Overview of Web 2.0 technologies

Web 2.0 is the term used in general and considered as a new phase of World Wide Web. It should not be mistaken as a new technology but instead it is a second generation of web development. Web 2.0 is not restricted to blogs, social networks, RSS, tags but also deals with how these next generation websites cater the end users requirements. (Krasne 2005) The word web 2.0 was coined by Dale Dougherty and Craig Cline but got much publicity after the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Conference in 2004. On the other hand some consider web 2.0 technologies as being overhyped or just another “meaningless marketing buzzword”. (O’Reilly 2005) Whereas web usability guru Jakob (2007) referred Web 2.0 as a new trend and that the web firms are unnecessarily making effort to personalize the website and neglecting the basic functions. (Nielsen 2007)

A blog or weblog in simple form can be explained as a personal diary with combination of technology, (Efimova 2004) it is similar to updating a web page but the major difference is that blogs uses linear posting (Felix, stolarz 2006) i.e. each new post overlaps the old posts and general public could express their opinion in the form of comments which was not possible in the normal website pages. According to Rebecca (2000) weblog was originally a “link driven websites”. Rebecca blood categorizes weblogs into three basic types they are filters which contains links to external websites, second is the personal journals which contains internal information i.e. blogger’s personal diary and third is the notebook which contains both internal and external contents For e.g.: essays. But Krishnamurthy classifies blogs into four types in two dimensions, personal vs. topical, individual vs. Community. (Herring et al 2004)


Figure 1 Types of blogs (Herring et al 2004)

and Dave winer(1999) adds to that the credit of creating the first weblog goes to Tim Berners-Lee from CERN which was more like a web site and he created a link to all the new websites that came online and this archive is available at world wide web consortium[w3c]

Another popular term which is a part of web 2.0 technology is Real Simple Syndication. (RSS)
Will argues RSS “as a format for aggregating web content in one place”. (Richardson 2005) It
is popularly known as news feeds. The best part of RSS feed is that it is a free to use and on top
of that it acts like a filter by blocking all the unnecessary spam, advertisements and collects all
the new contents from all the subscribed websites. RSS can be a very powerful tool from a
business context. For e.g. a project that involves lot of research, sharing new information
among the members would be very difficult and this can be overcome by automatically sharing
new information or links using RSS feed (Cold 2006)

One of the best uses of web 2.0 technologies can be found in SAP who recently launched SAP Developer Network [SDN] which is a online community that involved all developers, implementers, administrators working with SAP Net Weaver and other composite applications. To everyone’s surprise there was a overwhelming response in positive way. The site had access to all technical articles, sample codes, learning tools, weblogs, discussion forum were experts shared their knowledge by answering the doubts posted by other employees. The website was open to all SAP technologists around the world. Even thought SAP created this platform it was a success because of the users who made the community robust and interesting by sharing. (Sap news desk 2004)
This was a success story of web 2.0 technology, one might argue that the success was obvious as all the users involved were from technical background but the situation would be completely different when non technical users are involved.

References:
• Efimova, Lilia, Discovering the iceberg of knowledge work: A weblog case.
Available: https://doc.telin.nl/dsweb/Get/Version-9466/OKLC_Efimova.pdf [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].

• Richardson, Will. The ABCs of RSS,
Available: http://www.techlearning.com/article/3984 [Accessed on: 26/03/2009].

• Nielsen, Jakob. BBC NEWS technology web 2.0 'neglecting good design'.
Available: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6653119.stm [Accessed on: 27/03/2009].

• Winer, Dave. The history of weblogs.
Available: http://oldweblogscomblog.scripting.com/historyOfWeblogs [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].

• Blood, Rebecca. weblogs: A history and perspective.
Available: http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].

• SAP News Desk - SAP DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL.
Available: http://sap.sys-con.com/node/44272 [Accessed on: 28/03/2009].

• O’reilly, Tim. what is web 2.0 - O'reilly media.
Available: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].

• Cold, S. Jeff, Using Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to Enhance Student Research. ACM SIGITE Newsletter 2006
Available: http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1113378.1113379 [Accessed on: 29/03/2009].


• Krasne, Alexandra. What is web 2.0 anyway? 2005
Available:http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/archives/page9344.cfm?cg=searchterms&sg=web 2.0 [29/03/2009].

• HERRING, S.C., SCHEIDT, L.A., BONUS, S. and WRIGHT, E. Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of Weblogs, 2004. Available:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=1265271&isnumber=28293 [29/03/2009].