You call it Web 2.0

We have survived that first version of the web. We skipped many a flash intro, used many a sitemap to find our way around marketing hoopla. We even managed to give up old buggy browsers, adopted usability and accessibility in our everyday lingo.

Welcome to Web 2.0.

Much hyped, equally maligned. Web 2.0 is celebrated at events, taught in classes and even predicted to have the same horrible end that dot com’s had back in the day.

So what the heck is Web 2.0 and what’s all the fuss about? I give you this link to go do your homework about Web 2.0 . Long and short of it, Web 2.0 gets a lot of buzz in terms of the technologies and programmatic functionality that is now possible to deploy on the web. You have programmers and designers collaborating and making new businesses everyday of products that only they themselves will ever find a use for. At its worst, Web 2.0 is a narcissistic, self-congratulatory, self-referential and gimmicky me-too’s that have made their first attempt at selling a product for a niche market. Themselves.

At its best, however the evolution of the Web and its potential is only now beginning to become clearer to all that work for it (?), and those that have used it ever since they care to remember.

To me Web 2.0 is about doing what we never thought we would do on the web. Share.

Yah, you heard me. Share.

That’s the big word of the moment, and that is what at its core, Web 2.0 helps us do.

Web 2.0. Sharing. You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.

(Caution: Words are used in the following part of the article to weave a tangled web of links!)

We rant and we celebrate. We collaborate like never before. We share things illegally, or legally. We share things we were too shy to share before and we share things that we just couldn’t share as easily before. We still spend thousands of dollars for things that we are told not to share and some of us go ahead and share those as well. We share out seemingly useless things, and then someone goes out and makes something out of that pile of information. We find many things by sharing, as we lose things in an increasingly big messy pile of unsorted information. Then we go invent folksonomies to find those things. We hold a finger up at old ways of categorizing things (Dewey Decimal system be damned) and instead we put several tags to describe one thing. Much like how our brain thinks of things.

People are finding that micro-communities are more meaningful to them than the large ‘one-stop-shop‘ portals. They are even buying and selling things without the aide of mega-fee sites such as eBay.

We are living in a brave new world, but this onslaught of power hasn’t done much to ease our worries or workload. In fact, we seem ready to trade bits of our privacy at times if someone can make sense of our crazy digital world. And sometimes we just give away pieces of information about ourselves unknowingly. And sometimes we share out more than we had ever bargained for.

You call it a Platform; I call it Collective Wisdom. You call it Web 2.0. I call it Sharing.