Wait a second, Web 3.0??!!

Web 1.0 was the good old web of the 1990s. In those times, all client-side changes were the result of a server round-trip. The Internet was ramping up in popularity

Web 2.0 has been a little more than just a technological evolution. The staple of Web 2.0 has been the emergence of social media (Internet users creating most of the content), powered by mature technologies (DHTML, Ajax) on somewhat stable web browsers.

According to a recent article:

Web 3.0 is not a revolution either. It is yet another technological evolution destined to provide users with an even better experience, both online and offline. Web 3.0 will lead to the blurring of that artificial wall between the web browser and the desktop, providing a full — but secure — integration with devices and services exposed by the operating system.

Web 3.0 is just starting. Look around you and you’ll see that Web 3.0 technologies are slowly cropping up everywhere on the web. Google Gears, one of the first Web 3.0 technologies, allows you to build web applications that can work offline. Thanks to Google Gears, applications such as Remember The Milk, an online to-do list and task management system, can now work offline. The Adobe Flash player already allows application developers limited access to the webcam and the microphone. Soon, we’ll also be able to drag and drop files from the desktop to a web browser (see this Java Upload Applet for an example using the Java technology)

Another aspect of Web 3.0 is the use of stunning graphics, smooth animations, high definition audio and video, 3D, etc. and all of this inside a web browser!

If so, I am looking forward to it!

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?!)

Welcome to Web 2.Wow!

This is my first post to this new blog, and I want to welcome you, and thanks for reading. I aim to explore the world of web 2.0 here, a new phenomenon in the evolution of the Internet. If you are not familiar with Web 2.0, Wikipedia describes it as:

The phrase Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second-generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.

I agree with much of this definition, which would make sense, since Wikipedia itself could be described as a result/example of Web 2.0! It's sites like Wikipedia that really inspired me to start this blog -- the usability and incredible functionality have been impressive and I feel like writing about it. I cannot tell you how many times I've needed a quick reference point on some arcane point and Wikipedia was there to shed some light on the subject.

Through this blog I will not only cover new events in the Web 2.0 world, but I will also explore new things for you, the reader. This will include covering new sites, and even demonstrating/experimenting with their functions. All my results will be documented here, with comments turned on, so that I can take feedback about the sites I am visiting, the functions I play with, and listen to anything else you've got to say.

On that note, I'll let you know some of my fave Web 2.0 sites right off the bat, as these will likely be covered first, and if I am accused of having a bias, I want to own up to it right away!

Digg: Digg is a community-based popularity website with an emphasis on technology and science articles, recently expanding to a broader range of categories such as politics and entertainment. It combines social bookmarking, blogging, and syndication with a form of non-hierarchical, democratic editorial control.}

Reddit: reddit is a social news website where users can post links to content on the web. Other users may then vote the posted links up or down, causing them to appear more or less prominently on the reddit home page.}

Wikipedia: Wikipedia is a multilingual, web-based, free content encyclopedia project, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization.

Delicious: The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

Yelp: Yelp is a company that operates a social networking and user review website by the same name.

Thanks again for reading, and check back later for more good stuff!