of highly interlinked hypertexts. It also misses the development of Wikis inside corporate firewalls as tools for collaboration.
• Google stock price: Overhyped to the "red" level -- a search engine is a license to print money, he says. (Nielsen is no great fan of what he sees as the evolution in the use of search engines to dip briefly into scattered Web pages for answers rather than to interact more broadly with Web sites.)
  
• Practical Web sites: The most important story of them all gets almost no hype: we're seeing more and more simple websites that meet customers' needs and thus generate substantial business value.