Vat Ist Web 2.0?

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Aight. The following market-driven, techno-dribbling is sponsored by smashmyipod.com, ( see also smashmyxbox.com, smashmyps3.com, smashmyrevolution.com ). If I had an ipod, and I chose to smash it, I would choose smashmyipod.com. Web 2.0 then, is either a new era of ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ – or the ghastly hot air filling up the next dot com bubble, depending on who you speak to at the party. Popularised by Tim O Reilly ( he whose company dominates IT book shelves ), ‘Web 2.0’ is simply an attempt to define some of the unique properties of the net software and net practices we’ve been delivered via the development wave of the last few years. Some of us who live in filing cabinets, just get a bit too carried away with it.

From the horse’s mouth, aka Tim O’ Reilly, we get the following descriptions of web 2.0 characteristics >>
* Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
* Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
* Trusting users as co-developers
* Harnessing collective intelligence
* Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
* Software above the level of a single device
* Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

On the ground, or the mouse-click, this might help explain the huge success of collaborative projects such as the massively sprawling co-edited encyclopedia that is Wikipedia ( put an entry in there yourself ), or help describe the shift from static webpages to dynamic webpages – pages freshly updated from database driven infrastructures such as ‘content management systems’, wikis, or the automated publishing juggernaut that is ‘blogging software’. From there we get practices such as ‘social bookmarking’ – exemplified by http://del.icio.us, the practice of ‘tagging‘ to describe content and define our own categories, media sharing sites such as flickr.com ( most popular photo sharing site, and trying it’s hardest to be 2.0 friendly) and a huge range of video sites hoping to do the same ( see 8 contenders reviewed ). And the long tail above refers to a belief that as media diversity continues to expand, a tail of niches long enough will eventually outweigh the mainstream beast at the other end. RSS and being able to subscribe to all of the above though, really compounds the benefits of the above. The BBC as with their documentaries, are succinct in explaining RSS.

The smarter software developers, the smarter media makers harness the collective intelligence of their audiences, understand community as an asset and benefit from the feedback and contributions of the many. Open source software is of course the prime example of this, but site developers are trying their best to facilitate collaborative efforts too. Look at the differences between friendster.com, the networking/ pick-up site which tried to control it’s users too much, or limit their expression – it’s marketshare got eaten by myspace.com which offered much more capacity for users to add media and customise their content. Hard to compete with millions of people adding content everyday.

Special shout out to a company struggling with all this 2.0 bizness – dear old SONY, who in overenthusiasm to prevent music sharing, embedded nasty software on millions of their CDs which secretly installed itself in dangerous ways on the music owner’s computer. And now they’ve been forced to recall millions of CDs, bless their hello kitty socks. ( see a timeline of the drama unfolding ) That’s ‘harness’, not ‘insult’ collective intelligence’… Oops~!

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