How Web 2.0 Will Change The Internet
I personally feel that it is an understatement to say that Web 2.0 will change the face of the Internet. It is an emerging technology that has a number of important implications, and those who are prepared for such implications will prosper. Many have said that Web 2.0 will give users the same experiences that they first had when they used the Internet for the first time.
However, many experts feel that Web 2.0 will be the result of small advances and tweaks that will gradually transform the net. While it took a few years for email to be adopted by the general public, many feel that Web 2.0 will allow things to move much faster. However, the revolution that will become Web 2.0 is much more quiet than previous revolutions.
To the casual Internet user, the changes are not all that obvious. They log on, go to their favorite websites, or download games or movies. However, there are a large number of technical advances that are being made each day, and it will take some time for these changes to become visible.
Many of the organizations responsible for these are a few small companies, as well as large software companies. In a nutshell, Web 2.0 will be the result of a major software upgrade that will occur on the Internet. For most of history, the Internet has been nothing more than a group of computers that were networked together via interlocking pages. The information would flow freely, and it would go from once source to another.
One of the reasons why Web 1.0 was so powerful was because of its simplicity. Unlike many technological marvels, it was not inherently complex. A website was simply a group of pages that had text and images, and if you found a website that was similar in topic to your own, you could link to them, and they could link back.
People who visit their website could come to your website, and people who came to your site could go to theirs. While this interaction was very simple, it was revolutionary, and laid the foundation for what we have today. Now that I’ve given you an illustration of Web 1.0, let me give you a demonstration of web 2.0.
Let’s say you have a website in Web 2.0 that is related to a specific dog breed. You could subscribe to a dog care service that is related to Google News, and you could put in a request for the service to scan numerous new outlets across the web, and notify you of any information that is related to a specific dog breed. When you get up in the morning, you could find a link to a book that is written about the dog breed of your interest.
You could then click on the link to go to the first article, and you could then use a tool such as Blogger to write a review of the books with links to Amazon.com, a place where the book could be purchased.
Lets say a few hours after you’ve posted the review on your blog, the blog is scanned by Technorati. As the service scans your site, it will notice the link you made to Amazon.com. For those not familiar with Technorati, it is similar to Google, except it deals specifically with blogs. It will scan blogs on a frequent basis to pull up new information. Technorati also has a feature that allows it to list popular books.
If Technorati finds enough blogs like yours that have links that lead to the book on Amazon, it may be placed on the popular list, allowing the author to gain both fame and profits.
But the process isn’t complete yet. Lets say you now decide to catalog the information that is related to books. To do this, you will want to use a service that is named del.icio.us. You can use a tag that is related to the dog breed. Not only will this tag be visible to you, others can see it as well. You could think of it as a folder that is related to a specific topic.
As you can see, Web 2.0 is much more interactive than Web 1.0. It creates a social computing phenomenon where human users play an important role in the Internet experience. del.icio.us program could be thought of as a social bookmark.
