The Ten Commandments of Web 2.0

I picked this up from AU Interactive via the Atlanta Media Bloggers site (which was running a piece on bloggers who had been fired because of their posting). It's not perfect, but some of it is pretty funny and right on the money - the First Commandment is especially timely:

1. I am the Lord thy Google, which have brought thee out of the land of Web 1.0, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other search engines before me.

G knows when you are sleeping (Google Calendar), G knows when you’re awake (Google Alerts), he knows if you’ve been bad or good (Google Desktop), so be good for Google’s sake. Google has more power than God. If you don’t believe me, check out the results: “Google”: 114,000,000 vs. “God”: 40,600,000.

2. Thou shalt not take the name of Apple in vain.

The music of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the RIAA and the tyranny of MSN. Blessed is he, who in the name of iTunes and 99 cents, shepherds the weak through the valley of “The Darkness,” for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of “Lost” children. And I will Digg down thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my Macbook. And you will know my name is Steve Jobs when I lay my DRM vengeance upon thee.

3. Thou shalt not make copies of any Flickr image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth without first checking the creative commons license. Thou shalt not download it thyself and serve them from your server.

While YouTube plays the “Copy? Right!” game, and fair use is getting stretched wider than America’s waistline, the idea of intellectual property still exists and is enforceable. If nothing else it’s good karma – don’t steal other people’s art, photos, or video without permission, attribution, or at least a little “Thanks XXX, whoever you are”, muttered to yourself.

4. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Get the hell out of the house Sunday. Seriously. The world will not end if you don’t blog for 1 day out of the week. Go take a walk in the park or streak a football game. It will give you something to blog about on Monday.

5. Honor thy fathr and thy mothr: thy website names may not be long.

Avoid all vowels. At all costs. At all times. Also, give your mothr some props and put her in your top 8.

6. Thou shalt not kill your comments.

Only Seth Godin and Satan have blogs without comments. If you’re going to have a blog, let people interact with it.

7. Thou shalt not commit adultery (if you have an AOL account.)

The AOL data leak showed us all the dangers of search histories and large companies releasing large amount of semi-personally identifiable information. If you’re going to get some cookie, delete your cookies. And if you can, cancel your AOL account.

8. Thou shalt not steal successful ideas and lame them out.

If you’ve always wanted “School Your Way” or you want to “Let Your Page be Your Stage”, then check out the really hip Wal-Mart and AOL social networks. Tubular! Or you can always create clones of Digg (Netscape) or YouTube (MSN Soapbox) if cloning MySpace seems a bit too daunting.

9. Thou shalt not bear false witness against Wikipedia.

I’m looking at you Steven Colbert. We can’t have just anyone modifying the sum of all human knowledge at will. Not unless we live in Washington and/or our last names start with O’Reilly.

10. Thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not bookmark thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor’s.

It’s called tagging now and you should covet it like crazy. And you must put it in a cloud – it’s most angelic. Here’s a way to tag that wife, ass, house, and maidservant properly:

big house AOL cheating donkey manservant maidservant neighbor wife hot ox Oregon trail sweet wheels spinnin maiden oxen you have just died of dysentery synonyms donkey ass what don’t get it web2.0 digg how covet really want more ye olde scurvy