What is Web 2.0
Web 2.0 has meant different things over the years depending on the point of discussion. According to O’reilly, the term “2.0” refers to the coming back of the web business after its collapse on 2001 and its distinguished progress thereafter. However, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has questioned whether the term can be used in a meaningful way since many of the technological components of Web 2.0 have existed since the early days of the web.
Since we cannot completely grasp what exactly Web 2.0 is, then let’s just define what makes a site a Web 2.0 site. It is somehow seen as the second coming of the World Wide Web and is said to be the improved version of the sites that make the web their platform. It provides its users a way of interacting with others and organizes their content. Web 2.0 does more than just the retrieval of information because it furthermore includes the acronym SLATES as used by Andrew McAfee:
Search - the ease of finding information through keyword search which makes the platform valuable.
Links - guide to important pieces of information. The best pages are the most frequently linked to.
Authoring - the ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being the constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that the people undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.
Tags - categorization of content by creating tags that are simple, one-word descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.
Extensions - automation of some of the work and pattern matching by using algorithms e.g. amazon.com recommendations.
Signals - the use of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) technology to notify users with any changes of the content by sending e-mails to them.
With the long list of Web 2.0 sites over the net, here are a few of the most popular ones:
