Web 2.0 Assignment

When I think of the term “Web 2.0,” the first thought that comes to mind is “the Internet of the future.” In actuality, society is already immersed in what Web 2.0 stands for and has been for several years: a generation of Internet users utilizing tools like blogs and social networking sites in order to communicate with each other and create and share ideas.

According to Wikipedia, the term was first used by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 and can refer to a “trend in web design and development — a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services (such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies) which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing between users.”

Before the advent of Web 2.0, the Internet was less interactive as a medium. Users could browse web sites, but they didn’t have the powers they enjoy today, like the ability to comment on news articles and blog posts or express their thoughts and opinions on sites like LiveJournal and Xanga. People are also able to communicate with each other more than ever before on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. Wikipedia, which calls itself the online Encylopedia, is a crowdsourcing web site that has changed the way people search for information. YouTube, a web site that allows users to upload videos, quickly turned into a revolutionary way of sharing entertainment. Web 2.0 has facilitated this and other types of interactivity on the Internet in ways that weren’t available in the past.