'Web 2.0' is a big, fat target of a term, but it's not just hype. Tim O'Reilly:
The reason that the term "Web 2.0" has been bandied about so much since Dale Dougherty came up with it a year and a half ago in a conference planning session (leading to our Web 2.0 Conference) is because it does capture the widespread sense that there's something qualitatively different about today's web. … Web 2.0 is the era when people have come to realize that it's not the software that enables the web that matters so much as the services that are delivered over the web. Web 1.0 was the era when people could think that Netscape (a software company) was the contender for the computer industry crown; Web 2.0 is the era when people are recognizing that leadership in the computer industry has passed from traditional software companies to a new kind of internet service company. The net has replaced the PC as the platform that matters, just as the PC replaced the mainframe and minicomputer.
Richard MacManus sums it up: 'what Web 2.0 means to me - everyday, non-technical people using Web technologies to enhance their own lives and businesses. The Web is an infrastructure, a foundation. What we create and build on the Web is what Web 2.0 is all about.' Richard quotes Ian Davis, 'Web 2.0 is an attitude not a technology', who goes on to say:
It’s about enabling and encouraging participation through open applications and services. By open I mean technically open with appropriate APIs but also, more importantly, socially open, with rights granted to use the content in new and exciting contexts. Of course the web has always been about participation, and would be nothing without it. It’s single greatest achievement, the networked hyperlink, encouraged participation from the start. Somehow, through the late nineties, the web lost contact with its roots and selfish interests took hold. This is why I think the Web 2.0 label is cunning: semantically it links us back to that original web and the ideals it championed, but at the same time it implies regeneration with a new version. Technology has moved on and it’s important that the social face of the web keeps pace.
Davis also talks about Web 2.0, the Semantic Web, XML and RDF. (And smushing — not come across that before! Got to pass smushing on to the OED.)
Incidentally, I then went on to read Ian Davis' most recent post, 'Searching Folksonomies':
… I don’t actually visit del.icio.us all that often. For me, del.icio.us is a write-only environment. I fire and forget. I’m bookmarking because I might one day want to go back and use find it but in practice I rarely do. I seem to remember that the last time I did try to find something I’d bookmarked, I couldn’t remember the tags I’d used or even if I had bookmarked it and I ended up with Google anyway. … the fact of the matter is that tagging systems and folksonomies are great for organising, but boy do they suck when it comes to finding something. Google still wins hands down …
He suggests a Web 2.0 solution — 'I want all the pages I’ve bookmarked to be searched and shown first whenever I search in Google. Maybe I could do this as an extension to Google desktop, but a better solution would be for Google to allow me to register my RSS feeds with them. Then, they could subscribe to my feeds to learn what I’ve recently read or bookmarked and show those at the top of any search results. That would be extremely cool and infinitely useful!'
And by association, this: I haven't yet been able to import my del.icio.us bookmarks into Yahoo's My Web. Despite following the instructions, I always arrive at an error page: 'Sorry, we were unable to detect a valid feed'. Unless, that is, I use a backup from several months ago: 850 bookmarks as opposed to nearly 2000. Is there an upper limit to how many bookmarks My Web can import at one time?
