2.0

There is a season of change currently underway as we are growing and expanding. New days and growth means assessing and reviewing and restructuring and rebuilding.


I have myself using the phrase "2.0"alot in the last month. It is based on the term "web 2.0."

So I looked up "web 2.0" on wikipedia.... and here is a bit of a summary. You'll start to get the idea.

"Web 2.0" refers to the second generation of web development and web design. It is characterized as facilitating communication, information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. It has 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.

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] and maybe even your microwave.

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of "Web 1.0" to provide "Network as platform" computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser.Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to traditional websites, the sort that limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site's owner could modify.

The concept of Web-as-participation-platform captures many of these characteristics. Bart Decrem, a founder and former CEO of Flock, calls Web 2.0 the "participatory Web" and regards the Web-as-information-source as Web 1.0.

Critics have cited the language used to describe the hype cycle of Web 2.0 as an example of Techno-utopianist rhetoric.

Here is a mind-map that was developed to sum up some of the themes of web 2.0.

So for me, "2.0" is all about cummulative change, building on the strengths of the past, increasing collaboration, interaction, integration and adding-value.

Bring it on!!!