(Re)Discovering Web 2.0

I can remember exactly when and where I first heard the phrase Web 2.0. It was early 2005, and I was at the time, a ravenous listener of the Connect Learning Podcast, in which Web 2.0 applications in the classroom was a frequent topic. At the time, though I might have been able to say what Web 2.0 was, I'm not certain I could have described exactly what the experience of world wide Web 2.0 would be.

Recently, I read an article in infonomics--a magazine put out by AIIM (which I finally was able to discover stands for Association for Information and Image Management)--titled "Why all the fuss about Web 2.0?" This article begins with a brief discussion of the White House's new mandate to adopt Web 2.0, but was in fact, a rundown of the history and meaning of Web 2.0. It's an article well worth reading: it goes through one of the best rundowns of Web 2.0 I think I've seen.

When I started reading this article, a friend and I remarked, "Aren't we on at least Web 9.0 by now?" After all, in Internet years, Web 2.0, first named and described in 2003, should be ancient, a relic, little more than a paragraph or two in a dead-tree textbook on the history of the web. And yet, it has thrived, and grown--rather than becoming obsolete, it's become ubiquitous. By 2005, when I first heard of Web 2.0, Facebook had started to take over on college campuses. Now, five years later, everyone I know is on Facebook, even my little sister's teacup pig (not to mention Antharia's own Irma Cujo Dogsburger).

I took a survey online recently, and one of the most puzzling questions for me to answer was "What 3-5 content websites (ie, NOT Facebook) do you visit most frequently?"

I spend a fair amount of time online, but even so, I couldn't think of one purely content website I visit regularly, much less 3-5. Think I'm exaggerating? Think about the sites you visit on a regular basis. I'd bet that most of them have at least some elements of Web 2.0 to them.
One of the most important aspects of Web 2.0 is two-way (or three-way, or three-hundred-way) communication and collaboration. Think about websites that were created in 1995. They were static. Someone wanted to share some piece of information, and so created a webpage all about that piece of information. If a visitor to that page wanted to respond, they would be limited to emailing the owner of the site directly, or maybe signing a guestbook.

And now think about the difference between a website of that sort, and a site like Wikipedia. Love it or hate it, if someone visits Wikipedia and has information to add, they are able-and encouraged-to add the information directly to the site. Wikipedia is an obvious example of Web 2.0, just like many other social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube-all those sites rely completely on the content added by the people who use the site, rather than the people who originally created the website. Rather than creating the content for the site, they created a platform for others to build upon.

But that isn't the only manner in which you will find Web 2.0 in action. Take a site like Amazon.com. It is a commercial site, created for the express purpose of selling products. For that purpose, they have a large amount of information available about their products: price, number of pages, weight, publisher/distributer, and so on. That information isn't collaborative in the sense that the information in Wikipedia is. However, there is a strongly collaborative piece to the information they make available: the customer reviews. In that way, Amazon.com has created a platform by which people can add information, and interact with each other, much like they can on a site like YouTube.

And think about it. How often do you go to Amazon.com to look up the number of pages in a book, or the shipping weight of a vacuum cleaner? If you're anything like me, you generally skip that bullet list of product details and go straight down to the customer reviews.

A website doesn't have to have a huge corporation behind it in order to incorporate Web 2.0 concepts. A number of the websites I visit regularly are simple blogs. However, even blogs are built around the idea of reciprocal communication. A blog's commenters will often add greatly to the value of a blog post. Furthermore, communities often spring up within a blog, as frequent commenters begin to interact with each other as well as just with the blogger.

My challenge to you as I end this post is to take a second look at the sites you visit regularly... even if you've never thought about Web 2.0 before, you might find traces of it everywhere.

Posted by Claire Smith on February 10, 2010 at 11:56 pm EST

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