Web 2.0

Web 2.0 can be described as a trend in the world wide web. It defines the second generation of internet and in particular how its users interact with it. Web 2.0 allows for interaction and collaboration between users through a number of services.

The previous generation of the internet (Web 1.0) was a service in which information was provided to the user however there was no real sense of internet community. This was mainly due to the fact that it was much harder to publish information on the internet. Web 1.0 was concerned with reading, whereas Web 2.0 is concerned with writing and participating.

In the culture of Web 2.0 users have the ability to easily participate as well as collaborate. For example anyone can make a page on this website blogger and write about whatever they wish. Social Networking sites like Myspace and Facebook also allow users to publish information about themselves, as well as keep in touch with people. Similarly with websites such as youtube, anyone has the ability to upload their own video and display it to millions of others on the world wide web. In terms of collaboration, wikipedia is an excellent example of users coming together to share knowledge. Anyone can add content to the massive encyclopedia of information and anyone can access this information free of charge.

Folksonomies (collaborative tagging, social tagging) are another feature of Web 2.0. They allow users to tag and categorize content. For example the website del.icio.us allows users to tag their favourite websites. The website Flickr allows users to tag photographs with keywords.

I found an excellent example of the differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 that sums it up really well. It is from the blog of a man named Joe Drumgoole, the original can be found here

• Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing
• Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
• Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
• Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
• Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
• Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
• Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
• Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
• Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
• Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales
• Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
• Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
• Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
• Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
• Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

Examples

• Myspace
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Wikipedia
• Flickr
• del.icio.us