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By Dr.
Philip Baczewski, Director of Academic Computing and User Services
Recently a colleague of mine brought
the Wikipedia article about
Web 2.0 to my
attention. In case you missed it, Web 2.0 is a buzzword that describes
the "new" world wide web that is more social, more participatory, more
of a platform, and is a data driven engine. Of course, Web 2.0 is
really a marketing term, like "tween",
"generation X", or "baby
boomer". Rather than coming into gradual use, however, Web 2.0
was born of O'Reilly media, apparently around 2004.
Tim O'Reilly has a good
explanation of the phenomenon he's trying to label Web 2.0. For
example, instead of personal web sites, we now have blogging, instead
of Britannica Online, we have Wikipedia (which apparently, is just as
good), and the list goes on. The big differences are more direct
participation by individual users providing data (not necessarily
information) and collection of data to enable enhanced "services"
(like Amazon's "you might also be
interested in..."). In case you doubt the power of such data, just be
reminded of the U.S. government's
attempts to get it's hands on it.
All of this started me thinking about what was Web 1.0, anyway? Why
was it a web? In it's simplest form, a web page is a series of links
to other web pages. We take that for granted now, but the reason the
Web became such a success was that it could aggregate sources of
information in a way previously not possible and allow that
information to exist on a distributed network. No single
MultiVAC
controlled it all.
I'm left with the impression that what we have in Web 2.0 is a bunch
of MultiVACs. Google has the
collection of what anyone in the world might want to search for, so
Google can find it faster than any other service.
YouTube is on its way to holding
every video that's ever been made digital. MySpace
has all the friends you'll ever need. The list goes on.
So what's the real value of all that data? The answer would be,
marketing. Amazon.com knows the reading or listening tastes of its
customers and may make more sales based on it's suggestions. You
define yourself on the Web, and suddenly selling to you becomes much
easier.
Don't get me wrong, I'll still Google with the rest of them (only on
google.com, of course). I'm just not sure that Web 2.0 is quite as
participatory and social as it is described to be. It seems to be less
about information and more about data. At some point, more is less.
Everyone has a right to express their opinion, but if everyone is
talking at once, all you hear is noise. Pardon me if I don't get too
excited about Web 2.0. Maybe Web 2.1 will have
3D.
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