At the end of 2006, Time magazine’s Person of the Year was ‘You’. On the cover of the magazine, underneath the title of the award, was a picture of a PC with a mirror in place of the screen, reflecting not only the face of the reader, but also the general feeling that 2006 was the year of the Web - a new, improved, 'second version', 'user generated' Web.

But how accurate is our perception of so-called 'Web 2.0'? Is there real substance behind the hyperbole? Is it a publishing revolution or is it a social revolution? Is it actually a revolution at all? And what will it mean for education, a sector that is already feeling the effects of the demands of Internet-related change?

In this TechWatch report I argue for the distinction between Web technologies (ongoing Web development overseen by the W3C), the more recent applications and services that are emerging as a result of this ongoing technological development (social software), and attempts to understand the manifestations and adoption of these newer applications and services. I start with a brief discussion of the historical context, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for a single, global, collaborative information space and contrast this story of the technology with the ideas of Tim O'Reilly, who has attempted to understand the ways in which knowledge about the technologies, and the adoption of the technologies, can be used to make predictions about technology markets.

Media coverage of Web 2.0 concentrates on the common applications/services such as blogs, video sharing, social networking and podcasting—a more socially connected Web in which people can contribute as much as they can consume. In chapter two I provide a brief introduction to some of these services, many of them built on the technologies and open standards that have been around since the earliest days of the Web, and show how they have been refined, and in some cases concatenated, to provide a technological foundation for delivering services to the user through the browser window (based on the key idea of the Web, rather than the desktop, as the technology platform).

But is this Web 2.0? Indeed, it can be argued that these applications and services are really just early manifestations of ongoing Web technology development. If we look at Web 2.0 as it was originally articulated we can see that it is, in fact, an umbrella term that attempts to express explicitly the framework of ideas that underpin attempts to understand the manifestations of these newer Web services within the context of the technologies that have produced them.

In section three I articulate six 'big' ideas, based on concepts originally outlined by Tim O’Reilly, which can help us to explain and understand why Web 2.0 has had such a huge impact. In short, these are ideas about building something more than a global information space; something with much more of a social angle to it. Collaboration, contribution and community are the order of the day and there is a sense in which some think that a new 'social fabric' is being constructed before our eyes. These ideas though, need technology in order to be realised into the functioning Web-based services and applications that we are using.

Education and educational institutions will have their own special issues with regard to Web 2.0 services and technologies and in section five I look at some of these issues. By special request, particular attention has been given to libraries and preservation and the issues that present themselves for those tasked with preserving some of the material produced by these services and applications. Finally, I look to the future. What are the technologies that will affect the next phase of the Web’s development: what one might call, rather reluctantly, Web 3.0?

Download What Is Web 2.0? Ideas, Technologies and Implications for Education

PDF format, 1.77MB, 64Pages. Published by JISC (http://www.jisc.ac.uk)

By Paul Anderson. JISC Technology & Standards Watch

This report was peer reviewed by:
Mark Hepworth
Senior Lecturer, Department of Information Science
Loughborough University
Brian Kelly
Policy and Advice Team Leader and Web Focus
UKOLN
Randy Metcalfe
Manager, OSSWatch
University of Oxford
Lawrie Phipps
Programme Manager, Users and Innovation
JISC

CONTENTS
Introduction 4
1. Web 2.0 or Web 1.0?: a tale of two Tims 5
2. Key Web 2.0 services/applications 7
2.1 Blogs 7
2.2 Wikis 8
2.3 Tagging and social bookmarking 9
2.4 Multimedia sharing 10
2.5 Audio blogging and podcasting 10
2.6 RSS and syndication 10
2.7 Newer Web 2.0 services and applications 12
3. The big ideas behind Web 2.0 14
3.1 Individual production and User Generated Content 14
3.2 Harnessing the power of the crowd 15
3.3 Data on an epic scale 18
3.4 Architecture of Participation 19
3.5 Network effects, power laws and the Long Tail 20
3.6 Open-ness 25
4. Technology and standards 27
4.1 Ajax 27
4.2 Alternatives to Ajax 28
4.3 SOAP vs REST 29
4.4 Micro-formats 30
4.5 Open APIs 31
5. Educational and institutional issues 32
5.1 Teaching and Learning 32
5.2 Scholarly Research 34
5.3 Academic Publishing 35
5.4 Libraries, repositories and archiving 36
6. Looking ahead - the Future of Web 2.0 46
6.1 Web 2.0 and Semantic Web 47
6.2 The emerging field of Web Science 49
6.3 The continued development of the Web as platform 49
6.4 Trust, privacy, security and social networks 49
6.5 Web 2.0 and SOA 50
6.6 Technology Bubble 2.0? 51
6.7 And Web 3.0? 52
Conclusion 53
About the Author 53
Appendix A: Recommendations & points for further debate 54
References 57

1. 'Web 2.0' or 'Web 1.0'?: a tale of two Tims

Web 2.0 is a slippery character to pin down. Is it a revolution in the way we use the Web? Is it another technology 'bubble'? It rather depends on who you ask. A Web technologist will give quite a different answer to a marketing student or an economics professor.

The short answer, for many people, is to make a reference to a group of technologies which have become deeply associated with the term: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds etc., which facilitate a more socially connected Web where everyone is able to add to and edit the information space. The longer answer is rather more complicated and pulls in economics, technology and new ideas about the connected society. To some, though, it is simply a time to invest in technology again—a time of renewed exuberance after the dot-com bust.

For the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there is a tremendous sense of déjà vu about all this. When asked in an interview for a podcast, published on IBM’s website, whether Web 2.0 was different to what might be called Web 1.0 because the former is all about connecting people, he replied:

"Totally not. 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. And in fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0', it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0."

Laningham (ed.), developerWorks Interviews, 22nd August, 2006.

To understand Sir Tim’s attitude one needs look back at the history of the development of the Web, which is explored in his book Weaving the Web (1999). His original vision was very much of a collaborative workspace where everything was linked to everything in a ‘single, global information space’ (p. 5), and, crucially for this discussion, the assumption was that ‘everyone would be able to edit in this space’ (IBM podcast, 12:20 minutes). The first development was Enquire, a rudimentary project management tool, developed while Berners-Lee was working at CERN, which allowed pages of notes to be linked together and edited. A series of further technological and software developments led to the creation of the World Wide Web and a browser or Web client that could view and edit pages of marked-up information (HTML). However, during a series of ports to other machines from the original development computer, the ability to edit through the Web client was not included in order to speed up the process of adoption within CERN (Berners-Lee, 1999). This attitude to the ‘edit’ function continued through subsequent Web browser developments such as ViolaWWW and Mosaic (which became the Netscape browser). Crucially, this left people thinking of the Web as a medium in which a relatively small number of people published and most browsed, but it is probably more accurate to picture it as a fork in the road of the technology's development, one which has meant that the original pathway has only recently been rejoined.

The term ‘Web 2.0’ was officially coined in 2004 by Dale Dougherty, a vice-president of O’Reilly Media Inc. (the company famous for its technology-related conferences and high quality books) during a team discussion on a potential future conference about the Web (O’Reilly, 2005a). The team wanted to capture the feeling that despite the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, the Web was ‘more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity’ (O’Reilly, 2005a, p. 1). It was also noted, at the same meeting, that companies that had survived the dot-com firestorms of the late 90s now appeared to be stronger and have a number of things in common. Thus it is important to note that the term was not coined in an attempt to capture the essence of an identified group of technologies, but an attempt to capture something far more amorphous.

The second Tim in the story, Tim O’Reilly himself, the founder of the company, then followed up this discussion with a now famous paper, What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software, outlining in detail what the company thought they meant by the term. It is important to note that this paper was an attempt to make explicit certain features that could be used to identify a particular set of innovative companies, including business characteristics, such as the fact that they have control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources (something that could become increasingly significant for H&FE), or that they have lightweight business models. The paper did, however, identify certain features that have come to be associated with ‘social software’ technologies, such as participation, user as contributor, harnessing the power of the crowd, rich user experiences etc., but it should be noted that these do not constitute a de facto Web (r)evolution. As Tim Berners-Lee has pointed out, the ability to implement this technology is all based on so-called ‘Web 1.0’ standards, as we shall see in section four, and that, in fact, it’s just taken longer for it to be implemented than was initially anticipated. From this perspective, ‘Web 2.0’ should not therefore be held up in opposition to ‘Web 1.0’, but should be seen as a consequence of a more fully implemented Web.

This distinction is key to understanding where the boundaries are between ‘the Web’, as a set of technologies, and ‘Web 2.0’—the attempt to conceptualise the significance of a set of outcomes that are enabled by those Web technologies. Understanding this distinction helps us to think more clearly about the issues that are thrown up by both the technologies and the results of the technologies, and this helps us to better understand why something might be classed as ‘Web 2.0’ or not. In order to be able to discuss and address the Web 2.0 issues that face higher education we need to have these conceptual tools in order to identify why something might be significant and whether or not we should act on it. ...

Comments (0)

Show/Hide comments

Name

Email

Website

Title

Comment

smaller | bigger

Add Comment