understand web 2.0

...on Web 2.0

...in web terms

......in the words of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, “Web 2.0… is about making the Internet useful for computers.”¹

What we see happening in Web 2.0 is a step beyond this, to where users are adding their own metadata. On Flickr and Del.icio.us, any user can attach tags to digital media items (files, bookmarks, images). The tagging aspect of these services isn’t the most interesting part of them, though. What is most interesting are the trends we see when we put together everyone’s tags.

...A search engine searches metadata applied by designers, but Del.icio.us leverages metadata applied by folks who don’t necessarily fit that mold.¹

Like the Home page here at 43T as well I suppose. We’re contributing to Web 2.0! Yay us!

Web 2.0, according to [conference sponsor] Tim O’Reilly, is an “architecture of participation”—a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.¹

Love the word folksonomies. Need to understand why tagging is important.