Over the last 5 years the collection of websites and online services, such as Wikipedia, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, YouTube etc. has allowed anyone with access to the internet to use a web-browser to access these tools which allow easy collaboration and effectively use the web as the platform rather than the hard drive on your computer.
Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilley media, and supporter of free software and open source movements gave this definition:
Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them. (This is what I've elsewhere called "harnessing collective intelligence.")
Comapring Web 1.0 with Web 2.0
As my previous post on Web 1.0 technologies focussed on the problem of information retrieval of existing information, (the information being retrieved often was structured and held in a database or unstructured in the form of web pages), this post focussed on the “Network Effects” of the new technologies allowing us to easily create our own content and share it over the internet.
“Web 2.0 applications allow users to create and use ‘social spaces’, where social interactions can occur over the net.” (Butterworth 2010 lecture notes).
There is however there is nothing so new in the technology allowing these social spaces to work, other advances such as increased network coverage, the increased bandwidth, cheaper server space, advances in digital technology such as cameras, video, music applications and other management software that allow content to be created and uploaded to a web-server freely and easily by anyone.
Prior to this advances, photographs wood perhaps have to be scanned in, you would need to pay for sever space and know HTML and other code to enable the digital information to be displayed and available to others. Hence Web 1.0 was a read only environment to most individuals.
Web 2.0 characteristics
HTML allows text and images to be displayed in web browsers and can be styled (see post on CSS), and further made interactive using programming languages such as Javascript, However HTML 4.01 does not have any inherent support for video animation or sound. Instead application plug ins allow media to be added, eg. Flash, Ajax, jQuery (Butterworth 2010 Lecture notes). This gives the user a ‘rich user experience’ using Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s). Increaed response speed and greater functionality and usability.
A new version of HTML (HTML 5) is in the process of being developed allowing sound and video to be incorporated into web pages without these add in scripts. Taken from the W3C Schools website the background on HTML:
“The World Wide Web's markup language has always been HTML. HTML was primarily designed as a language for semantically describing scientific documents, although its general design and adaptations over the years have enabled it to be used to describe a number of other types of documents.
The main area that has not been adequately addressed by HTML is a vague subject referred to as Web Applications. This specification attempts to rectify this, while at the same time updating the HTML specifications to address issues raised in the past few years.” http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html#background Accessed 07-11-2010
User Participation: Providing people buy into the concept of Web 2.0 and offer a level of commitment to whether a social space on the internet is successful, then social spaces can be of great value for discourse communities i.e. groups with a common field of interest.
whatis.com? provide a definition of what social networking means:
“Based on the six degrees of separation concept (the idea that any two people on the planet could make contact through a chain of no more than five intermediaries), social networking establishes interconnected Internet communities (sometimes known as personal networks) that help people make contacts that would be good for them to know, but that they would be unlikely to have met otherwise.”
It could be true in the case of some social spaces that the more restricted the access and greater limitations imposed to allow only those with an interest to interact in that social spaces, the more successful they will be. Open participation is the very key concept of Web 2.0 however there maybe the opportunity for less constructive debate or interaction from those without an interest in that social space being successful. This can be seen in the often completely irrelevant comments left on YouTube videos, the unregulated access to comment often leads to hateful and derogatory comments.
Dynamic content: Web 2.0 technologies allow content to be created constantly, for example twitter updates will flow like a stream into the browser (flow internet). Tools to manage this include RSS (Rich Site Summary) where content the user is interested in is fed to the Browser (Butterworth 2010 Lecture notes). RSS is explained here:
http://www.whatisrss.com/
The vast amount of content created through sites such as twitter and facebook can be fed to any other site through RSS feeds (utilizing XML explained in another post) allowing the user to be alerted to new content that is of particular interest
Metadata:As Web 2.0 is about low barriers to publishing, a fully fledged metadata scheme (e.g a library catalogue) is inappropriate. Users of Web 2.0 technology would most likely not have the inclination, time or expertise to formulate an ontology or controlled vocablulary from which to populate structured metadata for all their content. That said, anything uploaded to the web needs some form of metadata for it to be discoverable and retrievable, thus rather simple techniques of tagging using single words, very short phrases or acronyms can help to keep information organised. It may also be possible for other users to add these tags (e.g. facebook allows anyone within a social network to tag a photograph with a person) which is referred to as a 'folksonomy'.
Further, the use of tag clouds is a web 2.0 concept where tags are grouped into a cloud, where more commonly used words in a document appear larger and more centralised (Butterworth 2010 lecture notes)
Example of a tag cloud:
Openness and freedom: The philosophy of web 2.0 is the concept of connecting with others using web services that allow anyone with an interest to view, publish content, interact (through commenting and responding) with one another, without (some of?) the restrictions imposed when compared to those used in traditional means of publishing. Many sites now exist, including Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Delicious, Digg, Blogs, Forums, Wikis, etc, in many domains, helping those with common interests in a topic, or relationships inherent in there field of influence to perform an array of knowledge and infromation sharing behaviours.
Informationweek.com published an article on their blog (an example of a web 2.0 service) called:
"Is all this Web 2.0 Openess a good thing? regarding the threat to the security of others:
I went to a news conference this morning and a philosophical debate broke out. The scene was the unveiling of the Nokia N810, a new Internet tablet from the world's No. 1 handset maker, at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The Nokia executives were extolling the virtues of openness in the Web 2.0 world, when a German journalist piped up and asked, "But aren't you just making things open for the malcreants also?"(www.informationweek.com/blog.com accessed 11-11/2010)
The fact that Web 2.0 openness and freedom allows these connections between people over the internet, who perhaps would not ordinarily interact, allows so called "malcreants" (he probably meant miscreants).....to invade that social space, steal identities, add hateful comments or incite criminal activity, or some kind of behavior perhaps morally or legally wrong. The very open nature of web 2.0 leads many to be suspicious of giving away too much information and thus undermines the very concept. As I critically evaluate several web 2.0 services I shall draw upon real life examples of the negative side, or inherent weakness of web 2.0 architectures and present the good and bad side of our new found web freedom.
Miscreants: "a vicious or depraved person; villain." dictionary.com
(accessed 11-11-2010)
Good work, Mr Brook. I did not realise that this was what you were studying. Are you looking to become a developer? I might be able to put some work your way... Andy. BTW, I didn't appreciate the gentle ben comment. I think i'd rather be the bear than the little wazzock kid.
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