web 2.0
Trendy buzzword or revolution? Web 2.0 is difficult to pin down. Clearly it is part toolset and part philosophy. Entrepreneurs proclaim it to be a business model but that part is foggy, at best. But making $$ on the web always has been. Here's what we mean when we are talking Web 2.0.
community
The community drives the content. In the user-contributed content model, the website provides the infrastructure and the community provides the content. Give the people what they want and then step back and let them do it.
YouTube and Flickr are two well-known examples of user-submitted content websites. These are media sites where users submit and rank their own media. Sites like MySpace and Facebook allow users to create profiles (online identities) and then build networks off of those identities.
Other sites, like Wikipedia, leverage the wisdom of its user base to index knowledge. Distributed, contributed wisdom is also an underlying philosophy of the open-source movement .
tools
Blogs, interactive commentary, user-ranked content, forums, news feeds, file uploads, AJAX.
These tools connect the users to the content, which build communities. That keeps people coming back.
Throwing the tools on a website, in and of themselves won't build a community. Providing a service and a space where there is need, will.
philosophy
In web 2.0, an emerging philosophy is coalescing and it is grassroots, it is democratic and, most of all, it is "open" (transparent).
Several intersecting trends connecting beneath the mainstream radar in the late 90's and early 21st Century are driving the philosophy:
Infrastructure: networks, personal computers and broadband connectivity have become ubiquitous, shrinking the globe and expanding reach
Culture: youth drive the web and youth are generous, open-minded and idealistic. Think open-source.
Independent Media: the new tools of the web make us all media producers, reports and niche experts. Bye, bye big old corporate media monopoly. Hello blogosphere!
Understanding these trends means building a website that supports the philosophies behind them.
related links
Links on web 2.0 to check out:
cms extraordinaire: drupal.org
manage your constituents: civicrm
O'Reilly -- What Is Web 2.0
BuzzShout: highlighting the best new web 2.0 sites