TechSpectives

The lexicon of the world changes regularly.  One thing I stress to my students that when they are writing that they be careful not to use slang in their work.  Slang can be cutural, generational, even regional.  Remember when the word bad actualy meant bad? And then it changed to good, back to bad for a few years, and now it depends on which generation you are talking to if bad means bad or if it means good.  If you cannot communicate an idea with the people you are talking with, then you have obviously have a failure to communicate.  Mistakes will be made, results will not be what you want.  The idea can be lost in the confusion.  Especially if there are new ideas, or ideas that are not defined very well.   

For years people have been trying to define what Web 2.0 is.  Web 2.0 is one of those concepts that is hard to define because there is so much that it can/cannot encompass.  Can you define what Web 2.0 means?  Or is still just an idea.  Different people have different ideas - or they incorporate new ideas into Web 2.0.  Is cloud computing web 2.0, or web 3.0? 

After years of trying to define it, a few people tried to define it by examples:  Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle answer the question of “What’s next for Web 2.0?” in Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On.

In our initial brainstorming, we formulated our sense of Web 2.0 by example:

This is a five page article with many different ideas and an interesting read.  What do you think of their examples?  Does this define Web 2.0 for you? 

Mark Viquesney