What is 'Web 2.0' ?

Web 2.0 is a term used to describe the nature of the internet since the the early 2000's. It is meant to imply an improvement over what was thought of as Web 1.0. What this means to me is specifically that there has been a fundamental shift in the ways and in the frequency of internet use over the past decade. The most significant of these changes is in the way we use the web to interact socially, which has also had an impact on the way news of the world is disseminated and absorbed.

With the birth of the blogosphere, Myspace, Facebook and Twitter, the web (web 2.0) has become a dynamic realm where everyone who wishes to have a voice in the world can do so easily. And that is really what separates web 2.0 from web 1.0, this idea of 'easy'. With technological improvements adding to the speed of personal computers, the amazing growth of server farms, and the near exponential increase in bandwidth, in combination with the websites mentioned earlier, normal, non-techy people now have a medium for creating web based content that runs the gamut from the ridiculous to the extremely topical. This is significant because back int the web 1.0 days, in order to put even a single thought on the world wide web, one had to know how to build a website, which meant you had to understand how to purchase a domaine name, then buy server space, then choose an ftp program and then learn how to code in html, all of this in order to put 'Hello World' on the front page of a site called www.anynamehere.com. Only now, because of the technological advantages and because of the software upgrades, this method for creating content on the web has been placed behind a curtain and away from a shy public. The average person won't ever know what's going on in the background and thus the web appears open, inviting, and easy to use.

With web 1.0 I we had sites like Geocities, and Tripod where we could create a personal web page. These were not necessarily difficult to use, and I would say they were every bit the same as blogs are today. Technology however is not the only thing that differentiates web 2.0 from web 1.0. Like I said, there really is not much difference between a site I might have had hosted on Geocities to a site like Blogspot. The difference is in how we, as internet users, have begun to trust the web as primary source for our information. In 1997 it would have been difficult to trust a personal website as being the authority on anything because the precedent just hadn't been established. But now, 13 years later we go to the web first, before even thinking about turning on the television. In this way web 2.0 represents a shift in how we choose to be informed and even entertained.

Basically web 2.0 is a term used to describe the web as we have come to know it for more than ten years. A place where, when you use the term -online community- you no longer use the air quotes to qualify your statement, because true communities are being built, maintained, and growing in the cloud. A place where not just techno-nerd-geekophiles are updating static content on a website once a week or even once a day, but where my grandmother comments on a picture of her grandson only minutes after I upload it directly from my web enabled camera. Really, web 2.0 is just a term used to describe the web that all of us have always imagined. Only, now technology and prevailing attitudes are beginning to align with the initial visions of those that created the web in the first place.