How Web 2.0 is reshaping information and its management.
Nomenclature and Beyond
Web 2.0 is another title, in a long line of titles, taking advantage of the feel good factor attached to a second home coming. It is the ideal comeback name for the resurrection of the internet after the Dot-Com burst when all gloom and doom was forecast for the web.
Officially, a name coined by Tim O'Reily, it was gradually popularized by the mainstream media and helped spawn many suffixed version 2s in its wake.
Web2.0, and all its surrounding context and its transition from web1.0, deal with one thing, information and its flow. A commodity since early on in Human history, Information has been constantly traded. From word of mouth to written form, from simple words to complex diagrams; information and the industry around it reflect the evolution of the Human race.
The arrival of the Personal Computer; powerful, yet completely subversive to human inputs, was a seminal event offering a single physical unit that could outperform humans in certain areas with amazing speed. Eventually, its single unit status, was the real hindrance to the aforementioned progress. Its real power would emerge only when more than one unit were combined or networked. Just as the true purpose and value of information lies in its flow – the device's value progressed as it started connecting to other devices. Enter the Web, or to be more precise Web 1.0.
Fundementally, as a way to collect and consume information, the initial internet era had content and relevance, but as an interactive medium, it needed better delivery mechanisms and better form. This state of the web where function was mismatched with form, and delivery meant dial-up, was the age of Web 1.0.
The WWW, was like the Wild Wild West at the start of the coast-to-coast migration in America, to borrow a real life example. As, in the west, the land became productive due to two main changes – Railroads and Settlers, similarly, Web 1.0 always had potential, but it is now, with Web2.0 that the potential is finally being realized.
The connectivity, accessibility and networking that the Rails provided, drove the settlers in, in the west, and similarly with Broadband and Terrabytes, Flash and Ajax, Social Worlds and Virtual worlds, Mashups and Wikis, Podcasts and WebCasts; the web is literally being defined and populated by its networked users... who are settling in droves.
In a way, Web 1.0 was a precursor - a laying down of the wires, protocols, systems, guidelines and possibilities, and Web 2.0 is the realization of those possibilities; where instantaneous connection, communication and collaboration are its sine qua non.
