05-11-2012, 12:26 PM
Web 2.0
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INTRODUCTION
Many changes have happened to the Web in the
past nine years. The rise of broadband connections
to the home, the increased number of people not just
connected to the Internet but contributing content,
and the increased sophistication of the technologies
supporting the Internet have all led to an online
paradigm shift commonly labeled Web 2.0. In this
chapter, we take a look at just what Web 2.0 is, its
main features, and how it has led us to the search
utilities and new types of content that we can search
today.
DEFINING WEB 2.0
Web 2.0 as a concept was fi rst labeled and defi ned
by publisher Tim O’Reilly in an article titled “What
Is Web 2.0” published in September 2005.19 In
this article, he doesn’t so much defi ne Web 2.0 as
he describes what he thinks are its seven central
components: (1) the Web as platform, (2) harnessing
collective intelligence, (3) data as the next Intel
Inside, (4) the end of the software release cycle,
(5) lightweight programming models, (6) software
above the level of a single device, and (7) rich user
experiences. (Some of those are a bit technical, I’ll
admit. Don’t worry about it right now; it’ll all make
sense by the end, I promise.)
WEB 2.0’S CORE CONCEPTS AND IMPLICATIONS
How Web 2.0 affects librarians involves three important
considerations: convergence, remixability, and
participation (all represented in Figure 1-1). Let’s
look at these one at a time.
Participation
If I had to pick a single factor of Web 2.0 as being
the most important it would have to be participation.
Participation is so important to Web 2.0 that the concept
itself has also been labeled “the read/write Web”
by some, including Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of
the World Wide Web.23
Blogs represent the single largest implementation
of the participatory factor in Web 2.0. Blogs are an
easy way for Internet users to contribute content, not
just absorb content, thus leading to a more participatory
experience. Wikis are another form of participation
in the Web 2.0 environment. With wikis, anyone
can contribute and change any of the content within
the wiki. If that isn’t participation, nothing is. We’ll
be looking at the most familiar example, Wikipedia,
in Chapter 4.
Participation, however, is more than just contributing
content. Take Flickr (http://www.fl ickr),
for example. Flickr is an online service that allows
users to not only upload their photographs to the
service but also create “photo pools” in which many
users may contribute their photographs on a common
topic. Flickr also supports the ability to create
contacts or friends, allowing you to easily track what
others are contributing to the system.
CONCLUSION
The concept of Web 2.0 is often bogged down in a
lot of technology-related gobbledygook, but when it
comes to its relationship to librarians and searching,
keep three main points in mind. The fi rst is convergence:
the idea that disparate resources and platforms
are being combined into single resources and objects.
The second is remixability: the idea that a user can
take multiple types of data and mix them up into a
new single output. The third is participation: the idea
that sources are no longer created by a set group of
self-appointed experts but by everyone. Last, out of
this comes the concept of a folksonomy, based on
the tagging of resources by the group as a whole.
Through tagging, new methods of both indexing
digital objects and fi nding those digital objects are
available to us as both librarians and searchers.