2.0 Wit Web 2.0
A few days ago there was an interesting discussion on LinkedIn’s “Travel 2.0″ group about what the buzzword “Web 2.0″ really means and how useful it is.
Here I adapt my own contribution to that discussion:-
Tim O’Reilly, who originally coined the term in 2004, said Web 2.0 is “a transformative force that’s propelling companies across all industries towards a new way of doing business characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects”.
“Web 2.0” is essentially a more interactive version of “Web 1.0”, allowing users to not only retrieve information, but also react to it, contribute to it, syndicate it, tag it, bookmark it, define it, control it, and create it.
Elements of Web 2.0 existed before 2004 and even before the dot com crash in 2001. In fact, many of the survivors of the bursting of the bubble had already woken up to the benefits of O’Reilly’s “user participation, openness, and network effects”.
For example, in 2001, Kerr wrote: “[If] you can build a more loyal community which feels a sense of ownership and collaboration with the website’s owners [you will be] ideally placed for future marketing activities.”
O’Reilly learned lessons from the surviving business models of Web 1.0 and suggested that the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies were related to:-
- “Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- “Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them [network effects]
- “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”
He notes, however, that a pure-play online organisation may be more likely succeed by specialising in one or two of these competencies rather than generalise in all them.
Web 2.0 is manifest in the following technologies, as listed by Wikipedia:-
- Folksonomies, which includes collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging
- Syndication, aggregation and notification of data in RSS or Atom feeds
- Mashups, which is merged content from client- and server-side sources
- Weblog-publishing tools
- Wiki or forum software, to support user-generated content
- Cascading Style Sheets, which aid in the separation of presentation and content
- Microformats extending pages with additional semantics
- REST and/or XML- and/or JSON-based application programming interface (API)
- Semantically valid XHTML and HTML
Despite all of that (or perhaps because of it), there is some disagreement in the online community, including LinkedIn, about the usefulness of the term “Web 2.0”. Even O’Reilly indicated in 2007 that Web 2.0 was “a pretty crappy name for what’s happening”.
“Web 2.0” for me is any web-based media characterised by O’Reilly’s “user participation, openness, and network effects”.
Why don’t you visit LinkedIn and connect with me. 
While you’re there, join the “Friends of the Pacific Asia Travel Association”, “PATA’s Sustainable Tourism Wiki”, and “Travel 2.0″ groups.
Some sources:
‘O’Reilly Radar Report on Web 2.0′, 2006
Kerr, Mark, ‘Tips and Tricks for Website Managers’, Chapter 6, “Marketing and Promotion”, ASLIB-IMI, 2001.
O’Reilly, T, ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, (www.oreillynet.com|leo://plh/http%3A*3*3www%2Eoreillynet%2Ecom/I1BT?_t=tracking_disc), September 30, 2005
Comment # 50 (October 5, 2007) on a blog post by Jason Calacanis entitled “Web 3.0, the “official” definition”, October 3, 2007 (http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2138/1945)
