Web 2.0

What is web 2.0?

“Co-creativity, participation and openness, represented by software that support, for example, wiki based ways of creating and accessing knowledge, social networking sites, blogging, tagging and ‘mash ups”

New Media: A Critical Introduction, p. 204

Tim O'Reilly is the person responsible for creating this new buzzword in 2003. Ever since then people have questioned what it is and where it came from.

Many new websites have come out of web 2.0, websites that don't just show opinion and fact, but have levels of interactivity. Websites such as Live Journal, Myspace, Facebook, Wikipedia, YouTube etc. 

'Michael Platt offers the following five qualities as being defining characteristics of web 2.0:- 

• Network and devices as a platform;

• Data consumption and remixing from all sources including

user generated data;

• Continuous update;

• Rich and interactive UI; and

•

 Architecture of participation'

It is also about 'the importance of user ownership data' (Dion, 2006). 

Ever since web 2.0 has been on the scene, there has been a huge marketing hype. 

“Web 2.0 is a term you love to hate or hate to love but either way, you'll know you'll get  folk's attention by saying it.”

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“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.”

Tim Berners-Lee (2006)

More and more user generated content is being produced now that web 2.0 is about. This can be in the form of blogs/vlogs, TV shows, music videos, articles etc. People are even becoming famous from it; Justin Bieber was found on YouTube by Usher and was then signed, and look at Bieber now! Wikipedia is also on that list. It is a online encyclopedia that anyone around the world can edit. The TV show The Million Pound Drop saw two contestants say Tom Jones was 90 plus, someone then changed his Wikipedia profile saying his new age. 

“Our idea was very radical: that every person on the planet would have access to an open-source, free online work that was the sum of all human knowledge”

Jimmy Wales (co-creator of Wikipedia)

In Digital Cultures p. 40

As technology develops, so do the number of people using web 2.0. 'Prosumers' is the latest buzzword to come out of the woodwork. It is defined as ' a model of production in which the user of the product or service gets more involved in the process'. For example, apps on the iPhone. 

“Truth and trust are the whipping boys of the Web2.0 revolution”

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