Web 2.0 Basics



31 January 2006 A bit late in the day, you may say (but I’m lazy), I’m finally getting down to cataloguing some of the fascinating projects, tools, and initiatives that I’ve been discovering over the past twelve months in the “social web”, heart of what Tim O’Reilly has dubbed “Web 2.0″. Sure, I’d been using Flickr and Elgg for a while, had looked at some sites using tagging, had got my de.lici.ous account, had got my head around ‘folksonomies’ and faceted classification, and been vaguely aware of technologies such as Ajax and Ruby on Rails. But had never got the whole into intelligent perspective, never really been able to see the wood for the trees, to see past the technologies to the social implications of Web 2.0. I think I’m now (January 2006) just starting to get the hang of it … :-)

What to me seem the key concepts / trends happen to be things I’ve been thinking about for a while (actually, since I bought Andy Oram’s Peer-to-Peer in a Calgary bookshop back in May 2001): an erosion of the classical client-server / producer-consumer dichotomy in favour of a decentralised (or ‘omni-centralised’? Tela 2.0 sphaera infinita est cuius centrum est ubique, circumferencia nusquam) end-user-empowering peer-to-peer ‘web-as-platform’ in which every participant is potentially both publisher and reader; a shift from taxonomic to hypertextual ‘folksonomic’ thinking (remember Vannevar Bush’s Memex? and Ted Nelson’s Xanadu?); semantics-driven web search based on tagging by fellow web users rather than on simple string-search; a move away, in information architecture, from the replication of real-world structures towards emergent new structures; a digital ‘gift economy’ (free and open source software, collaborative wikis, commons-based peer production, etc)

The sub-menu to the right has listings of selected Web 2.0 applications. It’s probably a criminal misuse of my time to be compiling these lists; but there’s a Linnaean obsessiveness in me that compels me to do so. Compels me to map out the Web 2.0 territory, to try to get a grasp of what’s going on, and where the Web is heading. I’ve signed up for accounts with many of the applications listed in these pages, tested them out, tried to get a feel for which I like best and why. That’s a big task; and I really don’t have the time to review and annotate them all (and, given the sheer numbers, there are many I’ve looked at that, weeks on, I can remember absolutely nothing about). So please excuse the skeletal and unhelpful listing.

“if [Web 2.0] is the answer then we are clearly asking the wrong question”

Post scriptum, July 2007 Have just read Bill Thompson’s intelligent and sobering assessment of Web 2.0 [t.b.c.]

Web 2.0 marks the dictatorship of the presentation layer, a triumph of appearance over architecture that any good computer scientist will instantly recognise and dismiss. Javascript and XML cannot deliver the stability, scalability or effective resource discovery that we need, and nothing that is being done today in Web 2.0 has any long-term applicability to solving the problems of turning the network from a series of tubes connecting processors into a distributed computing environment.

Bill Thompson, ‘How to Live in Interesting Times: Lecture to Bath University Computer Science Society, November 8, 2006′. Accessed 26 July 2007 at:
» http://www.andfinally.com/talks/0611bath/bathlecture.htm