Those of you who know me in real life know that one mention of the term Web 2.0 will send me into a maniacal rant. Unless, of course, it's making fun of it.

Some readers are eagerly awaiting my public Web 2.0 rant. I'm going to disappoint you and simply point to another Web 2.0 criticism. Jeffrey Zeldman has written a piece called Web 3.0. He cuts through the jargon and hype with precision. He praises the good and dismisses the bad. I agree wholeheartedly with this piece.

As for my own thoughts on the Web Twenny (please start calling the Web 2.0 the web twenny, it makes it much more tolerable) they are calming down somewhat. It is not that the activity that stems my hate-on has abated, it is that I have started to ignore it.

Living in remote eastern Canada might seem like a strange place to build a web company like silverorange. We're far away from most markets. We're a day's travel from "the valley". It snows...a lot. To top it all off we don't even have a GAP. I believe that our remoteness has helped us keep level heads. We're insulated from the hype by a mountain range, a thousand miles of prairie, a few great lakes, and the great woods of Maine.

It is because of this remoteness that we've come to realize the value of building a business the old fashioned way. Do good work. Get paid. Repeat.

Our remoteness has also forced us to be creative. As you can imagine there wasn't a lot of decent paying web work kicking around our province of 130,000 people. We were forced to apply our creativity not only to our trade but to our business model and operating philosophy. These are things that scarcity adds to a company. Had we grown up in a VC laden false economy we'd have bought Aeron chairs, thousand dollar desks, developed a pet psychology dot com, gone out of business, and would now all be working at Circuit City.

So what does this have to do with the Web Twenny? It's about perspective. As Zeldman points out, there are some great technologies mixed in with the hype. They are smart, they do certain things well, but they are just technologies. They are not the Second Coming. The web twenny cowboys who are trying to tame the wild west of social networking sound more like TV evangelists than entrepreneurs or techies.

The reality is that only a few ideas will be bought and paid for by Google and Yahoo. A few people are going to become really rich. Most of us will not. Some might get VC funding, make a quick buck, and then go bankrupt. Some will get out at the perfect moment then sail around the Lesser Antilles in their forty foot sloop. Most will see the bubble twenny burst and have to deal with the fallout.

Please do not get me wrong. I am all for chasing your dreams and trying new ideas. What I am I not for is the quick out. The 18 month exit strategy. Build something of value. Build something you can point to. Build something to be proud of. These types of things take time, stress, scarcity, and devotion. But, as in all other areas of life, they are the most beautiful.