Web 2.0 and Social Media

In Future posts, we will be talking more about the Changes in the Web Landscape , the significance of Social Media and opportunities that arise from this .

It is hard to talk about Social Media out of context from Web 2.0 , so…

What is Web 2.0?

To give a definition to Web 2.0

Web 2.0” refers to the second generation of web development and web design that facilitates, and is characterised by , information sharing and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

The advent of Web 2.0 led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and web applications. Examples include social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0

Web 2.0 Features

Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features/techniques. Andrew McAfee used the acronym SLATES to refer to them:^[18]

Search: The ease of finding information through keyword search.
Links: Ad-hoc guides to other relevant information.
Authoring: The ability to create constantly updating content over a platform that is shifted from being the creation of a few to being constantly updated, interlinked work. In wikis, the content is iterative in the sense that users undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, content is cumulative in that posts and comments of individuals are accumulated over time.
Tags: Categorization of content by creating tags: simple, one-word user-determined descriptions to facilitate searching and avoid rigid, pre-made categories.
Extensions: Powerful algorithms that leverage the Web as an application platform as well as a document server.
Signals: The use of RSS technology to rapidly notify users of content changes.