What is Web 2.0?
Sunday, October 5, 2008

The Internet is changing. Well, it has changed, and it’s still changing. The global structure and view of the Internet is being transmogrified.
The term used for this morph is Web 2.0, a phrase coined by Dell Doherty and Tim O’Rielly at a conference back in 2004. O’Rielly is a publisher of tech-centric books with quaint woodcarvings of animals on them. He’s also a big supporter of free software and the open source movement.
Web 2.0 has many definitions, but basically it means that users help to create the content. The 2.0 Internet is a global project contributed to by millions of people every day who upload blogs, wikis, photographs, classified ads, household items for sale, news, opinions, videos. It’s created by people who join cyber communities like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, and Cyworld. It’s expanded by people who vote on news, collect and create RSS news feeds, contribute to folksonomy -- collaborative tagging and annotation of content with services like Delicious, Digg, and Shoutwire.
Web 2.0 isn’t just a database that users access. It’s a database that is created by being used. Every link, every shared resource, every online interactive service contributes to the growth of Web 2.0.
To compare it to what is retroactively called Web 1.0 – let’s just say the old web was static. Web developers created content and visitors viewed it. Go. Read. Enjoy. Leave. Everything was a download, a local cache. In the new world of Web 2.0, upload is king. Sharing creates content. The Internet is the mushroom and we are its fertilizer.
EBay and Craigslist are Web 2.0 sites. I love Craigslist. I recently had a garage sale without ever sitting in my driveway. I took pictures of all my stuff and posted it. It was gone in a blink. I sold a motorcycle in the time it took me to use the bathroom. I sold a bicycle while pouring a glass of milk. A lot I gave away. I gave away a broken color laser printer with new toner cartridges in it in less than 3 minutes. I gave away 100 muskrat traps abandoned at my mini-storage in Nevada in about 10 minutes without leaving Benicia.
I run a website, three blogs, and a wiki, and I’m small fry. Many have more. I pay to use SurveyMonkey, QuizStar, and Lynda.com. I also have an avatar on Second Life, a virtual world where I can fly and shop at Target. I’m Buckley Skytower and I live on ISTE Island where I converse with educators about classroom technology. I have a dozen Youtube videos and hundreds of photos on Google’s Picasa.
Here are some lesser-known Web 2.0 sites worth visiting if you haven’t yet, and you can’t afford to go outside:
4teachers.org – 15 interactive educational services including lesson-plan builders, teacher and student web-making apps, a magnificent and free RUBRIC creator. No teacher should be without one.
Second Life – which I mentioned. It’s a metaverse where you create a person, build a house, join a community, and meet people around the world. You can buy and sell virtual items, sometimes for real money. They recently had their first virtual-real-estate millionaire. There are alternate metaverses at activeworlds.com and there.com
Illuminate.com & Vyew.com – free three-person conference rooms. You can talk and view each other, share a white board, computer screens and files. You can even let someone take control of your computer – for example if you have a tech problem and a friend in Wisconsin can fix it. You pass him your mouse and sit back while he troubleshoots and talks you through it.
Voicethread.com – add verbal captions to your photos and tell a story.
Fictionpress.com lets writers share their stories with the world – and everyone can comment, while you comment on theirs.
iTunes University – watch free college lectures and educational videos on anything.
Proboards.com – create a free online discussion board that you can restrict to chosen members or open to the world.
PBWiki.com – make a wiki (i.e. Wikipedia) of your own and invite your friends to join in. It’s basically your own website. Mine is tubenicia.pbwiki.com. You create the topics and the content and everyone’s an editor, if you wish.
Screen-o-matic.com – let’s you capture screen activity along with your voice, turn it into a movie, and share it with the world.
Spore.com – got kids? What to keep them busy for about a year? Buy them Spore and stand aside. They will create a guide a creature of their design through five stages of evolution. Watch them learn survival skills while playing.
Zoho.com – don’t want to buy Microsoft Office? Want a free word processor, presentation and spreadsheet maker, email, wiki, planner, chat, and much, much more? What are you waiting for? Go Zoho.
Openoffice.org – free office suite. Is compatible with Microsoft Office.
Google Docs – free office apps. Is compatible with Microsoft Office.
Last, when you’re ready to turn your computer into Internet TV, check out miro.com