Web 2.what?

Posted on October 25, 2007 by Brian Douglas

Ok, by now if you have spent at least 20 minutes on the Internet in the past year you’ve heard of Web 2.0. Of course, unless you are a technologist you probably are still wondering what the heck it is (and the truth is some technologists secretly wonder too.) It’s certainly a term that itself conveys no real meaning.

There are lots of good sites out there explaining the origin of the term, what it means from that author’s perspective, what it means to the economy or different sectors of the economy, blah, blah, blah. What you really want to know is – what does it mean for YOU? Well here is the answer, served up to you on a digital silver platter, in bite sized pieces, just the way you like it:

Web 2.0 is about enabling YOU to share thoughts, information, ideas, and opinions easily with others, and in the process, it became about US.

Did you ever try to create a web site in the old days? You had the 842 page HTML for Bozos manual, you read the first chapter and were off and running. You probably managed to launch a page about yourself that if you were lucky had your picture and your name. If you were really advanced, you posted an audio file of you karaoke-ing to a Prince song. And then you gave up. All the interesting thoughts you wanted to share, all those great moments on home video, opinions about the topics of the day, all remain bottled up because that first version of web publishing was just too darn hard. Enter Web 2.0.

Like to write or want to share your perspective on life – write a blog or create a MySpace site. It’s free and easy. Have a dog that does great impersonations of former Presidents? – post it to youtube.com. Post a new clip each week and create a channel. Want to share all that knowledge you have built up about growing onions in northern climates – join a wiki about it. And that’s the thing – this explosion of web publishing has not just led to information sharing, it’s led to communities. Vibrant online communities where people at anytime and from anyplace interact about everything you can imagine.

My wife writes a blog about motherhood. Now, I happen to think she is brilliant and an amazing writer, but I am still astonished that she has readers from all over the world, and after a year of this – they KNOW each other. They know about each other’s kids. They read and comment on each other’s blogs and know about each others highs and lows. They have never met and probably never will, but they are a community. And that’s what we all want, right – to be known somehow? That’s the beauty and power of Web 2.0.

Comments

One Response to “Web 2.what?”

Mark G on December 11th, 2007 10:19 pm

I enjoyed reading your post Mr. Douglas.

It’s fascinating to see web 2.0 in action with our upcoming Presidential election. Youtube debates seem to be getting more young people engaged in politics, and I think most, if not all, of the Presidential candidates have blogs.

An interesting website with a decent list of links of sites that are taking advantage of 2.0 technology is www.go2web20.net

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