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WEB 2.0 - What is it?

Posted 6 October 2006 at 8:00AM by Martin Faux in Doing business online

On Tuesday I went to an event hosted by Agency.com about social networking and social media. One of the slides included a definition for Web 2.0 but didn't fully explain it for me. So if you've heard the term, but never quite grasped what it is, here's my take.

As 2.0 suggests, a previous version of the web must exist. If you look to wikipedia for an answer, it describes its predecessor as websites that are unable to exchange information or content with other sites or applications and are effectively static, i.e. their content rarely if ever changes.

So sites that are WEB 2.0 allow the end user to have some form of online experience/interaction through using the site. To understand this it's best to look at a few examples:

• Wikipedia - an online encyclopaedia that allows anyone to edit it's content. The technology used is known as a Wiki.
• Del.icio.us - a site for saving links to your favourite articles, blogs, music and basically anything on the web and sharing them with your family and friends. This is known as a social bookmarking site.
• English cut - Thomas Mahon a Savile Row tailor using a blog to communicate what he's up to, allowing readers to interact by adding comments against his posts.
• MySpace - allows the creation of a personalised page with photos, music and more. Makes use of blogs and forums to allow discussion and comment. This is an example of social networking.

There are an increasing number of examples of Web 2.0 websites and I hope these examples give some indication of the range of uses of interactive websites.

Tags: social media, social networking, web 1.0, web 2.0, web 3.0, wikipedia

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