TMZ-a new original content and community news generated network launched by AOL a few months ago - is really coming into its own.  The site is doing a great job covering the Oscars – I think it’s much better, and more engaging, than what is being offered up by the traditional media.

A friend of mine sent me a link to this great Ovechkin highlight video made by Pierre Olivier Doyon.  Check it out.

An article in the New York Times today started me thinking that many of the lessons of Web 2.0 are the same ones we learned during Web 1.0. As before, success is not simply a matter of taking offline models and transplanting them online. Instead, the greatest success has come from listening to consumers and following their lead in improving what they are already doing. And what consumers are doing online boils down mostly to a handful of things: e-mail, instant messaging, search, social networking, and checking out new content.

An article in the New York Times today started me thinking that many of the lessons of Web 2.0 are the same ones we learned during Web 1.0.  As before, success is not simply a matter of taking offline models and transplanting them online.  Instead, the greatest success has come from listening to consumers and following their lead in improving what they are already doing.  And what consumers are doing online boils down mostly to a handful of things:  e-mail, instant messaging, search, social networking, and checking out new content. 

The difference in Web 2.0, however, is that those behaviors are converging, and consumers want new tools to help them in that process.  So if Web 1.0 was about simple text and image search, Web 2.0 is about giving users the tools they need to search for compelling video content, or make new friends, or find new social networks.  If Web 1.0 was about basic e-mail, Web 2.0 is about rich e-mail that lets users make send IMs, or make phone calls, or embed images and video.

And on the content front, Web 2.0 is about the interactive tools that allows users to create their own content, share their content with others, and find other content of interest to them.  It’s not about delivering traditional text or video to users who sit passively on the receiving end.  Rather than one-way video feeds or static text pages, Web 2.0 means giving users tools like blogs, RSS, social networking sites, robust e-mail and IM, podcasts, and personal web pages that allow them to create, promote, share, and search.

Whenever new media tries to replicate old media, it tends to fail.  When it takes advantage of the unique social and personal behaviors of this new medium, it does pretty well.