Community, participation and Web 2.0

 Tim O’Reilly (a media consultant) coined the term web 2.0 in 2003. “the widespread sense that there’s something qualitatively different about today’s web”

(New Media: A Critical Introduction, p. 204)

In the early days of the internet the web was used largely as a form of broadcasting known as brochureware. These type of sites display information without any user interaction, putting up adverts or information to be seen with no participation or personalisation with the user. The use of the internet in this way has since become known as web 1.0.

Web 2.0 is shifting the main creation of online content from producer to consumer, making sites interactive e.g. Facebook, Blogger.com and YouTube.

Unlike most media, e.g. newspapers (Producer -creating content for> Consumer) the internet has become co-creative (e.g. Consumer + Producer <-creating content for-> Producer + Consumer).

Essentially the line between Producer and Consumer is no longer clearly defined and instead in Web 2.0 everyone is simply a 'User'. The idea behind web 2.0 is users creating and sharing content with other users e.g. Wikipedia, livejournal and YouTube.

Sites like these rely heavily on the idea of 'snowballing' - Sites start off as small interesting communities but as more and more people become involved the sites start to grow to become huge sites with thousands of users both creating and viewing content.

Web 2.0 is a lot of people coming together to make something that is very big. Perhaps the best example of this is Facebook which is possibly the largest collective thing ever made by mankind with over 800 million users.

For five defining characteristics of web 2.0 check out this blog: http://rosie-digitalculture.blogspot.com/

Web 2.0 is also about "the importance of user ownership of data" (Dion 2006) the 'illusion' of power of control over the content you've created for example a facebook page.
We think of our profiles on Facebook as "my Facebook page" when in reality they are owned by facebook and can easily be shut down, altered or deleted without your consent. However we still retain a sense of ownership as its content we created about ourselves. MySpace actively pushed this idea of ownership even in their name. "My-Space" a space that is yours, that's created by you and that's about you. Essentially though the page belongs to Facebook or MySpace etc.

App Culture: Websites like the android market give people outside of the website or company the chance to create applications which enhance, improve or broaden the things possible within it.

Websites like Facebook and the android market have given way for an App Culture affording the opportunity for people outside of the website or company to create things which enhance, improve or broaden the things possible within it. This is an example of how the interaction between producer and consumer (found in web 2.0) has improved the way we use the internet, and is beneficial for the producers and other users.

Rather than having the elite producers i.e. highly talented, extremely rich etc. and everyone else being consumers, the two are now much closer together. This increases participation in the development of content and technology. The big companies tap into talent wherever it can be found, by slackening their control over their products, it means people usually considered consumers can create things. Rather than having a few people developing you can potentially have hundreds of thousands even millions of minds working on things to improve the content or technology already available. Also interacting with the consumers helps companies find out what it is their customers want and sometimes leads to customers creating it themselves and this despite consumers often not being considered experts but seemingly amateurs.
Therefore content is made both by experts and amateurs. It can be assumed that amateur content is a bad thing, as people often view 'amateur' as unprofessional. However the word is taken straight form the french word amateur which translates as "lover of", if someone does something purely for the love of it they perhaps approach it from a different point of view and are often incredibly committed to creating something great.

It is fair to conclude that Web 2.0 is about communication and interaction between people.

However Tim Berners-Lee the creator of the world wide web, believes there is no such thing as web 2.0.

“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is, of course, a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.” 

 (Tim Berners-Lee 2006)