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WEB 2.0
This has been the buzz. If you want to appear web savy just throw that out at your next cocktail party. What Is Web 2.0

The concept of “Web 2.0″ began with a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly (not Bill O’Reilly) and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O’Reilly VP, noted that far from having “crashed”, the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What’s more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as “Web 2.0″ might make sense? It was agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

Initial brainstorming

Web 1.0 Web 2.0
DoubleClick –> Google AdSense
Ofoto –> Flickr
Akamai –> BitTorrent
mp3.com –> Napster
Britannica Online –> Wikipedia
personal websites –> blogging
evite –> upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation –> search engine optimization
page views –> cost per click
screen scraping –> web services
publishing –> participation
content management systems –> wikis
directories (taxonomy) –> tagging (”folksonomy”)
stickiness –> syndication

The idea of “Web 2.0″ is purely in the implementation of the technologies available, much like when an application increases its version when it finds new ways to implement new features using the same language as the previous version.

For must website owners it means having a easier to manage website that works harder through your own efforts and through the actions of your visitors.

Blogging

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about?

At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. The chronological organization of a blog “seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain.”

One of the things that has made a difference is a technology called RSS. RSS is the most significant advance in the fundamental architecture of the web. RSS allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes. This has been called the incremental or live web.

Dynamic website continue to abound and today what’s dynamic about the live web are not just the pages, but the links. A link to a weblog is expected to point to a perennially changing page, with “permalinks” for any individual entry, and notification for each change. An RSS feed is thus a much stronger link than, say a bookmark or a link to a single page.

RSS also means that the web browser is not the only means of viewing a web page. Today there are desktop blog subscription clients and still others allow users of portable devices (pda, cellphone) to subscribe to constantly updated content.

An essential part of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain, the blogosphere is the equivalent of constant mental chatter in the forebrain, the voice we hear in all of our heads. It may not reflect the deep structure of the brain, which is often unconscious, but is instead the equivalent of conscious thought. And as a reflection of conscious thought and attention, the blogosphere has begun to have a powerful effect.

Search engines use link structure to help predict useful pages, bloggers, as the most prolific and timely linkers, have a disproportionate role in shaping search engine results. Blogging harnesses collective intelligence as a kind of filter. Mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of we, the media, a world in which not a few people in a back room decides what’s important.

Software

Software is a changing part of Web 2.0. Where in the past users clung to Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel; today many of those users are migrating to web based versions of those softwares. Consider Google Calendar or Cozi Calendar:
http://google.com/calendar
http://cozi.com

Additionally the web based software is not limited to just the PC. Many areas of Web 2.0, where the “2.0-ness” is not something new, but rather a fuller realization of the true potential of the web platform, this phrase gives us a key insight into how to design applications and services for the new platform.

To date, iTunes is the best example of this principle. This application seamlessly reaches from the handheld device to a massive web back-end, with the PC acting as a local cache and control station. There have been many previous attempts to bring web content to portable devices, but the iPod/iTunes combination is one of the first such applications designed from the ground up to span multiple devices. TiVo is another good example. iTunes and TiVo also demonstrate many of the other core principles of Web 2.0. They are not web applications per se, but they leverage the power of the web platform, making it a seamless, almost invisible part of their infrastructure.

User Experience

AJAX - The popularity, power, creativity, and overall awesomeness of AJAX has created the opportunity for so many traditionally desktop based apps to move online. I really don’t see this stopping anytime soon. The power and creativity of developers will continue to fuel this revolution in web apps for a long time, I think. AJAX is a key component of Web 2.0 applications such as Flickr (now part of Yahoo!) as well as other Google applications such as Gmail. We’re entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as web developers are finally able to build web applications as rich as local PC-based applications.

Interestingly, many of the capabilities now being explored have been around for many years. Firefox has reintroduced competition to the browser market, at least so far we haven’t seen the destructive competition over web standards that held back progress in the ’90s.

Gmail has already provided some interesting innovations in email, combining the strengths of the web (accessible from anywhere and searchability) with user interfaces that approach PC interfaces in usability. Meanwhile, other mail clients on the PC platform are nibbling away at the problem from the other end, adding Instand Messaging (IM) and presence capabilities. Integrated communications client combining the best of email, IM, and the cell phone, using voice over IP (VoIP - Vonage for example) to add voice capabilities all march forward.

Principal features and core competencies of Web 2.0 companies:

* Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
* Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
* Trusting users as co-developers
* Harnessing collective intelligence
* Customer self-service
* Software above the level of a single device
* Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

How Does Web 2.O pertain to service businesses? The key web 2.0 principle to think about is harnessing network effects to create products or services that get better the more people use them. So, for a service business, how might you harness network effects?

1. Make it easier for people to sample or recommend your services. What is the equivalent of viral distribution for software?

2. Help your customers to network. Is there some P2P or social networking angle to what you do? (In this context, see wesabe.com ( http://www.wesabe.com ) , which aggregates consumer spending behavior to build data about popular merchants, how people like you spend their money, as well as letting people share information about their experience with a product or service, and support each other in reaching financial goals. Let them annotate, review, and share information about your product or service. (Amazon is a great company to study in this regard. They don’t have a single big Web 2.0 competitive advantage like Google or EBay — they just work harder than anyone else to involve their customers in adding value to their product.)

3. Build services that learn from your customers.

4. Read Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog http://headrush.typepad.com ), and apply her insights.

5. Start your own blog, and follow the principle laid out in The ClueTrain Manifesto that “markets are conversations.”

6.) Study your own product or service, and think about how networked markets can and should affect it.

More reading:

Web 2.0
http://www.paulgraham.com/web20.html

Web 2.0 for Designers
http://www.digital-web.com/articles/web_2_for_designers/

Are You Ready for Web 2.0?
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2005/10/69114

All Things Web 2.0 - “THE LIST”
http://www.sacredcowdung.com/archives/2006/03/all_things_web.html

Yup, too much information. Well heck, it is the information age after all.

Fresh New Sites from FLASH HQ

Check out our new family members:

Martin Gallery - Cambria, CA http://martingallery.org

Theos-BBQ - Johnson City, New York http://theos-bbq.com

Impressionistic Images - http://impim.com

Talbert Photography - Huntington Beach, CA http://talbert-photography

Gary Irish Graphics - Marshfield, MA http://garyirishgraphics.com