Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Web 2.0

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."- Tim O' Reilly.

Web 2.0 is a living term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O' Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. The characteristics of Web 2.0 are: rich user experience, user participation, dynamic content, metadata, web standards and scalability. Further characteristics, such as openness, freedom and collective intelligence by way of user participation, can also be viewed as essential attributes of Web 2.0. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data.
These sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort which limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site's owner could modify.



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