Web 2.0 - “… linking people”

So what is web 2.0?

Not an easy question to answer. After some Googling researching, we discovered many different respected Internet minds have many different opinions on the definition of Web 2.0, so we decided to put our own definition together:

A collection of rules, combining technology, governing the way the web should be implemented.

Separation of presentation and content

So how should the web be implemented? Think back a few years, to when Microsoft Frontpage and Adobe Dreamweaver were the simplest ways to create a website. With a little MS Office experience, one could whip a website together and place it online for “free” provided you allowed 15% of your website to be full of banner advertisements - Oh those were the days!

Remember how much fun it was to update? You had to open the MS Frontpage document, change what you wanted to change, re-save it and re-upload it. This one single document had everything from the content of your website, the type of font used for text, the colour of the background, the thickness of the borders around the tables, you get my point. And it was all commanded by this mysterious jumble known as HTML which you didn’t even have to know existed.

Now fast forward to today - Blogs, Facebook, Myspace, YouTube and so on. We can quickly add content, own our own little piece of the Internet and basically say whatever we like on our pre-built blog or Myspace homepage. We can have the latest news written by Fairfax appear and update automatically on our website. We can have a video, hosted by YouTube appear in the middle of our blog without having to visit the YouTube website.

How is this possible? Why couldn’t we do this back in the days of MS Frontpage? Well, back when we saved that MS Frontpage document, with all of the text we wanted to displayed (content), we also saved within that same document, how the text was to be displayed (form/presentation). So to update the page, we had to re-save the entire document. Now-a-days, in Web 2.0 times, we can change the text on our blog, without having to concern ourselves with the way the text is displayed. We can take the latest news from Fairfax, display it on our website and then determine how we want it presented.

This is a small example of what Web 2.0 represents - the foundation and power of the ‘new’ Internet. And now to demonstrate this power, I have included a favourite video of mine, illustrating everything I just said, only with cool music.