First, a quick summary of what the lazyweb idea is, and how it grew:
1) Matt Jones coins the term “Lazyweb” to describe taking advantage of a phenomena a lot of people have experienced: having an idea, and then, soon afterwards, finding that someone has just created it. Rather than thinking negatively that you’ve somehow lost “your” new idea, you should see this as a positive thing: your idea has become real without you doing any work.
2) The term bounces around various blogs and starts to settle into regular usage, gaining a wiki definition.
3) Ben Hammersley starts a neat site that in effect collates hyperlinks to people “invoking” the lazyweb, and bundles them into an RSS channel. That way, we can all watch it more easily, and maybe the lazyweb can be even more responsive. The funny thing is that Ben’s site is something of a lazyweb product itself.
During the Yule break I was reading about the lazyweb again, and then wandered over to register.com to make sure I’d renewed this domain. I checked if anyone had registered lazyweb.org, and no one had. I assumed that someone would soon. A few days later I looked again. It was still available, but I noticed that lazyweb.com had been registered by resellers. I then registered lazyweb.org, mainly to stop it going to the resellers, partly because I wasn’t thinking straight.
Of course, the next morning I was clear headed enough to realise that I had no time to use the domain properly. I'm planning a short essay on the "emerging economic system" that the lazyweb represents, but I wasn't likely to get that finished anytime soon, and that's not much content for a site. I decided to just point the domain name to the first good useful lazyweb site or utility that appeared. It was the lazyweb thing to do.
I had to wait only ten hours before I noticed Ben Hammersley's lazyweb tracking site, so he got the domain. I invoked the lazyweb to "get" content, and he got the domain name via lazyweb.
The tricky thing now is explaining in more depth how "the lazyweb" is a symptom of a very important new economic system which also resembles religion and magic. Hopefully I've still got my old economic anthropology coursebooks somewhere. I can't hope to remember any of the correct terminology now. But I wouldn't be suprised if someone else is editing an article making the exact same points, right now...
