Are You Ready for Web 2.0?

by admin October 7, 2005 at 2:08 am

SAN FRANCISCO — No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.

Excitment over emerging new publishing theories — and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings — this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital.

Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O’Reilly, is an “architecture of participation” — a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.

Full article: Wired News