Web 2.0: Introduction

At the CSW XML Sum­mer School this year I gave a talk on Web 2.0, in the Trends and Tran­si­ents track. I’ve been pon­der­ing wheth­er to write it up as a series of post­ings or not; there’s so much hype and inform­a­tion around Web 2.0 that many people are bored silly with it now. I decided it’s prob­ably worth­while since I found some ways of organ­iz­ing the fea­tures com­monly asso­ci­ated with Web 2.0 that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

I’ve cre­ated a series of posts, of which this is the first. The links will become act­ive as I pub­lish the posts.

1. Buzzwords
2. Social and Collaboration
3. Tech­nic­al
4. Pro­cess
5. Issues

The big thing about Web 2.0 is the concept that lots of people want to have a say, and that many of them have some­thing valu­able to say. The idea is that sys­tems that give people a voice, and that enable them to take part in dis­cus­sions, have value. It’s no longer the case that only spe­cial­ists or celebrit­ies can have their opin­ions pub­lished, ordin­ary people can too. This idea that users can cre­ate the con­tent that oth­er users read or view has its detract­ors of course, but they tend to be out­numbered by the pro­ponents (or is it just that the pro­ponents are louder?).

The mar­ket­ing hype tends to over­shad­ow everything of course, and now we’re get­ting into the silly sea­son where every new idea is labelled with its own Web x.x vari­ant. Pretty soon we’ll be repla­cing the num­ber and append­ing the year, just like happened with oper­at­ing sys­tems, then with names taken from obscure or made-up lan­guages. Web 2.0 as a fea­ture set is, how­ever, worthy of atten­tion, even if the mar­ket­ing hype gets a bit much.

I’m not going to dis­cuss new devel­op­ments such as Google’s OpenSo­cial API in this series; it’s too new for me to be able to say any­thing use­ful on wheth­er it will change the big pic­ture, or just the details.

If you’re look­ing for a pub­lic­a­tion with a lot of detail, try O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Radar Report. It’s expens­ive, but it has a lot of mater­i­al and ref­er­ences in it, as well as recom­mend­a­tions for best prac­tices. Worth read­ing if you have to make bet-the-com­pany busi­ness decisions about this stuff.