Take Two

THE WEB’S SECOND COMING

Understanding the basics of Web 2.0.

By Lee Gimpel

With all the talk of “Web 2.0,” you might think that the good old World Wide Web had spun itself a chrysalis, shed its skin and become a fantastic new beast. In a way it has—although it’s certainly not the same sort of instant upgrade that happens when you move from one version of a software program to a newer one. No one stamped a “Version 1.0” on the online world of the 1990s; the 2.0 moniker O’Reilly Media coined in 2004 is meant to describe the evolution (rather than an overnight revolution) in how the web works and how users interact with it and each other. In many cases, Web 2.0 may only seem marginally different or better than its 1.0 incarnation; you could, for example, have kept an online journal that you updated frequently five years ago, but doing so would have been more cumbersome than simply using one of the many ready-to-go blog platforms that proliferate today (and are a cornerstone of Web 2.0). Unfortunately, a fair amount of debate and confusion exists about what defines Web 2.0. There may not be hard and fast rules as to what Web 2.0 is, but here are a few introductory terms and technologies that are crucial to understanding it.

PARTICIPATION: It used to be that a user’s interactions with a website were largely limited to clicking on links created by the site’s designer. Now, it’s common for users to also create content—to be, in essence, not just readers, but writers as well. This is seen with applications like wikis, notably Wikipedia, a compendium of encyclopedic knowledge that anyone can add to or edit.

SHARING: Blogs have flourished, and they make it very easy to share one’s thoughts—and those of others—through a cross-pollination of links. Blogs are powered by XML and RSS—the technologies that allow you to subscribe to news feeds from a site as well as customize pages like My Yahoo! In addition, the larger idea of sharing knowledge has continued to fuel the open source movement, where armies of volunteers create free soft ware, from specialized, consumer-focused programs to the kind of operating systems that power web servers.

NETWORK AS PLATFORM: Where there used to be a divide between “using the internet” and “using a desktop application,” the two have begun to merge in a meaningful way. Rather than simply use an internet browser to perhaps do online research and then go back to a “regular” program like Word to type up a report, Web 2.0 technologies have fused the two. Now many programs from word processing to spreadsheets and even Customer Relationship Management can be accessed and used solely through an internet browser.