Blog . Jiboneus

The web is changing, it’s evolving. A group of people had gathered together and start to name this changes, and they named it Web 2.0. They even have a conference about it, which surprisingly enough is named Web 2.0 Conference. The term was coined by Dale Dougherty of O’Reilly Media during a brainstorming session with MediaLive International to develop ideas for a conference that they could jointly host. After that anything on the web that looks new, has a RSS feed, uses fancy funky word such as web standarts, remixability, folksonomy and stuff like that, is call a Web 2.0.

However, there is also a huge amount of disagreement about just what Web 2.0 means. Some say it’s nothing but a meaningless marketing buzzword, some are more cynical about it. Never the less people starting to noticing the changes and are keeping track of it.

Web 2.0 to me, is what the web should have been in the first place. Only now we are starting to see the true potential of the web. Things are getting interesting right now. Finally there are some innovation.

So what is actually Web 2.0? That’s a very difficult question to answer. Tim O’reilly and those guys who coined up the term has an article to explain what Web 2.0 is all about and the article span over 5 pages. That shows either they themselves are not sure what Web 2.0 is or they just talk to much about Web 2.0.

Ross Mayfield sum it all up in one line which is “Web 2.0 is made of people”.

Well instead of having 5 pages article explaining about Web 2.0 lets talk about web trends, what we are seeing right now.

Personal publishing caught on and went mainstream. Gone are the days of ‘personal websites’ replace by blogs and wikis. Websites nowadays are more community base where it’s about user participation. There are a lot of data every where on the web. The web of documents now has become web of data.

A better way is need to aggregated all the data that’s all around us, and thus the idea of syndication emerged. The idea is not to have the data stuck on your domain but free it and let other people use it and manipulated it. Feed syndication is the best way of data aggregation for your blog. Instead of spending 3 hours of going through all your favorite news or blog site, you can spending 30 minutes scanning on headlines on your RSS reader, and just read those which caught your attention. Wonderful!

Web services and APIs (application programming interfaces) are also in. Set the data in your database free, some other people might make use of it in a way you didn’t think about.

Amazon makes its database of content accessible to the outside world. You now have an API to talk directly to Amazon database for information such as book or album review, book or CD album covers, ratings, user recommendations and lots more. Anyone can design an interface to replace Amazon’s that better suits specific needs, Amazon Light for example.

Google let loose their Google map API and every body when crazy. All sort of Google maps hack started to appear. For the first time maps has become interesting.

Content, data now don’t have to be stuck in a domain. The power of this is that content can be personalized or remixed (see I’m using the Web 2.0 lingo here) with other data to create more useful tools. This is how the web should be in the first place. The web is about content and data and moving it around.

Of cause this is not all, just that I’ve got to end this as it’s getting quite long. Things are just getting interesting, aspect more blogging from me on this topic from time to time.

Popularity: 5% [?]