“WHAT IN THE WORLD WIDE WEB IS 2.0? Another Berk’sNotes®”

Are you ready for 2.0? Me neither. Hold on to your keyboards. Here we go:

WEB 2.0 (2004–present)
This 2nd generation was “read-write” (Berners-Lee), social Web with interaction, active participation, and content generation. The term was coined by Darcy DiNucci (1999). It’s been called the “participatory Web” compared to Web 1.0 as the “Web-as-information source” (Decrem, 2006). It had a user-centered design to foster interactive information sharing so that users could be contributors, producers, and consumers. Examples include web applications, social media, video sharing, blogs, wikis, mashups, and folksonomies (categorizing content through tags) (see Wikipedia on Web 2.0).

USER-ORIENTED AND INTERACTIVE: Encyclopedia Britannica Online was replaced with Wikipedia, which relies on users (collectively) to constantly and quickly generate content. Users can write their own content and comment on others’ content through blogs, network groups, and social media. They can post their own social and professional profiles for others to review and create pages to advertise their businesses, events, and products on these sites. Users can even build their own social network with Ning. Other interactive services include Skype, online banking, and job and employee searching on LinkedIn and many other sites.

RELIANCE ON USER CONTRIBUTIONS: Some Webs rely almost entirely on user contributions, such as (a) social (Facebook, Twitter, Digg) and professional networks (LinkedIn), which permit users to create and share audio, video, text, and multimedia content, (b) photo (Flickr) and video (Flickr, YouTube) distribution and sharing sites, and (c) professional listservs. Without these contributions, most of these sites might vanish into cyber-air.

BOTTOM LINE: Overall, Web 2.0 facilitates creativity, information sharing and dissemination, dynamic, ever-changing content, and collaboration which has led to Web-based communities and the hosted services listed above. It radically changed the way people use the Internet, from 1-way to every which-way.

Tomorrow I’ll examine some of the criticisms of Web 2.0, and then on to Web 3.0.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC

“WHAT IN THE WORLD WIDE WEB IS 1.0? Another Berk’sNotes®”

Are you ready for 1.0? Me neither. Here’s what I missed while I was in the storm drain. Where were you? Inkling, maybe?

WEB 1.0 (1991–2003)
This 1st generation was “read-only” (Berners-Lee, founder of WWW), 1-way flow of information for passive viewing. Websites were business-oriented, static pages intended as information sources (see Wikipedia on Web 1.0). They provided content to read, such as Encyclopedia Britannica Online, or products to purchase using Shopping Carts, such as Amazon.

Most institutional sites, such as your college, university, or business, and personal sites followed this mold where the user opened the site to obtain information and typically signed in with a user name and password. That was usually the only activity requested of the user. (NOTE: Amazon did provide readers the chance to write and post reviews on the site. Many other catalogue-type sites did not.)

A major shift in Web design and use occurred with Web 2.0. That deserves its own blog. Stay tuned.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 Ronald A. Berk, LLC