In a sea of blogs that seem to celebrate all things 2.0 these days, I found Scott Karp’s blog at Publishing 2.0 to be a refreshing combination of sober and hopeful.  I think he brings clear thinking to both the upside and obstacles of the new Web 2.0 applications coming online.  He also has some good thoughts about the challenges of participation.  I share a similar view and that’s why I propose the bionic systems approach.

Excerpts from Scott’s post title “Too Much Media”

There’s Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, MySpace – already I’m too tired to list the dozens (maybe hundreds) of collaborative and participatory media. Surfing cable TV could consume an entire Sunday. Now we’re being asked to tag, comment, create, contribute, vote, refer, subscribe, engage, rate, report, add, chat, seed…

When we’re all creating media, who’s going to be left to consume it?

And from “Who Has Time for Web 2.0?”

This is the core problem with Web 2.0 as Media 2.0 — for all but a small group of dedicated users (e.g. bloggers) there is not a clear return on investment for the time and effort it takes to actively — and consistently — participate in media. Which is not to say there can’t be a clear value proposition, but we just haven’t found it yet.

Scott has laid down some of the challenges.  It will be fun to try to overcome them.