Web 2.0: A New Wave

Web 2.0. It assumes a certain interpretation of Web history, including enough progress in certain directions to trigger a succession. The label casts the reader back to Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s unleashing of the World Wide Web concept a little more than a decade ago, then asks: What forms of the Web have developed and become accepted enough that we can conceive of a transition to new ones?

Many people—including, or perhaps especially, supporters—critique the “Web 2.0” moniker for definitional reasons. Few can agree on even the general outlines of Web 2.0. It is about no single new development. Moreover, the term is often applied to a heterogeneous mix of relatively familiar and also very emergent technologies. The former may appear as very much “Web 1.0,” and the latter may be seen as too evanescent to be relied on for serious informatics work. Indeed, one leading exponent of this movement deems continuous improvement to be a hallmark of such projects, which makes pinning down their identities even more difficult.¹ Yet we can survey the ground traversed by Web 2.0 projects and discussions in order to reveal a diverse set of digital strategies with powerful implications for higher education.² Ultimately, the label “Web 2.0” is far less important than the concepts, projects, and practices included in its scope.

"Clipmarks is a site where you can just share clips or portions of a website rather than the entire bookmark, so it's good for quotations.

"Tumblr is basically a blogging platform for people who don't want to use a blogging platform. If you look at things like Wordpress and Blogger, which a lot of people use to create blogs, they're very functional. Tumblr is very simple."

Picturedots is a good example of the creativity that the so-called 2.0 sites display. You load in a photograph, trace the numbered dots on top of the image and print out the final result as a puzzle.

In a basic way it demonstrates how web browsers are gradually being used by consumers for far more than just looking around in cyberspace.

A future online?

As people gravitate to the internet for more and more free services and solutions the web browser could become the central window through which our daily lives are conducted, potentially replacing most desktop applications.

Software giants like Microsoft and Adobe have been launching their own online applications, some of which resemble their well-known retail titles.

Meanwhile Google has been building an entire suite of free online applications over the past few years.

Docs and Spreadsheets is a product that most consumers could happily use instead of Microsoft Office, with multi-user, location free collaboration being an added benefit.

Advertisers' advantage

The key question is whether online software is of genuine use to the consumer or is just about advertising revenue.

"There will always be people who say that this is just a mechanism to get more eyeballs on our ads," says Jonathan Rochelle of Google.

"But I don't think people see that, and I certainly don't see that as evil, as a bad thing. If that was the case and we ended up getting more people to look at our ads it's not necessarily a bad thing."

One incentive for companies to supply online software is compatibility. In one go all customers can be upgraded to the newest version and create files that are universally compatible, unlike different generations of Word documents.