Web 2.0

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What is Web 2.0?

The term "Web 2.0" was created in 2003 by Dale Dougherty of O'Reilly Media, Inc. O'Reilly Media distributes technology based information via books, online services, magazines, and conferences. One of the conferences they are involved in is the Web 2.0 Summit which will be holding its 5th annual conference this year. It is a partnership consisting of O'Reilly Media, Inc. and CMP Technology, moderated by the program chair John Batelle and the founder Tim O'Reilly.

There are numerous definitions for Web 2.0, here are a couple:

Web 2.0 is a perceived or proposed second generation of the web. This is were the web has evolved and improved over time and now offers better and more up to date services like blogs, wiki’s, social networking sites etc [1]

Web 2.0 is a knowledge-oriented environment where human interactions generates contents that are published, managed and used through network applications in a service oriented architecture. [2]

O'Reilly has written an article 'What Is Web 2.0' to clear up any confusion. The brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International created a list of Web 2.0 features and their Web 1.0 equivalent. One example is the 'blog' which previously existed as a 'diary/column' on a website.

Excerpt from The Incremental Web by Skrenta, February 12, 2005.

'Blogs may look like regular HTML pages, but the key difference is that they're organized chronologically. New posts appear at the top, so with a single browser reload you can say "Just show me what's new."

This seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain. Rather than using HTML, the delivery protocol for web pages, there is a desire for a new, feed-centric protocol: RSS. To search chronologically-ordered content, a relevance-based search that destroys the chronology such as Google is inappropriate. Instead you want Feedster, PubSub or Technorati. Feed content may be better to read in a different sort of client, such as Newsgator, rather than a web browser.'

Google itself is Web 1.0, however, Google News is Web 2.0 the difference being that the first is 'Reference Web, goal-directed' and the second 'Incremental Web, subject feeds'.