Today I was helping run an MRS course in London on Online Panels and Online Communities. One of the other speakers was Lee McEwan (of Leo Burnett and the Serendipity Blog) who was talking about what is Web 2.0. Lee’s take was somewhat different to the more traditional view. Rather than focus on specific activities, such as social networks, and wikis, Lee focused on the general change in the software that makes the Web work. His view was that 2.0 can be seen as all the sum of the recent improvements to things like browsers, Ajax, servers, networking, etc.
Whilst I do not fully accept Lee’s view, it did stimulate some additional thoughts on what I mean by Web 2.0. My feeling is that one useful way of thinking about Web 1.0 and 2.0 is that in the old world there was only a face at one end of the pipe. The publisher was known, but the reader was largely unknown. With Web 2.0 we have faces at both ends of most connections; the flow of information is two-way – which nicely oversimplifies to 1way and 2way – which will do for me at the moment.
"web 2.0 = networkification vs. web 1.0 = electronification" - attributed to David Sachs by Ev Williams in this tweet here: http://twitter.com/ev/statuses/40857992
Similar to your 2-way connection example..
Posted by: Mario | April 27, 2007 at 11:52 PM