The Web is in motion! It’s about conversations, interpersonal networking, personalisation, and individualism. The need for immediacy, interactivity, and community, combined with new and light-weight technologies are changing the social structure of the Web.

The Next Generation Web is about getting associated with openness, trust, authenticity and collaboration. Interactivity, new possibilities to connect, social software, usability, and community networking are fast catching up with users. This new buzz is generating fresh and exciting projects. The latest buzzword is Web 2.0.

The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the Web. Many people concluded that the Web was overhyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.

The concept of ‘Web 2.0’ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, Web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having ‘crashed’, the Web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the Web, such that a call to action such as ‘Web 2.0’ might make sense?

In the year and a half since, the term ‘Web 2.0’ has clearly taken hold, with more than 9.5 million citations in Google. But there’s still a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means, with some people decrying it as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and others accepting it as the new conventional wisdom.

Alluding to the version-numbers that commonly designate software upgrades, the phrase ‘Web 2.0’ hints at an improved form of the World Wide Web; and advocates suggest that technologies such as weblogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds (and other forms of many-to-many publishing), social software, Web APIs, Web standards and online Web services imply a significant change in Web usage.

It can also refer to the transition of Web sites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming computing platforms serving Web applications to end-users, as well as a social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralisation of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and ‘the market as a conversation’.

BIOS, Feb 05, 07 | Print | Send | Comments (0) | Posted In Video of the day