Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

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Thursday Dec 08, 2005

Web 2.0 in three words

I'm going far out on a limb. Internet.next, Web 2.0, semantic web, Internet 2.0, and similar monikers are marketing names for the read-write web. The technical distinction between the read-mostly, Internet 1.0 world and the meme-space known as Web 2.0 is that all of the examples of Web 2.0 involve end users writing data to the network. Once you start creating and consuming, you're worried about metadata, relationships, rights, derivative uses, attribution, distribution and location of your bits.

Everything that Tim O'Reilly posits as Web 2.0 examples is distinguished from a Web 1.0 counterpoint as being writeable. Three words: read-write web.

If you want to hear me rant and rave about this, and the wonders of transactional semantics in the filesystem (and believe me, they're related), check out Richard Giles' I/O Podcast, which we recorded about sixteen hours ago. Richard called me via Skype; I was sitting in a Sun drop-in work center (watching my Devils lose via real-time play by play broadcast by nhl.com); the whole thing went from talking to streaming in a matter of hours.

Consumers (me) are creators (also me). Read-write.

Posted at 01:27PM Dec 08, 2005 by stern in Technology | Comments[7] | Permalink

Comments:

Dave Winer has also referred to this as the "two way web", http://www.thetwowayweb.com/about

Posted by David Golding on December 08, 2005 at 06:53 PM EST #

Although "read-write web" might sometimes be a useful alternative phrase, there is a lot it doesn't capture. The Web was always meant to be writeable, e.g. see Tim Berners-Lee's design issues. The Semantic Web (also described by TimBL way back) differs qualitatively from Web 1.0 in the kind of data that is being read and written. Where the current Web is primarily about human-readable documents, the Semantic Web is about more explicit data. Metadata about documents and content (including that found in RSS feeds) is one kind, sure, but there's also data explicitly about things in the world (this is the kind of data currently found in most databases), e.g. machine-readable information about people and places (FOAF and Geo). Filesystem transactional semantics are certainly relevant, the filesystem is after all just another kind of data store. So although I do believe consumers as creators is an extremely important aspect, Web 2.0 is still useful as a more general umbrella term.

Posted by Danny on December 09, 2005 at 05:57 AM EST #

Snell's chmod 777 web is still my favorite definition: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog_comments.jspa?blog=351&entry=81961

Posted by stephen ogrady on December 09, 2005 at 02:47 PM EST #

My favorite definition is Dennis Wilen's -- "It's the uploads, stupid."

Posted by Joe Crawford on May 15, 2006 at 12:43 PM EDT #

[Trackback] The idea of reductionism holds that the nature of complex things can always be reduced to simpler, more fundamental ideas. In contrast, Tim O'Reilly's now-famous meme-map of Web 2.0 is a terrific piece of largely holistic analysis. Holisim, which is ...

Posted by Enterprise Web 2.0 on May 15, 2006 at 03:28 PM EDT #

I call the Web 2.0 phenomena "webware", that is, web as platform for applications and personal/social/global interaction.

Posted by Clara on May 17, 2006 at 06:38 PM EDT #

Here's Web 2.0 in three words: "whatever is new". I just see Web 2.0 as a label for anything new that's happened on the web since the start of 2005. Everyone struggles to find an underlying theme to everything from XMLHTTPRequest to tagging to JavaScript animations to MySpace. The real underlying theme? They're all new trends. That's about it.

Posted by Jesse Skinner on May 27, 2006 at 07:21 PM EDT #

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Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, cloud computing, security, privacy, world travel, technology, and snowmen.

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