History:
The term web 2.0 suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Formally, “Web 2.0” as a label was first used by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Publishing. The story goes that the two were brainstorming about the shared characteristics of today’s successful internet companies compared with the characteristics of the pre-dotcom bubble companies of 2000. Their brainstorming led to the birth of a conference – Web 2.0 (http://www.web2con.com/web2con/), which was held in October of 2004. The evolution of internet focused companies and services in the 13 months since that conference have helped to reinforce – and extend - their observations.
“Bart Decrem, a founder and former CEO of Flock, calls Web 2.0 the "participatory Web” and regards the Web-as-information-source as Web 1.0”
Web 1.0 was the first 10 years of internet. It’s a one way platform all we could do with it is just READ. The author of the website creates the content and posts it in their web sites and from where the user gets the information. Web 2.0 is a two-way platform where participation is a key-word .In web 2.0 the user produces the content e.g. .without contributors there is no facebook and without people posting videos there will be no YouTube. This is called called "Network as platform" computing. Users can provide the data that is on a Web 2.0 site and exercise some control over that data.eg The best example is facebook as a user we can comment on our friend’s status, we can upload videos,pictures and we can also delete the contents.The user have some admin privileges.This is not possible in Web 1.0 sites where the user can only read the information.
Conceptual Characteristics Of Web 2.0 :
ü Rich User Experience,
ü User Participation,
ü Dynamic Content,
ü Metadata,
ü Web Standards
ü Scalability
ü Openness
ü Freedom
Technical Characteristics Of Web 2.0 :
ü Delivered over the web (but not necessarily through a web browser)
ü Rich Application Interfaces
ü Syndication and Micro Content
ü Simple, Light Weight
ü Open Data/Information API’s
ü Collective Intelligence (By Way Of User Participation).
Web 2.0 areas:
The key application areas which embody the Web 2.0 concepts include:
Blogs (originally known as weblogs): A blog is a system that allows a single author (or sometimes, but less often, a group of authors) to write and publicly display time-ordered articles (called posts). Readers can add comment to posts.
Wikis: A wiki is a system that allows one or more people to build up a corpus of knowledge in a set of interlinked web pages, using a process of creating and editing pages. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.
Social bookmarking: A social bookmarking service provides users the ability to record (bookmark) web pages, and tag those records with significant words (tags) that describe the pages being recorded. Examples include del.icio.us and Bibsonomy. Over time users build up collections of records with common tags, and users can search for bookmarked items by likely tag. Because items have been deemed worthy of being bookmarked, social bookmarking services can sometimes be more useful than search engines for finding Internet resources. Using tags, users can find other users who use the same tag and who are likely to be interested in the same topic(s). In some social bookmarking systems, users with common interests can be added to an individual’s own network to enable easy monitoring of the other users’ tagging activity for interesting items. Syndication (below) can be used to monitor a single user’s or all users’ tagging activity that uses interesting tags.
Media-sharing services: These services store user-contributed media, and allow users to search for and display content. Besides being a showcase for creative endeavour, these services can form valuable educational resources. The most compelling examples include YouTube (movies) and Flickr (photos), Slideshare (presentations), DeviantArt (art work), and Scribd (documents). The last is particularly interesting as it provides the ability to upload documents in different formats and then, for accessibility, to choose different download formats, including machine-generated speech.
Syndicated content: RSS and Atom formats have been developed to enable content to be automatically embedded elsewhere. RSS was initially developed to support reuse of blog content produced. RSS’s success led to the format being used in other areas (initially for the syndication of news feeds and then for other alerting purposes and general syndication of content). The Atom format was developed as an alternative to RSS.
Mashups: A mashup is a service which contains data and services combined from multiple sources. A common example of a mashup is a Google Maps mashup which integrated location data was a map provided by the Google Maps service.
Podcasts: A series of digital media files (either audio or video) that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication. The word usurped webcast in common vernacular, due to rising popularity of the iPod and the innovation of web feeds. A list of all the audio or video files currently associated with a given series is maintained centrally on the distributor's server as a web feed, and the listener or viewer employs special client application software known as a podcatcher that can access this web feed, check it for updates, and download any new files in the series. This process can be automated so that new files are downloaded automatically. Files are stored locally on the user's computer or other device ready for offline use, giving simple and convenient access to episodic content. Social networks: Communal spaces which can be used for group discussions and sharing of resources.
Folksonomies and tagging: A folksonomy is a system of classification derived from the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. This practice is also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging.
