Week Twelve | Part One: Web 2.0

What is Web 2.0?

In Week Eleven (and really throughout this course) we looked at the Document Object Model, which allows is a way to make our Web pages dynamic ... which is to say, pages that our visitors can engage with in an active fashion.

We have focused on CSS ... but I wanted to introduce an important concept that will affect your design work and the Web for some time to come. The concept is called Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is not a technology, per se, but rather a cental idea around to which many new technologies, applications, economies, and human interactions are linked:

Wikipedia provides a useful description to get us started:

• "The transition of web sites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming computing platforms serving web applications to end-users."
• "The transition of web sites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming computing platforms serving web applications to end-users."
• "A social phenomenon embracing an approach to generating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and 'the market as a conversation'."
• "Enhanced organization and categorization of content, emphasizing deep linking."
• "A rise in the economic value of the Web, possibly surpassing the impact of the dot-com boom of the late 1990s."

Tim O'Reilly, whose renown books are used by programmers and developers around the world, is credited with coing the phrase Web 2.0. Read Tim O'Reilly's very interesting article on the rise of Web 2.0. It will show just how much the Web has changed since I first got on board back in 1995.