What is Web 2.0?
Essentially, you can gain an idea of what Web 2.0 is from these three words:
User generated content
With this in mind, the examples are quite obvious. Sites such as MySpace, Wikipedia, Blogger, etc are all children of Web 2.0 as they all rely on you, the user, to do all the work. Wikipedia would not exist without willing contributors; but the web is not short of those. Whereas Web 1.0 was a place where you simply read something, or looked at something, Web 2.0 is a place where you do something. A wiki is a very useful tool which relies heavily on this kind of technology. Wikipedia is the most obvious example but the principle of a wiki is to allow users to collaborate, edit and share information. PBWiki is a good tool if you want to collaborate on some work with several other people remotely (http://pbwiki.com/edu.wiki)
Web 2.0 has a very social aspect to it. The capabilities it has to encourage community and sharing is greater than that of the ‘original incarnation’ of the web. The communicative ability that the web offers us has been greatly improved, which is why social networking sites have experienced such massive popularity. Being able to send messages, comment on pictures, comment on comments, comment on blogs has made social networking a hugely attractive practice for most people we know.
RSS
Rich Site Summary (or RSS) is a tool most commonly found on current affairs websites. One can subscribe to an RSS feed and use it in an application away from the site itself. For example; Windows Vista has an RSS ‘Widget’ on its sidebar. This allows you to view news stories from your desktop in text format and click them for more of the story. It allows the user to customise the news stories they receive. You could use Google Reader to gather together all of your chosen RSS feeds onto one page:
A good reference: http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
Another good reference: http://newmusicstrategies.com/2007/04/02/thing-6-web-20/
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Pingback on Oct 11th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
[...] think that there is a difference between, what people refer to as the Semantic web, and here I will disagree with Adam and claim that RSS is not a Web 2.0 technology but rather a part of the Semantic web. The semantic [...]
October 12, 2007 at 9:16 am
Nice summary of Web 2.0. I miss some kind of definition although i know this is hard to find, it would be interesting to see if you could come up with something.
It would also be useful if you could give some quotes from for example the article you link to from O’Reilly.
And as you might know I don’t exactly agree with you on RSS being Web 2.0, but useful article that sums up the main points if Web 2.0.
October 12, 2007 at 9:25 am
I’m going to come down on the side of RSS being an integral part of Web 2.0, but I think that blows the whole Web 2.0 = User Generated Content thesis out of the water. Web 2.0 is a much broader phenomenon that allows, largely through XML, for web content to be used, distributed, repurposed — and, yes, generated — by the people who come into contact with it.
An example might be a site like Pageflakes, which you customise to your own ends, but it is essentially a news site generated from the RSS feeds of other people’s blogs and newspapers. No UGC there — but I’d still put it firmly in the 2.0 camp.
October 12, 2007 at 9:25 am
I never realised how much a lot of people seem to rely on web 2.0. Although there is the arguement that 2.0 is not that different to ‘web 1.0′, and that it’s features have always been there just not implimented in the right ways, it’s great how the internet has become such a significant social tool in the past 5 to 10 years.
October 12, 2007 at 9:36 am
Hey
The only thing that I think may be missing is how web 2.0 effects music online. Other then that it was very interesting to read.
Thank you
Mandy