Wired News: Are You Ready for Web 2.0?: "Are You Ready for Web 2.0?
By Ryan Singel | Also by this reporter
SAN FRANCISCO -- No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.
Excitment over emerging new publishing theories -- and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings -- this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital
Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O'Reilly, is an 'architecture of participation' -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.
The theory has been percolating for some time. But it intensified last week when O'Reilly published an essay on the topic, as well as a graphic outlining the key categories of this new medium.
Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a company that sells collaborative wiki software to enterprises and that is hosting the Web 2.0 wiki, had a simpler definition for conference goers.
'Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people,' Mayfield said.
The day was not without skeptics."
By Ryan Singel | Also by this reporter
SAN FRANCISCO -- No one may be able to agree on what Web 2.0 means, but the idea of a new, more collaborative internet is creating buzz reminiscent of the go-go days of the late 1990s.
Excitment over emerging new publishing theories -- and the whiff of a resurgence of startup financings -- this week drew throngs of geeks paying $2,800 a head to the sold-out Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Eight hundred people jostled in the doorways of early workshops devoted to tagging, innovations in search and raising venture capital
Web 2.0, according to conference sponsor Tim O'Reilly, is an 'architecture of participation' -- a constellation made up of links between web applications that rival desktop applications, the blog publishing revolution and self-service advertising. This architecture is based on social software where users generate content, rather than simply consume it, and on open programming interfaces that let developers add to a web service or get at data. It is an arena where the web rather than the desktop is the dominant platform, and organization appears spontaneously through the actions of the group, for example, in the creation of folksonomies created through tagging.
The theory has been percolating for some time. But it intensified last week when O'Reilly published an essay on the topic, as well as a graphic outlining the key categories of this new medium.
Ross Mayfield, the CEO of SocialText, a company that sells collaborative wiki software to enterprises and that is hosting the Web 2.0 wiki, had a simpler definition for conference goers.
'Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people,' Mayfield said.
The day was not without skeptics."
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