Gizmos and Gadgets Web 2.0 Edition

Gizmos and Gadgets Web 2.0 Edition

Since the advent of the internet cyberspace has been an amazing destination for users. Websites were great places where anyone could get countless amounts of information. One could surf the web for countless hours. You could visit sites that give info and weather forecasts at www.yahoo.com. Or learning how an a-bomb works at sites like www.howitworks.com. Many dot.com companies arose in the 1990’s where companies went public and made millions overnight. At the turn of the century the dot.com bubble had finally burst. In the midst of these various firms failing, the strong survived and rebuilt. Enter the web 2.0 regime.

What is Web 2.0 one might ask? According to wikipedia.com’s entry it is a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2003 and popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004.  It refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services. Examples of such social-networking sites are wikis and folksonomies which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O’Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted.  Although there are factions that point to the fact that these particular web structures has existed since the beginning of the internet.

Gone are the days where large companies dominated cyberspace because they had large budgets. Large capital expenditures were once needed to start a good website. Where hit counts were an indicator of a successful website. Now you can have a smaller budget because the cost to start and maintain a site are much cheaper. Public knowledge has grown and sites are more user-friendly when trying to customize to ones personal preferences.

A prime example of the difference between the old and the new is user interaction and collaboration. In the past website mostly were great places to store information. As Dan pointed out in class encyclopedia type information could be accessed on the web. The Web 2.0 version is wikipedia which is an interactive information site. Users can edit entries or ad completely new entries as well. Websites such as myspace and facebook are the new face of social networks. Where users can tag people as friends and send notes to one another. High level interaction and user input is the common theme across a lot of Web 2.0 platforms.

Power has been put in the user’s hand where things are more of a democratic. The web is growing and sustaining and looks like there may be no dot.com bubbles to pop in the near future.