What is Web 2.0

I really liked O'Reilly's 'What is web 2.0'. I guess I'm a bit of a geek - I enjoy learning about internet history, particularly the seedy underworld of 'web services' (advertising), and Spyware such as doubleclick. It's interesting that those incremental steps towards monitisation of the Internet may have heralded the first use of web2 tools.

O'Reilly stresses that without the data these appliations (Google Maps, Facebook, Google search) are useless. The applications themselves almost enjoy a symbiotic existance with the data, learning new ways to twist and interpret the data to drive new things. There's news about now that Microsoft Bing is stealing Google's search results - apparently Google has 'reused' lots of other bits of people code for it's applications but draws a line at borrowing the data.

It's interesting to hear that blogs were initially used to share links to other like minded folk. How often these days do you see a Links page on a website? Never? I rememeber whan I was a student setting out my website for the first time (I wonder if it's still out there?) the most important thing was to set up a Links page to set out who you were, to hope that you would help make a connection easier for someone else. I guess for people who were working at that time a chronological ordering would be a natural next step.

Bak to O'Reailly. He writes: "Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by an web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust". How often do you remember showing someone (or being shown) Wikipedia for the first time and shocking the person (or being shocked) that you can delete the whole article on dogs if you so choose. That sort of scepticism seems to stay with users.

I think this article must have been written sometime ago. for one thing Google Maps is now a heavily used system.

If you rely upon advertising your not web2.0 - like university's?

Back to hype cycles - for sometime I was sceptical of blogging. There were articles in newspapers suggesting the Blogosphere was to collapse. But somehow, I don't know when, blogging seems a lot stronger to me now. I guess I check them out just as part of my Google searches to find usually the most useful dynamic up to date information (along with bulletin boards). I like the way this article describes the media not taking on just one blogger but the whole blogospehere.

I was interested to hear in class one of the other students from China who used a diary until highschool and then moved to a blog since ~2008, and now uses a microblog. She uses a blog because she can share her experiences with her friends (presumably now worldwide). I wonder if the move from a private diary to a blog, was a conscious one. Presumably a diary is only readable by your self. Will writing to an audience kill off the form of a diary?