Web 2.0 defined
by Brian Brown (follow me on Twitter): April 9, 2006Since I began this blog, I've noticed that the term Web 2.0 pops up everywhere. I've also noticed that if I mention the term to anyone outside my industry, they don't know what the heck I'm talking about.
I suspect many business owners who find this site may very well be "outside my industry." So I would like to lay down a definition for the term:
Web 2.0 is the group of websites on the internet that allow you to access their content through RSS feeds and interact with that content in some way.
There, simple enough. Everywhere else, people try to define it as a philosophy, a religion, a product upgrade, or a phenomenon. Too esoterical for my tastes.
Why it's called Web 2.0 is debatable, but when people use the term, they mean what the definition describes above. (Here's a great discussion about calling it something else)
This "group" of websites is absolutely huge, by the way, and may constitute a large majority of websites on the internet in a short period of time. The types of websites that are included in Web 2.0 are blogs, photo sharing programs, newspapers, and weather websites. Each of these types of sites produce an RSS feed that allows you to read their content in an RSS reader (MUCH faster than having to browse to a website), and each allows interactivity like leaving comments, or adding photos. In this way, Web 2.0 websites are considered to have two-way conversations with their visitors as opposed to the old way of thinking where websites were basically one-way ads for whoever created the site.
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Conversation and collaboration are two of the main words that stick in my mind when I think of Web 2.0.
Posted by: Easton Ellsworth | April 10, 2006 at 12:19 PM