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web 2.0

What is web 2.0?, or the History of the Internet as We Know It.

Making good things great.  When applied to the web, the result is web 2.0.
What is better than what was there before?  Yes, it is unclear and amorphous.  What makes this term hard to
define and understand is the same thing that makes it makes sense.

The Internet became really popular in the late 90s but there was disillusionment when people didn’t make millions
of dollars overnight.  The beginning web contained websites that were nothing more than corporate brochures or billboards
There was no YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Del.iciou.us, Reddit, Lynda, Twitter…..

These are all things that came later.  We didn’t know what they would be, but we knew something big was going to happen,
because in terms of a communication medium, it was grander than anything humans had ever seen.   The early
web was created by metaphor by taking what we already knew about communications and applying it to the web.  Thus, the idea of advertising was narrow.  Take a website and sell ads on the sides that would generate revenue.  This just became annoying.  For news it was to take headlines and put them in boxes and create links to the rest of the content.  Continued on page 5.  Stuff like that.  No one was thinking of an RSS feed.  Why not have the information come right to you as it happened?  Why do you have to go to the New York Times homepage to get the news, when you could get it much quicker from and individual who broke the story and had there blog get picked up by an aggregation site?

The promise was always there for great things to happen, we just didn’t know what they would be.  As it is with most things
that are new and mysterious, they are feared and misunderstood.  How do you describe something you know little to nothing about?  It is hard.  We need meaning, we need a symbol we could attach meaning to.  We strive to understand.  The web is different than anything that came before.  But how?  Think of Web 2.0 as a logo for an idea or concept of the Internet’s full potential realized.

Originally, Web 2.0 was a term coined during a brainstorming session for an Internet trade show.  They were trying to come up with a catchy way to portray the Internet in a new light after the dismal fallout from the dotcom burst.  There was value in the industry, obviously, but the “outside” world was not interested.  The people involved in the trade show needed a way to generate buzz to get the general public interested in the web again.  There were mouths to feed and with the Industrial Revolution being over and all, we needed products and services to keep our economy relevant.

Ironically, metaphor would again help to define what was happening on the web.  Only this time it was applied in reverse.  Instead of using known, real-world communication models to describe the Internet, a term was coined that meant all the things we did not understand about this Internet thing.  All these weird new and useful websites and applications that were like nothing before them.  Blog what?  Publishing had changed for ever, so what was this new Internet that was different than anything before?  In software development, when a new and improved version is released it is the same name appended with a sequential number.  Major upgrades are whole numbers and incremental updates are decimals.  A major software update was well known to programmers and people in the industry, so became the perfect metaphor to describe what the potential of the web was becoming:  Web 2.0.