Defining Web 2.0

Almost as absurd­ly pop­u­lar as the con­cept of Web 2.0 itself is the idea that the term can’t be defined. After lis­ten­ing to sev­er­al EDUCASE pod­casts from the ELI Con­fer­ence in San Anto­nio this Jan­u­ary, I am struck by how fre­quent­ly folks remark on the inher­ent unde­fin­abil­i­ty of the word. It’s almost as if this fuzzi­ness is part of the Web 2.0 meme itself, an aux­il­iary meme designed to inoc­u­late the idea from being dis­missed out of hand for being too simple–or con­tra­dic­to­ry to the spir­it of Web 2.0 itself. After all, a big part of the idea is that it is more social than cog­ni­tive, and to many, social means fuzzy. So, at the risk com­mit­ting ana­lyt­i­cal mur­der on the idea, here is a def­i­n­i­tion:

Web 2.0 refers to (1) a wild­ly suc­cess­ful set of tech­nolo­gies that rad­i­cal­ly low­ered the bar to cre­at­ing con­tent on the web (blogs, wikis, RSS, etc.) which tend­ed to vast­ly increase the num­ber of web read­er-writ­ers, (2) anoth­er set of wild­ly suc­cess­ful tech­nolo­gies that took advan­tage of the net­work effects of the increase of web read­er-writ­ers (Google any­thing, Wikipedia, de.licio.us, etc.) and gen­er­at­ed val­ue out of expos­ing the mas­sive increase in web con­tent and par­tic­i­pa­tion back to the client, and (3) to the emer­gent devices, gen­res, and struc­tures of par­tic­i­pa­tion that result­ed from this feed­back loop (tag clouds, social book­marks, feeds, etc.)

If looked at from a pure­ly tech­ni­cal per­spec­tive, the addi­tion of through-the-web edit­ing and ready made infor­ma­tion archi­tec­tures (how blogs and wikis improved on build­ing home­pages with Netscape Com­pos­er) appear as dif­fer­ences in degree, not in kind. Same with the addi­tions of smooth DHTML and AJAX to improve the user expe­ri­ence in work­ing with web appli­ca­tions. But the net effect (pun per­haps intend­ed) of these changes in degree was to sharply increase read-write “pro­sump­tion” on the web beyond some crit­i­cal thresh­old where the emer­gent prop­er­ties of the sys­tem changed in kind. At some point, folks began to think of what can be done with the web dif­fer­ent­ly, both con­tent pro­sumers and web appli­ca­tion devel­op­ers and com­pa­nies. They began to get some­thing of what Sir TBL intend­ed when he cre­at­ed HTML and HTTP almost two decades ago. And that is Web 2.0.

Web 3.0 on the oth­er hand has the oth­er problem–all def­i­n­i­tions and lit­tle fuzzi­ness to show for it. I have hopes for it, though. If the thresh­old for cre­at­ing struc­tured micro-con­tent can be lowered–by being built into our through-the-web author­ing tools, as eas­i­ly as tools for cre­at­ing tags or track­backs are, then search engines, aggre­gat­ing tools, and net­work effec­tors will begin to seek out, priv­i­lege, and select for that kind of con­tent. The pres­sure will then be on for pro­sumers to shape up their con­tent for the Engines; dis­tri­b­u­tion will pull pro­duc­tion in its con­sid­er­able draft. It’s being called SWEO and will hope­ful­ly have the same effect that SEO (Search Egine Opti­miza­tion) has had on con­tent pro­duc­tion already.

Let me con­clude by attempt­ing to link Webs 1, 2, and 3 into some­thing that uni­fies them beyond a tech­nol­o­gy trail that begins with HTML/HTTP 1.0.

In the begin­ning was the World Wide Hyper­text. In this Web, all pages were in prin­ci­ple con­nect­ed by a World Graph of links, but in real­i­ty they were not. Instead, the Web was com­prised of some very large and dense graphs loose­ly con­nect­ed at the edges, and there exist­ed many struc­tur­al holes and iso­lat­ed islands of con­tent. Then came the Search Engines, and Google in par­tic­u­lar, to link every­thing togeth­er. Google itself became the de fac­to Cen­tral Node of a vast net­work, join­ing the sep­a­rate graphs into One. Then came the Engines of Content–the blogs, the wikis–along with their built-in Link­ing Engines–the syn­di­ca­tors and aggregators–to cre­ate a Web of self-link­ing con­tent. So the World Graph became effec­tive­ly a real­i­ty. But the WG lacked structure–what some ven­tured to call “meaning”–a lay­er of mark-up that would make search­ing and using this vast sphere of Con­tent both eas­i­er and more inter­est­ing. And, by virtue of Stan­dard­ized Ontolo­gies, it would con­vert the ran­dom­ness of the crowd into some­thing coher­ent. And so the Seman­tic Web was cre­at­ed.

Or some­thing like that.

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