The growing popularity of Web 2.0, and of the buzzwords linked to it, give reason to ponder about the deep changes that are altering our conceptions of the Web.
Too often such evolution is thought to be solely affecting the technological realm, rather than triggering more dramatic economic and social changes. And there are no clear conceptual boundaries to the Web 2.0 phenomenon, because it roams freely across multiple matrices bridging real and virtual worlds.
What is certain is that ethical, political, economic, and relational models will have to be rethought in the light of this growing social pressure from below. Think about blogging, or rather the blogosphere. It has become a separate medium, independent from mass media, enabling freedom of expression of Net crowds and the ability to influence them. Or think about how YouTube has liberated Net users' creativity, giving rise to a new form of entertainment which is supplanting TV, because it's more participatory and global.
In such forms of user-generated content, users also create cataloguing systems via so-called metatags.
Thanks to metatags you search photos on Flickr, videos on YouTube, links on del.icio.us, blog articles on Technorati and Digg. These folksonomies (a neologism that refers to taxonomies compiled from below) exploit collective intelligence and crowdsourcing, and, unlike Google, function as semantic search engines.
We haven't reached the stage of the Semantic Web just jet, but collective tagging is emerging next to a quantitative indicator as PageRank to be a useful complement in information retrieval.
This is also the era where applications do not come in CD-ROMs, but are downloaded from the Web, thereby enabling users to use applications which are disentangled from the particular PC we are using. Our favorite links are immediately accessible on del.icio.us from any IP, we can work on the same document with Google Document, and we can manage our social network on Facebook, another iconic activity characterizing life on Web 2.0. Augmented reality is the name of the game in the new online world. In fact, social networking is not a substitute, but rather a facilitator of daily activities. Look at various forms of social networking, which can be either professional (Linkedin), or college-bound (Facebook), or content-specific (Myspace), and offer all participants various modes of interaction and sharing.
A final aspect characterizing Web 2.0 is the relative strength of business models built around it. Several companies in the industry have drawn the right conclusions from the dot-com bubble lesson and have become better at detecting swift changes in the direction of Net culture. Ventures like Amazon Netflix have learned to make use of the enormous variety of the Web to bend Pareto's paradigm, by managing to cover every market niche with their digital bazaars, which exploit that demand phenomenon peculiar to the Web that Chris Anderson has described in The Long Tail.
Web 2.0 is a continuously evolving phenomenon embodying various convergent trends, which, for better or worse, are shifting all equilibria in media, society, and the economy. Certain companies will prove unable to survive this sea change, but the social transformation it has triggered is likely to continue unabated.
by Luigi Proserpio,
Director of TeD Plus Research Lab, SDA Bocconi School of Management
Giovanni Lion
Collaborator of TeD Plus Lab