 Among the thousands of buzzwords that, well, buzz around the digital cosmos, one has emerged in recent months as a genuine touchstone for where the Internet may be headed. “Web 2.0” is now the official tag, if you will, for a host of technical innovations and new business models that many analysts say are driving the booming Internet economy after that fateful bubble burst in 2001. Shortly after the great digital downturn, book publisher Tim O’Reilly joined with Dale Dougherty of Media-Live International to brainstorm the state of the supposedly fallen Web project. They realized that “far from having crashed,” says O’Reilly, “the Web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites.” Google introduced new algorithms for searching the Web and an interface for the Internet that users embraced. Yahoo! suddenly catapulted to massive profitability as advertisers started moving money online. And many old concepts, such as Web-based TV and community pages, re-emerged in more compelling forms as on-demand streaming media and blogging. The Web was back, and audiences were ready and wired for it. But in this second stage of quieter, more frugal development, the Internet was being reimagined as a much more interactive, user-driven medium. Web 2.0. Say what?
 A Platform Not A Medium | 
In the emerging world of Web 2.0, the Internet becomes an operating system, and companies such as ThinkFree offer full-featured software applications as a browser-based “service.” |
The Web 1.0 of the late ’90s was fueled by hype, laden with old media presumptions about what the Web should be, and discredited by half-baked ideas about Web use that were way ahead of an audience still struggling with dial-up connections. In that world enormous capital went into selling dog food (Pets.com) that no one wanted to buy online and trying to push all the same mega-media brands (Time Warner’s Pathfinder.com) in the same noninteractive ways of offline publishing.
First and foremost, Web 2.0 conceives of the Web not as just another extension of print, TV, and radio, but as a series of “services” or tools that get things done. “The Web has become a platform,” author and Web 2.0 theorist John Battelle recently told a meeting of advertising executives.
The increasing use of Ajax lets standalone applications such as email, word processing, contact management, and storage become in-browser Web services. Google Maps started the trend by letting users reposition maps and pop up data without page reloads, but a gusher of investment and betas are bringing the techniques to every imaginable application. The upcoming major revision of Yahoo! Mail lets you drag and drop messages into folders on a Web page the same way you would in Outlook. ThinkFree.com is an example of a full-featured office suite that’s hosted entirely online. It puts a complete application menu structure in a browser window for making spreadsheets, docs, or presentations. Late to the game, Microsoft is playing catch up to the Web 2.0 services revolution by rolling out Windows Live (www.live.com), which promises to transform Microsoft Office, email, bookmarking, and security from desktop tasks to online resources. Rather than being tied to a physical location, your PC and data are now migrating to the Web itself, where you can access it anywhere, anytime, and also share it with others. | 
Flock promises to weave into a single browser interface some of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 developments: content sharing and remixing, blogging, and integrating other Web services such as Flickr directly into another application.
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More than a set of applications, Web 2.0 is a pool of data that users can manipulate, pull down, and reuse at will, says Kelly Abbott, director of information strategy at Red Door Interactive. RSS feeds were just the beginning of a trend where Web sites such as Google Maps and news providers open up their applications and databases for reuse to provide fully customized and on-demand content. Just as Google Maps lets users lay their own data onto the mapping interface to create wholly new content, sources such as The New York Times will offer APIs into its archives, so users and developers can pull any slice of data they like into their own new applications (an encyclopedia, real estate listings for your own neighborhood, etc.).
At O’Reilly’s tech publishing company, O’Reilly Media, thousands of textbooks are fully digitized, so users actually subscribe to the entire library and can piece together chapters and even paragraphs of books into their own texts. In a deal with Microsoft, help systems in some of its software development kits link directly into O’Reilly’s text libraries to pull down advice and even programming examples as needed. In traditional media, and even most Web 1.0 sites, the publisher defined the look and feel of content and how and where it could be used. In Web 2.0 the user declares how and where information is important to him and takes it on demand. In Web 2.0-speak, “users add value,” says O’Reilly.
The Web Of Us In fact, a central difference among the earlier concepts of the Internet as linked content and Web 2.0 revolves around the increased role of the user, not publishers, determining what is valuable online. At destinations such as the photo-sharing site Flickr, for instance, users not only create the repository of images but also tap into one another’s flow of material and tag the entries with terms that are important to them. Often called “folksonomy,” this collaborative tagging doesn’t restrict an image or any piece of content to a particular use that’s defined by some professional editor somewhere. Folksonomy surrounds the many pieces of content with countless overlapping tags so that users can find it in many more ways. In yet another buzzword of the new Web economy, parsing content into smaller pieces and tagging it densely activates “The Long Tail” of the new Internet. Just as the Amazon.com recommendation engine can make buyers aware of a much larger catalog of less popular books than any major retailer could carry on physical shelves, a Web of densely linked content brings to the surface obscure or forgotten texts and images for use in unimagined new ways. By tagging, searching, sharing, and reconfiguring content, users add value. | 
Yahoo!'s Flickr is a standard-bearer of Web 2.0 trends: content generated by users, collaborative tagging, and content sharing.
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Wikipedia is the ultimate expression of user-generated value, a radical turn away from the classic encyclopedia where formal “experts” defined what was important for people to know and reviewed what was accurate and “true.” In the Wikipedia model, a broad community declares what is important and accurate. Leading the charge into this new era was the Google search engine itself, says O’Reilly, which started indexing and ranking content on the Web in part according to how many times others linked to it. Likewise, companies such as Amazon leverage the wisdom of its customers to drive user reviews and recommended titles.
Flock Together
If Web 2.0 is about Web services, integrating diverse applications and data across the Internet, and the power of collaboration, then the trend's perfect expression may be the highly anticipated Flock browser. Based on the Mozilla Firefox engine but founded on Web 2.0 principles, Flock is being designed to let people interact with the Web and each other within the browser paradigm.
Flock sports a Topbar that links directly into Flickr and eventually will be able to pull in other content sharing communities. You’ll be able to review photos, even dragging and dropping images from your Desktop directly into the Topbar and thus into your Flickr account. Another repository, your Shelf is where you can store text clips, copied images, and links from other sites. All of these tools become super-charged when you invoke Flock’s integrated blog editor. Yes, in Flock you make blog entries in the browser window, which also lets you drag and drop into your entries the links and text you stored in the Shelf or photos from the Flickr Topbar.
Call it next-gen Web or Web 2.0, theorists of the evolving Internet believe our use of the technology is redefining content itself. In the world of Web services, software such as Flickr and Google don’t have anything as quaint as “version releases.” Their developers update them weekly and add and test new features as live betas that evolve in response to user feedback. O’Reilly Media now has a Rough Cuts series where buyers access unfinished books as the authors write them, allowing for customer feedback and bug fixes. Blogging, content sharing and remixing, Wiki media, and the new Web services that enable them are forcing us to rethink traditional notions of publishing that depended on earlier technologies, says O’Reilly. Content may start as a collaborative Wiki then course across blogs, search engines, into devices and syndication, and all along the way gain user comments and tags that refine and redefine it. “Content becomes more like a wave. It’s a momentum,” says O’Reilly. 
by Steve Smith
Q&A: Flock’s Geoffrey Arone: Don’t Say Web 2.0 Around Here
 The bleeding-edge digerati and much of Silicon Valley have eyes on the upcoming “social browser” Flock because in many ways it embodies so much Web 2.0 spirit. By making the browser into a multifunction application, Flock promises to integrate browsing with publishing, blogging, photo sharing, and public bookmarking, among many other very Web 2.0 functions. But as co-founder Geoffrey Arone tells us, saying “Web 2.0” around the Mountain View, Calif., office will cost you.
CPU: What does Web 2.0 mean to you and the Flock project?
Arone: We actually have a tip jar in front of the office and penalize you a dollar for using the term. We’re trying to break away from using any buzz marketing words. We try to talk about specifics of what we are trying to achieve for users. To me and to most at Flock it means the new ways that people participate online, the technologies that cater to certain types of participation.
CPU: How does Flock layer onto the Firefox engine these participatory functions?
Arone: We looked at the ways that people are interacting online. Firefox reinvigorated the browser space, but browsing is the same. It doesn’t address the greater participation by folks in easier publishing, sharing content, social networks, all of these higher amorphous concepts. We are looking into what product can make interacting through a browser better. We looked at examples of blog editors and photo browsing and uploading. What makes us special is the interplay of the different features. If I read an article at NYTimes.com on the running of the bulls, I can Star it to my favorites or just highlight text and keep it in a Shelf. I can blog the photo and then drag text from my Shelf, then open Flickr in the Topbar and search for my friend’s photos of his experience with the bulls. It involves several things and the end-to-end user experience is different.
CPU: When will we see usable versions of Flock?
Arone: Today it’s pretty stable. Expect to see something that’s a significant improvement in mid-May. The second public beta will come two months later and then if all goes well, a 1.0 two months after that.
In Search Of Web 2.0
Check out these sites to find some examples of this amorphous Web 2.0 concept at work.
Rollyo.com. This “roll your own search engine” site lets you create and share search boxes that peruse only the sites you most value. This is a mashup of Yahoo! search technology and social networking.
Flickr.com. The photo-sharing site brings user-generated content to a new level, as members tag and swap images to make one of the largest repositories of densely indexed images ever seen.
ThinkFree.com. Using the Web as an operating system, ThinkFree puts basic Office apps such as word processing and presentations in the Web browser, so you can make and edit your docs from any machine, operating system, and anywhere there’s a Web connection.
Wayfaring.com. Wikipedia meets Rand McNally. Users create, tag, and share personal maps that chart their personal adventures, annotate hot spots in an area, or collaborate on group-made maps. |
Infinite Loop
USB Vacuum Cleaner
For those of us who spend a lot of time at the computer, USB-powered devices go a long way toward making our lives easier. If you subsist entirely on powdered donuts and Cheetos while sitting at your computer, then Genica’s USB Vacuum Cleaner was designed with you in mind. Just plug it into an available USB port, select the appropriate attachment, and then start cleaning. There’s even an LED for vacuuming the darker recesses of your computing area. Now all we need is a USB-powered wet/dry vacuum to suck up all the coffee we’re spilling into our keyboards.
Source: www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=GN-060
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