Post #2: “Exploring 2.0 Land”

Wow!

I’ve been exploring “2.0 land” as a part of my sleuthing, playing, and thinking that will hopefully help me to make the information, knowledge, and choices that are becoming available more useful tools for people. I feel that as long as we view these new options as tools they will serve us best. I hope that as new technologies come to have an increasingly centralized role in our lives that they will continue to serve us rather than us serving them… but that’s the subject of a whole different post.

There is an awful lot out there in “2.0 land”. The short time between the beginnings of the internet as we know it today and the highly interactive tool it has become is astonishing. Many of the “tools” that internet users make a regular part of their lives began as recently as the mid 90’s. This period of major development gave birth to internet giants like Yahoo.com and Amazon.com.

When I began this exploration I thought that I knew a bit about many of the 2.0 tools and services out there. I’ve since come to find out that there are probably hundreds of these tools out there, each one vying to become the next internet superpower. While I do have a pretty clear understanding of the major players in “2.0 land” I am curious about what folks will find useful and exciting. In an attempt to wrap my mind around all of the goofy gadgets, I found the librarian in me trying to categorize the major groups that exist thus far.

It made my head spin.

My partial list includes:

• Visual media services (TV, video, movies, etc.)
• Audio media services (music sharing, playlists, recommendations, etc.)
• Money and financial services
• Blogging and aggregating
• Search engines
• Question answering services
• Social grouping and collaboration
• Travel and map creation services
• And many more

Of course not all tools fit into a category. Some of the tools I came across included those used for sharing research, garage sales, drawings, RSS magazines, social sites for dogs, and other gadgets that defy categorization. This begs the question: What exactly makes something a part of “2.0 land” and not just another fancy webpage?

Apparently I am not the only one who is a bit confused by what “2.0” means exactly.

The term “Web 2.0” is commonly accredited to a “conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International.”1 This lead to the first Web 2.0 Conference in 1994. Because there are so many definitions for this term I get the idea that nobody really has a clear and universal definition. Other people who find this term confusing include:

Tim Berners-Lee who said, “Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.”2

Paul Graham who said,

“Does ‘Web 2.0′ mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn’t, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don’t need it.” 3

Until a concise definition is agreed upon (ha!) I would like to collect a list of places to discover new 2.0 tools and exciting ways to use them in the library. I invite you to contribute something to help me grow the list. You can find it here.