Tuesday 21 October 2008

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is social, it’s open, it’s letting go of control over your data, it’s mixing the global with the local. Web 2.0 is about new interfaces - new ways of searching and accessing Web content. And last but not least, Web 2.0 is a platform - and not just for developers to create web applications like Gmail and Flickr. The Web is a platform to build on for educators, media, politics, and community, for virtually everyone in fact!
Take a look at what the education community is doing with the Web, for example. They are not only starting to use the tools of Web 2.0 - blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. They’re also adapting to a new generation of kids who are growing up on the Web, the so-called ‘Digital Natives’. The challenge for educators now and for the future is to learn and teach Internet literacy, converse and collaborate with their students using Web tools, and help our children make sense of the huge amounts of information and media that surround us.
Web 2.0 is about the people, when it comes down to it. So it has to be inclusive. The definitions of technologists, social scientists, web designers, philosophers, educators, business people, anybody - they all count.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:
Web 1.0

Web 2.0
DoubleClick
-->
Google AdSense
Ofoto
-->
Flickr
Akamai
-->
BitTorrent
mp3.com
-->
Napster
Britannica Online
-->
Wikipedia
personal websites
-->
blogging
evite
-->
upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation
-->
search engine optimization
page views
-->
cost per click
screen scraping
-->
web services
publishing
-->
participation
content management systems
-->
wikis
directories (taxonomy)
-->
tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness
-->
syndication