There's an idea going around that's bothering me.

It has a lot to do with Sean's and Brian's concerns wrapped up in Sean's post at Bloodhound. But it goes much further than that and is beginning to pervade much of web 2.0. I don't know what to call it quite yet, but it's something like a con game where the consumer is elevated by the set-up and business is denigrated as the hook.

Before I go further let me say that I'm as service oriented as anyone. It's a sacred belief of mine that a service company that doesn't value service is doomed in the long run. Excellent service at the lowest cost possible is to satisfy consumers of the service. But this is why I'm having a problem.

Information is pervasive and it's now basically free thanks to the web. But service and information are two different things. Service can never be free. Web 2.0 in it's efforts to make information free and easy to access has created some kind of unconscious expectation that devalues service in the process. Empowered by information and placed in the position of royaly by web 2.0, the consumer looks down on service providers as servants who compete to lower prices and meet their every whim. And some service providers do, but the excellent service providers are likely to revolt, especially when the economy turns around.

The consumer is being conned into a devaluation of service providers and is losing the ability to distinguish between value and boot-licking. Then when the boot-lickers don't meet every whim and practically work for nothing, the consumer stomps his feet and demands more. This won't last long -- it will cause the excellent service providers to develop a different model and the consumers will be left lording over incompetents and hucksters. When the consumer discovers they've been had as tools for advertising dollars, they'll begin looking for good service again -- and they'll be willing to pay for it. I recently used the example of People's Airline as an example of this con game. People's Airline had to choose between service and price -- they chose price and went bankrupt. The consumers were conned by price and devaluation of service until the service got so bad that they left People's Airline in droves to more quality, higher priced airlines.

Instead of a corporate policy conning consumers, we now have Web 2.0 conning consumers. Good service costs money to provide and the service providers aren't indentured servants -- they are professionals who know how to take information and make it work profitably for the consumer. Information is made valuable through specialized knowledge and expert efforts of the service providers.

Even if the information is enough for some consumers to go it alone, most don't want to -- they want it taken care of by experts, by professionals who provide excellent service. If the relationship isn't a mutual, respected meeting of minds, the consumer/service provider relationship will not work on web 2.0 and web 2.0 will become a tacky bazaar of carnival barkers or a slum filled with cheap billboards. If web 2.0 is to become a real marketplace, it will have to understand value and build something worth advertising, and something worth the time and effort of excellent service providers..