I find it interesting that "web2.0" is a chronological marker for you...

Submitted by stevenmansour on February 18, 2007 - 9:02am

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dose · no-jargon 10-point pledge

I find it interesting that web2.0 is a chronological marker for you - when exactly were you “able to begin participating in the web, without any technical knowledge”?

Because let’s face it - a true “non-techie” who has never used a computer before hasn’t got much more of an easier way to put info on the web than they had, say, in 1998. Sure, the barrier of entry is lower - you can get up and running with blogspot a little quicker than you could with Geocities way back when. My aunt hadn’t ever done much else than send an email, but she had her neighbour’s photos up on Tripod in less than an hour. Ten years ago.

So what changed? The “definition” of a techie, and the scale. Today, anyone with a myspace page is a techie - the fact that it takes a couple minutes to set up doesn’t change that. Then, we’ve got this entire generation being raised on IM (to stay “in the loop” with their friends), Google and Wikipedia (to plagiarize homework reports) and Myspace (god knows for what, but presumably for the same purpose as IM). They’re doing the lion’s share of the propagation behind much of this (just look at the comments section of any Youtube video), because it happens to be the state of the web at a time in their life when these tools are useful to them.

These enabling technologies (xml, wiki syntax/versioning, trackbacks, syndication, “blogging”, podcasting, youtube, etc) have been evolving slowly over the past 10 - 15 years, and didn’t just appear when O’reilly uttered the words “web two point oh”.

[”Web 2.0″] was coined by Dale Dougherty during a meeting betweenO’Reilly and Associates (a computer book publisher) and MediaLive International (an event organizer) as a marketable term for a series of conferences.

There you have it. A slogan. Most marketers have them.

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Nameless's picture

Nameless

February 18, 2007 - 10:05am

easy: free hosted blogging. previously:
- i did not know how to set up a web site
- i did not want to have to learn how to set up a web site
- i did not want to pay money for a web site i didn’t know how to set up

then, blogger.com (for a couple of months, but set up by a friend), and shortly after, even better, blogsome.com (running wordpress).

suddenly I became a publisher of content to the web, where before I was not, for many different reasons. But the change was in the tools: free. easy.

for me:

web1.0 = I had to program to participate actively - otherwise web was totally passive (ie receive content, not add content). I could not program therefor I was passive.

web2.0 = I could participate actively (ie make and share content) without programming.

myspace, youtube, flickr, wordpress, etc. are all examples of simple tools that I can anyone can use without knowing anything about html, xml, or anything at all.

techies get knickers twsited because for them there was no substantive change: the tools got easier, but they were publishing to the web before (as part of the chosen few), and continued to do so when the web got invaded by a bunch of neophytes, who were so excited to now have access to the tools that were takne for granted by techies for years.

so whether its a marketing buzzword or not, the term for me marks the most significant possible change in MY relationtionship to the web: from passive to active

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