Introduction
If you share your pictures on Flickr, you are an active user of Web 2.0. If you have a Facebook or MySpace page, download video from YouTube, subscribe to RSS feeds, or use Wikipedia, you are also involving yourself in Web 2.0. Web 2.0 illustrates a new generation of the web, designed around content created by users.
Hi-Tech people explain Web 2.0 sites as ‘collaborative’, ‘participatory and interactive’, ‘personalized’, or ‘community-driven’ because these sites allow people to go beyond simply reading content supplied by others. People can proactively share their interests and ideas with other site visitors.
Blogs, podcasts, dating sites, social and business networks, and mashup sites combining data from various sites, are all part of Web 2.0. This is in complete contrast to Web 1.0, which is still the ‘standard’ that most sites correspond to. These sites solely rely on content that is created by the site owner and provide few or no opportunities for the site visitor to enter into a dialogue or to add their own content. Online banking, e-tail stores, and most corporate web sites are good examples of the Web 1.0 world.
Web 2.0 also allows you to find the way through sites in various other ways which can provide a more participatory experience through rich, interactive text and image displays like drop down menus. Such interactive elements might become visible anywhere on the screen, in fly in or pop-up windows, you may see rollover images that transform when you move the mouse over them, and dynamic scrolling menus.
All of these features allow you to communicate with the web site and its owner far more than the click-boxes, buttons and hyperlinks of the typical Web 1.0 site will. Even if you do not think you are visiting a Web 2.0 web site, you may be viewing a page enhanced with Web 2.0 technologies. Companies have started to experiment with next-generation web sites using many of these features. Google is a leading example of a company that uses the features and functions of Web 2.0 extensively.
Web 2.0 sites are essentially about making it easy and convenient for web users to share information and build communities of interest, without the need for those users to have any understanding of programming or website development.
Web 2.0 sites use powerful new technologies that put more intelligence into the browser in order to enhance and develop the range of what you can see as well as hear on the site.
Perhaps the most significant of these technologies for adding power to the browser is AJAX, short for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. JavaScript is a programming language that can control functions on your system, whilst XML refers to a group of standards for sharing data among different applications. In this perspective, ‘asynchronous’ means the web page can automatically download additional information or updates after the page itself has finished loading - a typical example would be a stock ticker or soccer scores. These sites do not need you to click on a refresh button or take any other action to keep the content current, as a Web 1.0 site would.

1 What Is Web 2.0?
The formal description of Web 2.0 is ‘the network as a platform, spanning all connected devices. Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform and its connectivity, those which are delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it. These people are constantly consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while offering their own data and services in a form that permits remixing by others, creating network effects through an architecture of participation and going beyond the page restrictions of Web 1.0 to deliver varied and increasingly rich user experiences.’
A simpler description of Web 2.0 is that it is the Read and Write web, an ever-proliferating onslaught of web sites that permit users to publish their writings, their podcasts, their graphics, their videos, their thoughts, and basically, their every waking moment.
In previous times and web incarnations, people retrieved information from the web and the lucky few who knew HTML and had access to a web site could publish information to be shared.
With the arrival of new programming languages and the simplicity with which users can now upload all kinds of information, the web has become an interactive experience and a voice for all to share their thoughts, opinions and personal lives. The Web is no longer an inactive area, but an active participant-driven network of social communication and interaction.
Content on the web is no longer fixed. Web users can:
• comment on web pages for their own or others use
• create social networking sites
• maintain on-line calendars and to-do lists
• create blogs and wikis
• share favorite web sites
• manage group word processing and spreadsheet projects
• upload and edit photos, videos and PowerPoint presentations
and so much more. Every day new tools are emerging on the web.

2 Web 1.0 Vs Web 2.0
As a matter of fact, Web 2.0 is really a very complicated thing if we were to define it. What exactly is Web 2.0? A new change in the way we utilize the Internet or some new technology that has been just invented? These answers will differ from person to person. What my understanding would be might be different from what is understood by another individual.
Lots of people may define Web 2.0 as a set of technologies that are fundamentally linked with phrases like wikis, RSS feeds, podcast, blogs and much more. These technologies make it easier and make the Web a more advance platform where we all have the capability to add and edit information space. That was the brief understanding of Web 2.0. However, a longer answer would definitely be much more complicated and confusing for those who are not really well versed with Internet or the Web.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who is behind the invention of the Web, is having a feel of déjà vu with regards to Web 2.0. When he was asked the difference between Web 2.0 and Web 1.0, he replied that Web 1.0 is what links people and it is an interactive space. He also said that he thinks Web 2.0 is something people do not even understand and that it is complicating. He also feels that is Web 2.0 means having podcasts and blogs, then that is what Web is meant to do in the first place. He also says that using Web 2.0 is utilizing the principles that have been invented by Web 1.0.
Therefore, to really understand the methodology of Sir Tim, the history of the progress of the Web has to be studied and analyzed. In fact, Sir Tim has gone into depth about this topic in his book titled, ‘Weaving the Web’. Furthermore, Sir Tim’s initial notion was about a common workstation where every single thing is linked to everything else in a sole, universal information space. And his idea was that we all will have the capability to edit and add information to this space.
Nevertheless, despite a series of working ‘ports’ to other machines from the original development computer, the capability to edit through the Web client was not incorporated in order to speed up the process of adoption within CERN. This attitude to the ‘edit’ function persisted throughout all subsequent Web browser developments such as Viola and Mosaic (which eventually became the Netscape browser). Remarkably, this left people thinking of the Web as a medium through which a relatively small number of people published whilst the majority only browsed or ‘surfed’, but it is probably more accurate to picture this juncture as a fork in the road of the technology's development, one which has meant that the original pathway has only recently been rejoined.
Dale Dougherty, the vice-president of O’Reilly Media Inc is the one who officially coined the phrase Web 2.0. O’Reilly Media Inc is a company that deals with conferences that are technology based and books that are of great quality. The team of O’Reilly Media Inc wanted to summarize the feeling that the Web was even more vital in spite of a sudden increase and then a bust in the dot-com field. They also pin-pointed that all those who had survived the dot-com smash were generally stronger because of the experiences they had gone through. In addition, it was also understood that all those had survived had a few similarity. Along these lines, it is important to take note that the term Web 2.0 was just coined as an effort to portray something that is completely ambiguous.
Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media Inc followed this issue up with a thesis that is really popular, titled, ‘What is Web 2.0? : Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’. This thesis summarizes what O’Reilly Media Inc means by Web 2.0. You need to remember that this thesis is an attempt to point out some detailed features that can be utilized to acknowledge a specific group of companies and technologies that are pioneering, collectively with business distinctiveness.
In spite of these fairly limited boundaries, the paper did discover certain features that have subsequently come to be connected with social software technologies, such as participation, the user as contributor, connecting the power of the crowd, rich user experiences and much more. As Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out, the capacity to execute this technology is all based on so-called ‘Web 1.0’ standards. In fact, it has just taken longer for it to be realized than was originally projected at the outset, that is all! From this point of view, ‘Web 2.0’ should not therefore be held up in opposition to ‘Web 1.0’, but should be seen as a result of a more fully integrated web that is very squarely based on Web 1.0 technology and standards.
This difference is important to comprehend where the boundaries are between ‘the Web’, as a set of technologies, and ‘Web 2.0’, which is the effort to conceptualize the importance of a set of effects that are permitted and enabled by those Web technologies. Comprehending this difference helps us to think more clearly about the issues that are thrown up by both the technologies and the results of the technologies. And this helps us to better understand why something might be classed as Web 2.0 or not. In order to be able to discuss and address the Web 2.0 issues that face higher education, or example, we need to have and be able to apply these conceptual tools in order to identify why something might be essential and whether or not we should act on it.
For example, in his original article Tim O'Reilly pinpoints what he believes to be features of successful Web 1.0 companies and the most interesting of the new applications. He did this in order to develop a set of concepts by which he was able to benchmark whether or not a company is Web 1.0 or Web 2.0. This was significant to him because of his concern that the Web 2.0 meme had become so widespread that companies were adopting it as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding of just what it meant. We can also take a look at the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 in this ‘meme-map’ below:
Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0
domain name speculation --> search engine
optimization
page views --> cost per click
screen scraping --> web services
mp3.com --> Napster
Akamai --> BitTorrent Britannica Online --> Wikipedia
DoubleClick --> Google AdSense
Ofoto --> Flickr
personal websites --> blogging
publishing --> participation
content management systems --> wikis
directories (taxonomy) --> tagging
(‘folksonomy’)
stickiness --> syndication

Implications Of Web 2.0
Web 2.0 forms is a methodology whereby large groups of people can join forces and exchange information, whilst reducing the significance of the computer itself as an information-delivery platform. When both the applications and the data that feed into them reside online, a variety of devices can function as information terminals, and that can be your smart phone, your music player, the computer you use today, and whatever computer you will use next year. Web 2.0 not only makes all this achievable, it also makes it easy on the pocket and easy to deploy.
Web 2.0 not only places the Internet user squarely at the very epicenter of digital events, it also provides that user with the means and power to create and manipulate data. In effect, Web 2.0 radically changes how we view and use the web. It actually creates a whole new internet in many ways.
Strengths of Web 2.0
Web 2.0 shifts computing from stand-alone computers and reduces software deployment as well as administrative costs. It also fosters the free exchange of information between different tools and groups of users. Web 2.0 encourages large-scale collaboration too. It facilitates new forms of problem-solving that can provide valuable ideas and insights.
Weaknesses of 2.0
The hype surrounding Web 2.0 can sometimes be pretty confusing. The vague nature of the term means that some people will use the term Web 2.0 almost as a means of attracting attention, regardless of the extent to which their offering really is dynamic, interactive, or built around accepted Web 2.0 protocols. As more and more Web 2.0 startups enter the marketplace, it is a fact that not all of them will survive. It is thus advisable to exercise due caution before making any substantial investment in a Web 2.0-based tool.
Web 2.0 Technologies
AJAX: An acronym derived from ‘Asynchronous JavaScript and XML.’ AJAX is an essential underlying technology that is used to create interactive Web applications. Ajax is what allows Web 2.0 sites to behave dynamically, so that Web 2.0 enabled sites feel more like computer programs than static web pages.
Atom: A format for the syndication of online content, atom functions as a newer alternative to RSS.

Blog: Initially derived from the word ‘weblog,’ a blog is a simple content website created with inexpensive self-publishing tools.
Mashups: Websites or applications that unite content from one or more sources.
RSS: Real Simple Syndication, RSS is a protocol that makes it easy for computer users to receive content from their favorite providers whenever the content is updated. Instead of having to remember to visit a website to read a favorite column, watch a video, or listen to an audio program, RSS lets a user subscribe to the content so it is delivered automatically. The flow of content the user receives is called an RSS feed.
Social media: A common term used to describe Web-based tools that harness the power of collaboration and group interaction.
Tags: User-generated keywords used to describe online content. Tags make it easier for both humans and search engines to find relevant and related information.
Wikis: A dynamic Web document that allows users to add, change, or edit the content displayed on the page. The user-created Wikipedia online encyclopedia is the most famous example.
XML: An abbreviation for ‘Extensible Markup Language,’ XML is a programming code for online data that preserves the structure and formatting of a digital document regardless of whatever application is used to read it. XML is an important enabling technology for RSS feeds.
Basic Requirements of Web 2.0 (People & Technology)
Hardware: Computers running Windows 98 or Mac OS 9 will not work well with Web 2.0 applications. Newer operating systems are therefore definitely recommended. Desktops or laptops should be able to run the latest Internet browsers and they should ideally have access to a broadband internet connection via DSL, T-1 lines, or WiFi.
Internet browsers: No matter what browser your employees prefer, whether it is Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera or Safari, everyone on your team should use the most up-to-date version available. Make sure they also have the latest multimedia plugins installed.
Project leader: A risk-tolerant team member who is not an Information Technology staffer to lead an effort to assess, deploy and evaluate a Web 2.0 technology.
An open mind: Web 2.0 buzzwords can be really complex. They also make it hard to recognize what Web 2.0 services can really do until you try them out. They are often no more than ‘jargon’ terms that were most probably coined to make someone look as if they just did something extraordinary! Do not therefore be scared or intimidated by Web 2.0 terminology.

Web 2.0 Services And Applications
There are a number of Web-based services and applications that display the essential fundamentals of the Web 2.0 concept. They are already being used to a certain extent in education. These are not really technologies as such, but services built using the building blocks of the technologies and open standards that underpin the Internet and the Web. These include blogs, wikis, and multimedia sharing services, content syndication, podcasting and content tagging services.
Many of these applications of Web technology are relatively mature, having been in use for a number of years, although new features and competencies are being added on a regular and continual basis. It is worth noting that many of these newer technologies are concatenations, meaning they make use of accessible services.
Blog
The term web-log or blog was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and refers to a simple webpage consisting of brief paragraphs of opinion, information, personal diary entries, or links that are called posts, arranged chronologically with the most recent first, in the style of an online journal. Most blogs also allow visitors to add a comment below a blog entry. This posting and commenting process contributes to the nature of blogging as an exchange of views in what Yale University law professor, Yochai Benkler, calls a ‘weighted conversation’ between a primary author and a group of secondary comment contributors who communicate to an unlimited number of readers. It also contributes to blogging's sense of immediacy, since blogs enable individuals to write to their Web pages in journalism time, that is hourly, daily or weekly, whereas the Web page culture that preceded it tended to be slower moving, which is less the equivalent of online reporting and more akin to an essay or dissertation.
Each post is normally ‘tagged’ with a keyword or two, permitting the subject of the post to be categorized within the system so that when the post becomes old it can be filed into a standard, theme-based menu system. Clicking on any post’s tag that you will most commonly find displayed below the post will take you to a list of other posts by the same author on the blogging software’s system that use the same tag. Linking is also an important part of blogging as it increases the conversational nature of the blogosphere and its sense of immediacy. It also helps to facilitate retrieval and referencing of information on different blogs but some of these are not without their own inherent problems:
The permalink is a permanent URL which is created by the blogging system and is permanently attached to a specific post. If however the item is moved within the database, as an example for archiving, the permalink stays the same. Critically, if the post is renamed or if the content is altered in any way, the permalink will also continue to remain unchanged. It means that there is no version control and utilizing a permalink does not guarantee that the content of a post is necessarily related to whatever the post title implies.
Trackback or pingback allows blogger A to inform another blogger B and that he or she has referenced or commented on one of blogger B’s posts. When blogger B gets the notification from blogger A that a trackback has been created, blogger B’s system automatically creates a record of the permalink of the referring post. Trackback only works when it is enabled on both the referring and referred blog site and in fact some users will consciously switch off the trackback facility due to its potential for misuse by intending blog spammers.
The blogroll is a list of links to other blogs that a particular blogger likes or finds useful. It is similar to a blog bookmark or favorites list.
Blog software also smoothes the progress of syndication in which information about the blog posts and entries (e.g. the headline) is made available to other software via RSS and increasingly through the use of Atom. This content is then aggregated into feeds and a variety of blog aggregators and specialist blog reading tools can also make use of these feeds.
The massive number of people engaged in blogging has given rise to its own term, blogosphere. Blogosphere is to express the sense of a whole world of bloggers functioning in their own environment. As technology has become more sophisticated, bloggers have begun to incorporate multimedia into their blogs and there are now photo-blogs, video blogs called vlogs and increasingly, bloggers can upload material directly from their mobile phones that is called mob-blogging.
Wikis
A wiki is a webpage or set of webpages that can be easily edited by anyone who is granted access to do so. Wikipedia’s popular success has meant that the notion of the wiki as a joint collaborative tool that makes the production of a group work possible is widely understood. Wiki pages have an edit button displayed on the screen and the user can click on this to access an easy-to-use online editing tool to modify or even delete the contents of the page in question. Simple hypertext-style linking between pages is generally utilized by the site to create a navigable set of pages.
Unlike blogs, wikis commonly have a history function which permits previous versions to be examined and also a rollback function, which restores previous versions. Proponents of the power of wikis cite the ease of use of the tools, their tremendous flexibility and open access as some of the many reasons why they are useful for group working.
There are unquestionably problems for systems that permit such a level of openness, and Wikipedia itself has suffered from problems of malicious editing and vandalism. On the other hand, there are also those who argue that acts of vandalism and mistakes are rectified quickly enough by professionals of work group wiki specialists that the risk is worth taking.
Tagging and social bookmarking
A tag is a keyword that is added to a digital object, for example to a website, picture or video clip to explain it, but not as part of a formal classification system. One of the first large-scale applications of tagging was seen with the initiation of Joshua Schacter’s del.icio.us website, which inaugurated the social bookmarking phenomenon.
Social bookmarking systems share a number of general features. They permit users to create lists of bookmarks or favorites and to store these centrally on a remote service rather than within their own web browser so that they can share them with other users of the system, hence the ‘social’ aspect. These bookmarks can also be tagged with keywords and a significant difference from the folder based categorization used in traditional browser-based bookmark lists is that a bookmark can belong in more than one category. For example, using tags, a photo of a tree could be categorized within the tree, nature and silver birch groupings.
The idea of tagging has been broadened far beyond mere text based website bookmarking so that services like Flickr use it for photos, YouTube for video and Odeo for podcasts. All these sites enable a wide variety of different digital artefacts to be socially tagged, and this is an idea that is continually being expanded. For example, the BBC’s Shared Tags project is an experimental service that permits members of the public to tag BBC News online items. An important and significant example within the context of higher education is Richard Cameron’s CiteULike, which is a free service to help academics to store, organize and share the academic papers that they are reading. Using this service, when you see a paper on the Web that interests you, you simply click a button and add it to your personal library.
CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so you do not have to type them in. The idea of tagging has been further widened to include what are called tag clouds, which are groups of tags or tag sets from a number of different users of a tagging service which collates and then highlights information about the frequency with which particular tags are used. This frequency information is often presented graphically as a cloud within which those tags that are the most popular are displayed in the largest text.
Large organizations are starting to discover the potential of these new tools and their potential applications for knowledge management across the enterprise. For example, IBM is investigating social bookmarking through their intranet-based DogEar tool.
The result of the widespread usage of tagging has been the rise of the ‘folksonomy’. Unfortunately, this term has not tended to be used consistently as yet and there is therefore some uncertainty about its real application. For now, it is enough to note that there is a difference between a folksonomy, which is a collection of tags created by an individual for their own personal use and a collabulary, which is a collective vocabulary.
Multimedia sharing
One of the most rigorously developed areas has been around sites and services that assist the storage and sharing of multimedia content. Well known examples include YouTube for video, Flickr for photographs and Odeo for podcasts. These popular services take the idea of the writeable Web, where users are not just consumers but are an active part of it, and apply it to the production of alternative types of digital Web content. They then enable this new content form on a massive scale. Factually speaking, millions of people now participate in the sharing and exchange of these forms of media by creating their own podcasts, videos and photos. This development has only been made possible by the widespread adoption of high quality but comparatively low cost digital media technology such as hand-held video cameras.
Audio blogging and podcasting
Podcasts are audio recordings, usually in MP3 format, of talks, interviews and lectures which can be played either on a desktop computer or on a wide range of handheld MP3 devices. Initially called audio blogs, they have their roots in pioneering efforts to add audio streams to early blogs. Once standards had settled down and Apple introduced the commercially successful iPod MP3 player and its related iTunes software, the process became more widely known as podcasting. However, even this term has enjoyed its share of controversy since it naturally suggests that only the Apple iPod will play these files. But in actual fact any MP3 player or PC with the requisite software can be used.
A more recent development has been the introduction of video podcasts, the name of which is sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast. Basically, this is the online delivery of video-on-demand clips that can be played on a PC or again on a suitable handheld player. The more recent versions of the Apple iPod, for example, are enabled for video playing.
A podcast is made by creating an MP3 format audio file using a voice recorder or similar device, and then uploading the file to a host server computer. After that, it is only a question of making the world aware of its existence through the use of RSS. This process adds a URL link to the audio file, as well as directions to the audio file’s location on the host server and into the RSS file.
Podcast listeners subscribe to the RSS feeds and receive information about new podcasts as they become available. Hence, distribution is reasonably simple. The harder part, as those who listen to a lot of podcasts will know only too well is to produce a good quality audio file. Podcasting is nevertheless becoming increasingly popular in education and recently there have been moves, for example, to establish a UK HE podcasting community which suggests that podcasting is not about to go away any time soon.
RSS and syndication
RSS is a family of formats which permit users to find out about updates to the content of RSS-enabled websites, blogs or podcasts without actually having to go and visit the site. Instead, information from the website is collected within a feed which uses the RSS format and this is then sent directly to the users computer through a process known as syndication.
In order to be able to use a feed, a prospective user must install a software tool known as an aggregator or feed reader onto their computer desktop. Once this has been completed, you as the user must now make up your mind which RSS feeds you want to receive and then subscribe to them. The client software will then periodically check for updates to the RSS feed and keep you informed of any modifications, updates, additions or alterations.
To be precisely accurate, RSS is an XML-based data format for websites that enables an exchange of files that include publishing information and summaries of the site’s contents. Indeed, in its initial manifestation, RSS was understood to stand for Rich Site Summary.
For a variety of historical reasons, there are somewhat confusingly a number of RSS formats, such as RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0 as well as RSS 2.0 and because of this, there are some concerns of incompatibility. It is worth noting, for example, that RSS 2.0 is not simply a later version of RSS 1.0, but is a totally different format.
As it has become more widely used for blog content syndication, in later versions RSS became known as Really Simple Syndication. The majority of blogging platforms and systems now create and publish these RSS feeds automatically and webpages and blogs regularly display small RSS icons and links that enable a quick registration process so that you can swiftly access the feed from the site.
In 2003, a new syndication system was suggested and developed under the name Atom in order to clear up some of the contradictions between RSS versions and the problems with the way they interoperate (or sometimes don’t!). This includes two standards, the Atom Syndication Format, an XML language used for Web feeds and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), a HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating Web resources.
There is, as you might expect, significant debate between proponents of RSS and Atom as to which is the best way forward for syndication. The two most important distinctions between the two are, firstly, that the development of Atom is taking place through a formal and open standards process within the IETF10 and secondly, that with Atom the definite content of the feed item’s encoding (technically known as the payload container) is more clearly defined. Atom can also support the enclosure of more than one podcast file at a time and so multiple file formats of the same podcast can be syndicated at the same time.
Newer web 2.0 services and applications
As has already been noted, there are a number of technology services that are often posited as being the best representation of Web 2.0 theory, encompassing everything that Web 2.0 is ‘really all about’. Nonetheless, one key feature of the whole Web 2.0 concept is its dynamism and ability to change almost overnight.
This it should be no surprise that there has been an outburst of new ideas, applications and start-up companies working on ways to broaden existing services in recent months. Some of these are likely to become more significant than others and some are certainly more likely to be more appropriate to education than others.
There is such an overflow of new services that it is quite difficult to keep track of what is available out there or to make sense of what each different provider or technology can actually do.
There are two ways of trying to cope with this understanding process.
Firstly, to make sense of what the service is trying to do in the notion of the overall Web 2.0 big ideas might work for you. Secondly, try to understand that as new services become accessible they can be classified roughly in terms of what they are designed to do, for example, aggregate user data, construct a social network and much more.

The Web As Platform
Like many important ideas and notions, Web 2.0 does not have a rigid limit but rather a gravitational core. You can envision Web 2.0 as a set of ideologies and practices that tie together a genuine solar system of sites that display some or all of those principles, all of which are moving around at a varying distance from that central focal point.
This is the core concept behind the theory that the Web should be seen as a platform, and that Web 2.0 is an increasingly important component of it.
For example, two of the initial Web 1.0 exemplars who were both involved in advertising, DoubleClick and Akamai, were both also pioneers in treating the web as a platform. People do not often think of it this way but ad serving was the first widely organized and distributed web service and the first widely deployed mashup.
Mashup is another term that has achieved popularity of late and is something that can be seen in action in the most unlikely of places. For example, every banner ad you see is a result of seamless cooperation between two websites, delivering an integrated page to a reader on yet another computer.
On the other hand, the initial pioneers like DoubleClick offered useful contrasts to what was then the accepted norm, thus enabling later entrants to push their own solutions to the problems of Web 1.0 even further.
In this ability to force widespread questions to be asked about what was possible and what was not, both DoubleClick and Akamai were Web 2.0 pioneers. They were not, of course, able to advance as far with developing these as-yet unrecognized concepts as we can now.
Netscape vs. Google
If Netscape was the archetypal Web 1.0 organization, then Google is most certainly the standard bearer for Web 2.0, if only because their respective IPOs were defining events for each era. So let's start with an assessment of these two companies and their relative positioning.
Netscape structured ‘the web as platform’ in terms of the old software paradigm and their flagship product was their web browser.
Furthermore, their approach was to use the authority bestowed on them by their dominance of the browser market to establish and control a market for high-priced complementary server products.
Their control over standards for demonstrating content and applications in the browser should in theory have given Netscape the kind of market strength that was already benefiting Microsoft in the PC market. Much as the relative inefficiency of early horse drawn carriages highlighted the new parameters established by the automobile whilst at the same time recognizing it as nothing more than a development of what had gone before, Netscape promoted a ‘webtop’ to replace the desktop and designed services that would populate that webtop with information updates and applets served up to the webtop by information suppliers who would buy Netscape servers.
However, at the end of the day, desktop and webtop technology and concepts came into direct conflict with one another, and the former, which was Microsoft’s ‘baby’ won the battle.
To draw a distinction, Google began its life as a native web application. It never sold or packaged any kind of goods in its early days, but rather, it delivered an online service with customers paying directly or indirectly for the use of that service. In that original Google business model, none of the trappings of the old ‘software for sale’ industry are present.
There were no scheduled software releases, just continuous development. There was no software licensing or ‘disks’ for sale, and customers only paid for usage. According to the Google model there was (and is) no porting to distinctive operational platforms for customers to run the software on their own equipment. Google is all about providing services that are offered by the software and systems that they have built, rather than selling the software itself. Indeed, Google relies on applications and utilities that no one outside the company will ever get to see.
Google therefore needs and demands operational proficiency levels that Netscape never needed, most of which might best be described as essential database management. Google is not just a compilation of software tools, it is a specialized database.
Without the data, the tools are useless and without the software the data is unmanageable. The power ‘leverage’ that was applied in the previous era of software licensing and control over APIs is irrelevant because the current software is never going to be distributed.
The only thing that matters is that it performs and that is has the capability to collect and manage the data, because without this the software is of little use. As a matter of fact, the value of the software is entirely and totally predicated on the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage.
Google's service is not the provision of a server per se, although it is delivered by a huge collection of internet servers. It is also not a browser, though it is experienced by the user community within their browsers. Nor does its flagship search service even host the content that it enables users to find. Much like a phone call, which happens not only on the phones at either end of the call but also on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser, search engine and destination content server. It is an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.
While both Netscape and Google could be explained as software companies, it is clear that Netscape belonged to the same software world as Lotus, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other companies that got their start in the 1980's software revolution.
However, Google's compatriots are other internet applications like eBay, Amazon, Napster, DoubleClick as well as Akamai.
DoubleClick vs. Overture and AdSense
Like Google, DoubleClick is an organization that most definitely belongs to the internet era.
It was (and arguably is) the crux of competency in data management and was a pioneer in web services long before web services even went by such a name. On the other hand, DoubleClick was almost inevitably restricted by its own business model, principally because it bought into the '90s idea that the web was about publishing and not about participation. This essentially meant that the advertisers and not the consumers ought to call the shots and that corporate size and strength were all that mattered. This it was that the internet was progressively being dominated by the top websites as measured by MediaMetrix and other web ad scoring companies, and that was the way organizations like DoubleClick expected things to remain.
Consequently, DoubleClick a little conceitedly cites on its website ‘over 2000 successful implementations’ of its software. Yahoo! Search Marketing (formerly known as Overture) and Google AdSense, by contrast, already serve hundreds of thousands of advertisers respectively. Overture and Google's success came about as a direct result of their awareness of what Chris Anderson refers to as ‘the long tail,’ which is the collective power of the small sites that make up the bulk of the web's content.
Furthermore, DoubleClick tend to adopt a ‘traditional’ business approach even whilst operating on the net by, for example, requiring a written sales agreement containing both quotas and targets. This by definition limits their potential customer base to a handful of the organizations behind only the largest websites. Overture and Google on the other hand figured out how to facilitate ad placement on virtually any web page. What is more, they have nothing to do with publisher or ad-agency friendly advertising formats such as banner ads and popups, concentrating only on minimally invasive, context-sensitive, consumer-friendly text advertising.
The Web 2.0 lesson here is that the leverage of customer-self service and algorithmic data management enables sites like these to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the center, to the long tail and not just the head. Not surprisingly, other web 2.0 success stories demonstrate these same characteristics and similar behavioral patterns.
eBay, for example, facilitates occasional transactions involving only a few dollars between single individuals by acting as an automated intermediary. Though the leading P2P music download system Napster was shut down for legal reasons, it created its network not by building a centralized song database, but by designing and implementing a system that turned every music downloader into a server at the same time, and thus they were able to grow the network.
Akamai vs. BitTorrent
Like DoubleClick, Akamai is optimized to work with only the largest and best known organizations, not smaller businesses or entrepreneurs, which means that he also only wants to deal with the center and not mass of the Internet to be found around the edges. Despite the fact that it serves the very same individuals who are to be found at the edge of the web by allowing them access to the high-demand sites at the center, it still gathers, almost all its revenue from those central sites. On the other hand, BitTorrent is like other pioneers in the P2P movement in that it takes a fundamental approach to internet decentralization, and in a similar way to the demised Napster service, treats every client as if their computer is also a server.
So files that are located on individual client computers are broken into fragments which can then be served to other network members from multiple locations. In this way, files, folders and other forms of data are passed from one member directly to other network users.
Equally is important is the fact that when you download a file using a service like BitTorrent, there are ‘bits’ of the download coming from many different user computers. From this it follows that the more popular the file that you are downloading is, the faster it can be served to you. This is because there are more users offering bandwidth and fragments of the entire file.
BitTorrent therefore displays a central Web 2.0 principle, which is that the more people who use this service, the better the service will automatically become. Whilst Akamai is forced to add servers to improve their service, every BitTorrent consumer brings his own resources to the group party. There is an implied ‘architecture of participation’, a built-in ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts first and foremost as an intelligent broker, linking the edges to each other and binding the power of the users themselves together.

Connecting Collective Intelligence
The key attribute behind the success of the giants who were born in the Web 1.0 era and have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era would appear to be the fact that they have accepted and embraced the power of the web to connect collective intelligence.
Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content and new sites, it is absorbed into the structure of the web as a result of other users discovering and approving the content and therefore linking to it. In the same way that synapses form in the brain, with links becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of associations on the net will tend to grow organically as a natural consequence of the combined activity of all web users.
Yahoo!, the first grand internet success story, was born as a catalog or a directory of links. It was and still is an aggregation of the best work of (initially) thousands and now many millions of web users. Though Yahoo! has since moved into the business of creating many types of content, its role as a portal ‘doorway’, giving access to the combined work of worldwide net users is still the main aspect of its service that offers value.
Google's breakthrough in search engine technology which rapidly made it the unquestionable search market leader was PageRank, which is in one respect a way of using the connecting structure of the web to offer better search results.
eBay's product is the combined activity of all its users, like the web itself. eBay grows purely in response to user activity and the company's role is simply to act as an enabler within a framework in which that user activity can take place. Also, eBay's competitive advantage comes almost completely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers who use the site, which automatically makes any new entrant providing comparable services considerably less appealing.
Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have, for example, focused massive efforts and resources on having considerably more user reviews than any of their competitors on their site. Furthermore, they are overwhelmingly proactive in inviting new members to join them on virtually every page and even more fundamentally, they actively track user activity to generate better on-site search results.
Whilst a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to produce results overwhelmingly dominated by the company's own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with the ‘most popular’ titles. This is a real-time representation based not only on sales but other aspects that Amazon insiders call the ‘flow’ around products. With such a high level of user and customer participation, it is definitely no shock that Amazon's sales almost always outpace those of their competitors.
Given these success stories, it is perhaps no surprise that increasing numbers of ground-breaking new companies picking up on this approach and attempting to broaden it even further, thus doing their own thing to make their mark on the web.
Wikipedia, is an online encyclopedia centered on the somewhat doubtful concept that a reference work-based or entries that are added by one web user and edited by another in any way reliable of. It is therefore a deep-seated experiment in trust, putting into effect Eric Raymond's dictum that was originally coined in relation to open source software that ‘with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’. However, the site must be doing something right, because Wikipedia is already in the top 100 websites and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a reflective modification in the dynamics of content creation!
Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, two companies that have attracted a great deal of attention of late, were the originators and drivers of a new populist phenomenon that is most widely termed ‘folksonomy‘, something that is perhaps best explained as a style of joint classification of sites using freely chosen keywords or tags. Tagging allows the kind of multiple, overlapping links that the brain itself uses, rather than being hidebound by unnaturally inflexible categories. In a simple example, a Flickr photo of a kitten might be tagged both with the words ‘kitten’ and ‘cute’, all of which are appropriate. This allows retrieval following the most natural lines of user generated activity.
Shared spam filtering products like Cloudmark aggregate the individual assessments of email users about what is and is not spam, thus managing to outperform systems that rely on the study of these messages themselves.
It is a cliché that the supreme internet success stories do not advertise their products. Their implementation is driven by ‘viral marketing’, which is, suggestion transmitting directly from one user to another, sometimes referred to as word-of-mouth advertising. In fact, you might even go as far as to suggest that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it is not Web 2.0.
Even many of the underlying technologies that drive the communicational abilities of the web such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Perl, PHP, or Python code which are all widely used in web servers themselves rely on the peer-production process of open source.
There are more than 100,000 open source software projects listed on SourceForge.net. Anyone can add a project or download and use the code. New projects migrate from the edges to the center as a result of users putting them to work, an organic software adoption process relying almost completely on viral marketing.
Blogging
One of the most extremely hyped features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so what is exactly all this fuss about?
At its most normal and somewhat banal level, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. But as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog ‘seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain.’
One of the most important things that has driven this distinction is a technology called RSS. RSS is possibly the single most important progress made within the elementary architecture of the web since early hackers become conscious that CGI could be used to create database-backed websites. RSS permits someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it and thus receive notification every time that page changes. Skrenta calls this ‘the incremental web.’
However, others call it the ‘live web’.
Of course, ‘dynamic websites’ such as database-backed sites with dynamically generated content initially began to replace motionless web pages well over ten years ago. What is however dynamic about the current crop of live website developments are not just the pages, but the links that they contain. A link to a weblog is almost always going to point to a constantly changing page, with permalinks provided to take anyone seeking them to one particular individual entry.
Along similar lines, an RSS feed is a much stronger link than say a bookmark or a link to a single page.
RSS also means that the web browser is not the only method of viewing a web page. While some RSS aggregators such as Bloglines, are web-based, others are desktop clients and still others permit users with portable devices to subscribe to frequently updated content.
RSS is now being utilized to push not just notices of new blog entries, but also all kinds of data updates, including stock quotes, weather data and photo availability.
This utilization is generally a return to one of its roots.
RSS was born in 1997 out of the amalgamation of Dave Winer's ‘Really Simple Syndication’ technology, which was initially used to push out blog updates and Netscape's ‘Rich Site Summary’, which permitted users to create custom Netscape home pages with repeatedly updated data flows. Netscape unfortunately lost interest and the technology was carried forward by blogging pioneer Userland, which was Winer's own company. In the existing crop of applications, we can see the direct heritage of both parents, but RSS is only part of what makes a weblog diverse from an ordinary web page.
For example, weblogs, enabled Internet for almost the very first time to referred directly to and comment upon a highly specific post on someone else's site and debate it if they felt like doing so. Thus, quite naturally, lots of highly energizing and challenging discussions and chats emerged. As a result, friendships emerged or became more well-established. So it was that the relatively humble permalink was the first and so far perhaps the most successful attempt to build bridges between weblogs.
In many ways, the blend of RSS and permalinks adds many of the features of NNTP, the Network News Protocol of the Usenet, onto HTTP, the web protocol. The ‘blogosphere’ can therefore be viewed as a new, peer-to-peer equivalent to Usenet and bulletin-boards, possibly the most talked about problem areas of the early internet.
Not only can people subscribe to each others' sites and easily link to individual comments on a page, but also, via a mechanism known as trackbacks, they can see when anyone else links to their pages and can respond, either with shared links or by adding comments.
Originally, the establishment of two-way links between sites was the objective of early hypertext systems like Xanadu. Nevertheless, in more recent times, hypertext purists have distinguished trackbacks as a step towards the original holy grail of two way links.
But do bear in mind that trackbacks are not properly two-way. Rather, they are potentially symmetrical one-way links that generate the effect of two way links. The difference may seem unimportant, but in practice it is significant. Social networking systems like Friendster, Orkut, and LinkedIn, whose operations depend upon an acceptance by a recipient of a proposal from another site user before I connection can be established naturally lack the same scalability as the web.
If an important part of Web 2.0 is connecting collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, then the blogosphere is almost like the ‘voice’ that we all hear in our heads from time to time. It it has nothing to do with the deep structure of the brain, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as an indication of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful and profound effect on the net as a whole.
This is firstly because search engines use link structure to help search and categorize useful pages. As the most energetic and regular link creators, bloggers do however have an disproportionately large role in shaping search engine results. Second, because the blogging community is so highly self-referential, that is, the community is full of bloggers paying attention to other bloggers in order to expand their own visibility and power. The ‘echo chamber’ of the blogosphere that cynics and other doubters criticize also acts as an amplifier for the thoughts and ideas of individual bloggers.
If it were just an amplifier, blogging would definitely not be appealing. But like Wikipedia, blogging connects collective intelligence as well as acting as as a kind of filter. What James Suriowecki calls ‘the wisdom of crowds’ comes into play and much as PageRank will tend to generate a better outcome than the study of any individual document, the collective attention of the blogosphere almost invariably focuses upon value.
The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls ‘we, the media,’ a world in which ‘the former audience’, that is, the Internet as a whole rather than a few lonely people hidden away in a back room somewhere, decides what is important.

Key Feature Of Web 2.0
One other feature of Web 2.0 that is worthy of mention is the fact that it is no longer restricted to the PC platform. In his parting advice to Microsoft, long time Microsoft developer Dave Stutz pointed out that ‘Useful software written above the level of the single device will command high margins for a long time to come.’
Needless to say, any web application can be developed to be software above the level of a single device. In spite of everything, even the simplest web application includes at least two computers, the one hosting the web server and the one hosting the browser. And the development of the web as a platform extends this thought to synthetic applications composed of services offered by multiple computers.
But, as with many areas of Web 2.0, where the ‘2.0-ness’ is not something new, but rather a fuller awareness of the true prospective of the web platform, this phrase gives us a vital indication as to the best ways designing applications and services for the new platform.
Up to now, iTunes is the best exemplar of this principle. This application effortlessly reaches from the handheld device to a huge web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many preceding attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod or iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example.
iTunes and TiVo also show many of the other basic principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications as such, but they influence the power of the web platform, making it a flawless and almost indistinguishable part of their infrastructure. Data management is most obviously at the heart of their contribution. They are services, not packaged applications although in the case of iTunes, it can be used as a packaged application by managing only the user's local data. Both TiVo and iTunes show some promising usage of collective intelligence, although in each case their experiments are at direct loggerheads with the IP lobby.
This is one of the sectors of Web 2.0 where we can justifiably expect to see some of the greatest changes, as more and more devices are linked to the new platforms and those that subsequently replace them. For example, you only have to consider what applications and services will potentially become workable when our phones and cars are not consuming data but reporting it in real time as well? Real time traffic monitoring, flash weather updates and citizen journalism are only a few of the early warning signs of the capabilities of the new platform.

Web 2.0 Changing User Experience
The purpose of all the technology and the design principles that we have looked at so far, should definitely enhance peoples’ ability to communicate with one another and with their computer systems. If this is at all possible, Web 2.0 sites make it easier for people to link to and to learn from one another whether this is at an internal company level or for general public consumption. The result of the user-generated content is said to be a growing ‘collective intelligence,’ as increasing amounts of knowledge generated by ever increasing amounts of online consensus decision-making. Buzzword-watchers will remember when the glorified term for this was ‘collaboration.’
Whether for relatively unimportant matters like music reviews or for critical business-changing decisions, the advantage is that people can work and play better as well as collectively and can as a result make more intelligent decisions based upon what they have learned from their fellow net user.

How Web 2.0 Benefits Business?
To the unbiased observer, Web 2.0 generally appears to be an overwhelmingly consumer driven trend. It perhaps follows from this that it is more difficult to recognize the discernible advantages of Web 2.0 for traditional businesses.
Without doubt, Web 2.0 is essential if you are building yet another website to share digital photos. It also has business repercussions if you plan to create business-to-consumer online resources such as an airline reservation site where the user can dynamically change search criteria and which promotes user-generated content such as airline reviews. Yet, Web 2.0 is equally vital in business-to-business Information Technology as well.
The key is for even the most traditional of IT businesses to realize that they can tie the flexibility of Web 2.0 to the service-oriented principles of loose coupling, encapsulation and code reuse.
Web 2.0 generates rich media by integrating data sources and the internet, thus producing intranet provided services. That means Web 2.0 can act as a flexible and lightweight user interface, relying on network accessible services that are built on an Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) foundation. The communication between the two sides of this paradigm allows businesses to create and manage business processes with a far greater degree of flexibility than was previously possible.
Users can create enterprise mashups by collecting, assembling and sharing existing enterprise-related content whether the objective is to create a straightforward business integration effort or to offer portals that monitor and develop systems information and transactional flows.
All of this suggests clear benefits for major corporations, both within, the IT industry and outside. In any case, the fundamental features that make Web 2.0 persuasive to consumers, such as its ability to offer contextualized personal information and to use community as well as social links to improve communication are equally essential in a business context.

Web 2.0 Developer Tools
Defining Web 2.0 is challenging and fun but building Web 2.0 applications is difficult. The latest round of web technology came on the scene so rapidly that it is, in fact, quite difficult to know where to start the story.
Web Page Technology Profiler
BuiltWith is a web site profiler tool. Upon looking up a page, BuiltWith returns all the technologies it can locate on the page. BuiltWith’s objective is to help developers, researchers and designers find out what technologies pages are using as that may help them to decide what technologies to execute or include themselves.
A new way to build your Google Maps
Click2Map is a new rich Internet application. It is and the easy way of building and sharing your site Google Maps online. Click2Map’s objective is to offer an easy to use application for creating, managing and publishing online maps without any knowledge of programming. You also do not need to know how to use the Google Maps API.
Meet Others Browsing the Same Page at the Same Time
Weblin might best be described as your personal virtual presence on the internet. Weblin enables people who are using the same webpage to see and interact with each other in real time.
CodeIDE
This is a site that enables you to program live on the web without any specialist knowledge. You can manage files, program in numerous languages, run your creations, and use command line prompts. It even has a real-time chat facility so that you can talk to other users who are programming on the site and watch as their errors come and go.
Dapper
Dapper allows you to capture specific parts of a site, add a wide range of options to it and turn it into exportable data for your own projects. You can look at it as building an API for any website. For example, you could make a custom Dapper file that grabs headlines from Digg for a specific search term on a certain page that would then notify you of any occurrences of this happening on a specific website.
Online Video Converter
Flvix is a simple free online video converter. Convert and download videos from YouTube, Google Video or directly from the original .FLV file. Run it on your PC, Mobile, and an iPod.
Sticky Notes for the Web
MyStickies allows you to place little yellow squares of digital paper anywhere and everywhere you feel like it right across the whole wide Internet world. Along with the ability to put sticky notes on webpages, Mystickies offers a powerful interface that enables you to browse, search, sort, edit and generally have a wonderful time with your sticky notes from any computer that has internet access.
Presentations for New Web
Spresent is a free Web-based presentations application built with Flash. Using it, you can create and edit high-quality Flash presentations online, or send presentations via e-mail or publish on your web site or blog.
Code Together, Show your Results Instantly and Make the Next Leap
Springloops is a unique source code management tool focused on web development teams. It lets you code in parallel and share your code safely whilst focusing on results, not on lost changes or overwritten files. You get quick collaboration in a securely protected space. Thanks to the project management perspective, it best serves those with a getting things done attitude. Moreover, Springloops lessens repeatable activities in your day-to-day work and thereby makes great things simple to do and achieve.
Easy to use Icon Generator
Favicon lets you create nice icons. Just choose a color, click on the squares and paint your logo. Download the icon when your have completed it or publish it to favicon community.
Online Photo Editor
Wiredness is an image manipulation application. Upload a photo or grab from any URL, to resize, change exposure, fix red-eye, rotate, colorize and change brightness as well as contrast and much more.
Your Personal Wiki, at Your Service
StikiPad is officially a hosted wiki provider that lets you collaborate online unofficially. It is a blank piece of paper where you decide its use.
Take Content Anywhere
Spinlets run inside a webpage. They allow anyone to create their own website 'mash-ups' by embedding content from one site into another site. Spinlets are completely based on browser technologies such as HTML, Flash, etc. It is not a desktop widget, like the ones provided by Apple and Yahoo.

Conclusion
Web 2.0 has become a catch-all buzzword that people use to explain a wide range of online activities and applications. Do bear in mind that Web 2.0 does not have anything to do with Internet.
It is not a new and improved internet network operating on a separate backbone. Nevertheless, it is dine if you have heard the term and nodded in acknowledgment without having the slightest idea of what it really means.
Web 2.0 can be described as a term that is used to explain an old system that everyone is comfortable to use, but it is nevertheless a new method of thinking about and using the Internet. You will find Web 2.0 is an amazing means for growing your business, driving it forward whilst continually re-affirming your reliability on the Web.
If you are concerned in sharing information and shaping collective communities on the Internet, you will also find that Web 2.0 technology is something new, stimulating and ground-breaking to discover. No matter your aim or objective, it is worth a little time and attempt.