So what is Web 2.0?
Article Date: Nov 27 2006
Allow me to make a confession. I’ve been carrying a guilty secret around for quite some time, but only now do I feel able to share the burden...I don’t understand what Web 2.0 means. Not really, properly, in a talk-with-confidence kind of way. Or rather, I didn’t until a few days ago.
I know, it’s totally shocking isn’t it? Here’s me, a so-called captain of industry, head of one of Britain’s most successful dotcoms and all that, and yet when it comes to the latest bit of industry jargon, the talk of cyberspace, I’m in the dark.
And seeing as I’m being completely honest, I’ll also admit that I’m only, as my kids would say, ‘fessing-up’ now because I feel pretty safe in assuming that most of you will identify with my plight.
Come on, be honest, we’ve all been there. By now you will, like me, have met dozens of people who go on and on about this Web 2.0 lark like it’s the best thing since the Ryder Cup. No matter where you turn, sooner or later someone will start singing the praises of it and telling the rest of us that it is essential to seize the opportunity it represents.
The only trouble is, none of them can actually tell you what on earth it really is. That’s why I finally decided to sit down the other day and find out about this Big Idea. It didn’t exactly take a long time to get to the bottom of it and find a great little article by Tim O’Reilly.
Seeing as he’s the guy that helped coin the very term ‘Web 2.0‘, he’s a pretty good source. He lucidly explains some of those things that go to make up this second evolutionary phase of the digital revolution.
In a nutshell, he says Web 2.0 sites are essentially those that are moving away from ‘publishing’ and towards ‘participation’. These sites emphasise services, not software, and employ hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them. They harness the collective intelligence, so that users become co-developers. As users add data, the sites aggregate it by default, and build value as a by-product of ordinary use of the application.
User-generated content
In other words, one of the key hallmarks of Web 2.0 is that it’s the users that add the value. I found O'Reilly's thoughts very intriguing and helpful. I've sent them to all my staff, who no doubt will feel the same illumination if they haven’t read them already. It turns out that there is something there after all: the phrase isn’t just so much snake oil. But that’s despite, not because of, the thousands of column inches which have been printed on the subject.
Highly theorised business models and academic studies of dynamic performance are, of course, incredibly valuable. Yet just as an idea starts to form into a useful commercial concept and gather momentum, it tends to get grabbed as a marketing device rather than a business tool.
The more the idea is put on a pedestal and held up as a panacea, the more it is used as a badge of cleverness for executives apparently more interested in name-dropping it at the right networking sessions than actually understanding it.
