Web 2.0 is Evolution

Web 2.0 is really amazing. It is changing a lot of things, all based upon how we interact with our computers. In a way, Web 2.0 is making the computer a more fluid extension of the human mind. Now, I know that scares some people, and for good reason. No one wants to be The Borg (well, some people do, but they are usually at conferences with lots of laytex on), but the amount of information and the ways in which we can harness it are necessarily limited by our innate humanity. This is not in and of itself a bad thing. We all need to unplug awhile. Remember, human beings evolved BEFORE the advent of computers. We invented them, and thus we are not necessarily adapted to the needs of a machine. Go figure.

But data is power, right? With this in mind it only makes sense that we should, as a species, manage it the best that we can. I know my tone sounds a little high here, and perhaps a little much, but humanity has struggled with knowledge and how to control and manage it since the first people began to write. As the methods of information and retention evolve (say, from papyrus reeds to paper and then to data on chips) so do the methods for managing it. It has to. In a way -- and again, I apologize for the tone – because writing and human knowledge are born of human minds, it only makes sense that the way they are managed should, too.

Tim O'Reilly, one of the guys heavily responsible for coining the term Web 2.0, wrote up a little “chart” of some things that were representative of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. On the left you'll find the original/Web 1.0 sites/ideas, and their respective evolution after the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. I think it's useful, and I'm going to reproduce it below:


Web 1.0 <---------------------> Web 2.0

DoubleClick ----> Google AdSense

Ofoto ----> Flickr

Akamai ----> BitTorrent

mp3.com ----> Napster

Britannica Online ----> Wikipedia

personal websites ----> blogging

evite ----> upcoming.org and EVDB

domain name speculation ----> search engine optimization

page views ----> cost per click

screen scraping ----> web services

publishing ----> participation

content management systems ----> wikis

directories (taxonomy) ----> tagging ("folksonomy")

stickiness ----> syndication


Much of Web 2.0 doesn't revolve around the old paradigm of something having a hard boundary. Instead, much of Web 2.0 can be thought of a using something akin to a gravitational core. Many times this core can be thought of as a set of principles and/or practices that tie together a number of similar sites that demonstrate some or all of those principles. In other words the Web 2.0 concept is intended to function as a core “set of principles and practices” that apply to common threads and tendencies observed across many different technologies. Some sites will be more adherent to those ideals, and thus you will have varying degrees of distance from the ideological core. Despite this rough guideline, there has been little consensus about where 1.0 ends and 2.0 begins.

(on a side note, I tried to format the list in a really neat table format, but Blogger apparently *doesn't* support tables. What's up with that?!)