What's the meaning of "Web 2.0'?

In USA has this term been widely used since Tim O’Reilly introduced it in 2003. The concept isn’t precisely defined and is therefore not consistently used. Its opponents may designate it as a buzz word, but it can be found as an entry in e.g. Wikipedia.

”Web 2.0” doesn’t indicate a stage in traditional technological software development – HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is and has been used to communicate far the most of all webpages since end of the previous century. But the concept refers to an evolution of the Internet and the used programs. The predecessor, ”Web 1.0” designates the technology that binds computers together, but ”Web 2.0” indicates the technological development that rather focuses on the humans that use the computers. ”Social software” and ”blogging” are concepts that definitely belong to Web 2.0.

In terms from the communications theory designate "Web 2.0" a many-to-many communication (typical examples are blogs and wikis), while the way of communicating via the net previously was one-to-one or one-to-many communication (email and traditional homepages are typical examples).

What’s new in this development is that the traditional send and receive roles get closer to each other – Wikipedia is a very good example of a text collection where everything is both written and edited by the users. At first glance this might seem as a chaotic foundation for exactly an encyclopedia, which per se holds authority, but in practice it shows up that cancellation of the distinction between author and reader ensures a very high degree of credibility and fairness. Authority is no longer something you hold by title or position, but something you achieve by actions, contributions and comments.

User generated content can today (these lines are written ‘07/’08) be found in multiple variants – e.g. there actually is a quite remarkable browser, Flock (free, for Macintosh, Windows and Linux), that calls itself “the social browser”, because it focuses on a number of social services (e.g. photo sharing via Flickr, video sharing via Youtube, bookmark sharing via Del.icio.us, blogging etc.)

The above-mentioned are certainly not isolated phenomenons – that they are called by name here is to say nothing of a couple of very large sites like e.g. Myspace and Facebook (read Wikipedia article on social software). And at last but not least an explicit recommendation: ‘micro-blogging’ with Jaiku – click here to read about this in general and click here to read my very own Jaiku presence stream :-)