Web 2.0 and web 1.0 Applications

1. WEB 2.0

1.1 THE SOCIAL READ/WRITE WEB AN INTRODUCTION

We live in age of information where flow of information is constant and internet plays an important role in this flow of information sharing and exchange. The world is on figure tips due to the advancement in technologies. All this become possible due to World Wide Web which cause to made globe as community. Technology and information become obsolete so quickly. Now we are in era of web 2.0 According to Tim Orielly

“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation,’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web1.0 to deliver rich user experiences” (Orielly, 2004).

According to Alan smith “2.0” does not show any specific increment in web version it’s only the way the use of web change (Smith, 2009). Murugesan define Web 2.0 as second phase in the Web’s evolution, which attract IT professionals, businesses, and Web users. Further more he writes that Web 2.0 is wisdom Web, people-centric Web, participative Web, and read/write Web (Murugesan, 2007).

Web 2.0 is ‘people Power’ web shows the blogging success, user review, photo sharing (Anderson, 2006) and observe called it gift culture due to users contribution as participation (Mason & Rennie, 2007). In learning and teaching process effective evolution of technology, importance of active participation, critical thinking, social presence, collaboration and two way communications are also important (Beldarrin, 2006).

Web2.0 provides more effective interaction and collaboration, investigation for the ways of using blogs effectively, wikis, podcasts and social network which also used in education. The main characteristic of these tools called Web 2.0, which shows active participation from user in the content of creation process (Usluel & Mazman, 2009).

Web 2.0 social networking applications, allows users not only to find out information about others, but also to connect with others through linking to their profiles, joining and creating group, and ability to send public and private messages to their friends for example Face book, MySpace, and sharing with them their happy moments as on Picasa and flicker. It has changed the static information to more active, dynamic and responsive participation, creation and sharing of contents.

On the biases of Orielly definition Markus Angermeier created a mind map for web 2.0 which explain the key concepts. These important concepts of Web 2.0 include Usability, Standardization, Design, Remixability, Economy, participation and convergence.

Usability is one of the key factors of web 2.0. According to Lewis

“Web 2.0 applications tend to look more like desktop applications than Web pages: they have simple interfaces with plain colours and no busy patterns, logos, or animation. They provide a richness of Interaction previously found only in desktop applications” (Lewis, 2006).

He further write about the dynamic content of web 2.0 and information gathering and assembling of information on a single page.

The source of information is blogs which are like online diaries, resource sharing which allow users to share their favourite web links and other resource like tags (Lewis, 2006). Example systems include del.icio.us and bibsonomy.org. Web 2.0 fulfils the standardization requirements of (W3C) for applications development and content generation. Design provide rich look and feel with practical user-interface, eye catching appearance and ease of use. Remixability is the facility that Web 2.0 offers where an application can be remixed with different set of other minor applications together to form a new and more interactive application.

The introduction of Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX breaks this fixed page based model in several ways. Traditional web sites depend on a page update model where each interaction results in an entire page refresh Web 2.0 applications allow part page updates (Pilgrim, 2008). For example, Google Maps do not require an entire page to be refreshed when the user selects a preferred view. Google system gets the data that lies outside of the edge of the map in frame with out refreshing whole page and allow user to grab the map and drag it without any interruption (Zucker, 2007). Gmail also uses AJAX technology in similar fashion to update the little portion of page when new email arrives (Pilgrim, 2008).

1.2 WEB 1.0 VS WEB 2.0

According to Musser and O’Reilly (2006)

“Web 2.0 is a set of economic, social, and technology trends that collectively form the basis for the next generation of the Internet—a more mature, distinctive medium characterised by user participation, openness, and network effects”.

The main difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is creation and presentation of content. In Web 1.0 the majority of users acting as consumers of content, while in Web 2.0 user can actively participate in content creation and sharing and there are various technologies available to create the content to its maximum potential. The free nature of Web 2.0 allow users to create exchange and share contents of any kind (text, audio, video) and tag, comment, and link “Pages ” within group or outside the group. A popular improvement in Web 2.0 is “mashups,” which combine or make content in fresh forms (Cormode & Krishnamurthy, 2008). For example, street addresses are linked with a map Web site to visualize the locations. This type of site linkage provides facility to create additional link between records of any database with other database.

In web 1.0 people implicitly put links of interesting resources to their personal home pages. HTML form tags spread across entire web with no facility of tag base browsing, search engines were using this text as source of web page to improve the quality of search, it limits the tagging in web 1.0 and which restrict collaborative interaction and collective intelligence of community (Brine & Page, 1998).

While web 2.0 every one can participate in tagging as it become very easy task and become the key characteristic of portals. “Due to the large scale of the tagging community, portals like del.icio.us have accumulated decent annotations in the form of tags for numerous resources. These tags are used for search and navigation and Google AdSenseform easy-to-read summaries for the described resources” (Kinsella, et al., 2008)

Tim O’Reilly in his Article “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software”, 2005 describe the difference of web1.0 and web2.0 as follows:

(Table 1.0 What is Web 2.0: O’Reilly, 2005)

According to Gibson dynamic updates is one of the important characteristic of web2.0 and this is adopted through AJAX technology (Gibson, 2007). Web2.0 websites respond user request such as email checking or instant chatting. Web2.0 applications also provide automatic updates such as stock quotes, sports scores and other information (Gibson, 2007). Mostly news sites like BBC, Sky News…etc. continuously updating providing instant information.

Web2.0 encourages the active participation from the users to access content and interaction with each other on the Web (Pilgrim, 2008). The content of Web 1.0 was ‘read-only’ and static. Whereas the transformation of web to changed the read-only web to ‘read-write’ web enabled user active and collaborative participation.

The above graph shows that how persistent growth in internet usage according to the facts provided by Internet World Stats with in a decade its usage rise from 361 million to 1650 million users world wide.

At the early stages content of web were static in their nature and they are publish for reading purpose there were no interaction between users and user generated content are at ignorable scale. As the number of users raise it change the way of content presentation and publication on internet and users start active participation and involvement in the content and collective intelligence increased through this social read/write web. The change brought by Web 2.0 in content publishing and consumption evidently shows the divergence between static web (web1.0) and dynamic web (web2.0). Web 2.0 provides pages with dynamic content which not only can be read by browsers or readers but with the capability of writing, collaborating and sharing knowledge at the same time.

1.3 WEB 2.0 ACTIVITIES AND SERVICES

There are a number of Web 2.0 services and applications available which provide the foundation of Read/Write web. These tools allow users to create, edit and modify the content of information with collaboration. Web 2.0-based communities occupy virtual spaces that are open, self-organizing, adaptive, agile, readily accessible, and easy to use (Sabina & Leone, 2009). A Web 2.0 platform has shared design of services to support a collaborative and distributed environment in which users can connect, share, comment and create new content or software tools (Sabina & Leone, 2009).

Services offered within the Web 2.0 framework offers evolutionary services of the Internet history. To be active on internet firms have no choice but to find out an appropriate role using web2.0. Most major firms, including BMW, IBM, Google, and many others, are positioning them-selves to find their strategic place, appropriate place and fit within these developments (Wigand, Benjamin & Birkland, 2008).

In today’s web we find different type of content. According to Paul Anderson (2007)

“These include blogs, wikis, multimedia sharing services, content syndication, podcasting and content tagging services. Many of these applications of Web technology are relatively mature, having been in use for a number of years, although new features and capabilities are being added on a regular basis It is worth noting that many of these newer technologies are concatenations, i.e. they make use of existing services”.

In this section I will discusses about some of the important activities Web 2.0 activities, these are Blogging, Folksonomy and Social Bookmarking, Multimedia Sharing, Social Networking, Podcasting.

1.3.1 BLOGGING

The term web-log, or blog, was coined by Jorn Barger in 1997 and refers to a simple webpage consisting of brief paragraphs of opinion, information, personal diary entries, or links, called posts, arranged chronologically with the most recent first, in the style of an online journal (Doctorow et al., 2002).

Blogs are also called online diaries which enable users, without requirement of any technical skill, to create, publish and organize their own web pages that contain dated content, entries, comments, discussion etc. in sequential order (Alexander, 2006; Castenade, 2007).

People can publish information which they collect from various resources and establish relation between them in blogs. Additionally RSS and the possibility to post comments make blogs also a collaborative and social-interactive software application (Petter et al., 2005).

San Murugesan defines blogs a two- way web-base communication tool. Simply it is a website which is used to share thoughts and ideas to leave suggestions and comments. An entry in blog might contain text, image, or link to other blogs and web pages, and possibly the other media related to the topic. Blogs have ability to generate machine readable RSS and Atom feeds it means they could be use to distribute machine readable summaries of contents and provide the facility of searching similar information from different sources (Cayzer, 2004), (Anderson, 2007).

Huge number of internet users involved in blogging and they are operating in their own environment. As technology has become more sophisticated, bloggers have begun to incorporate multimedia into their blogs and there are now photo-blogs, video blogs (vlogs), and, increasingly, bloggers can upload material directly from their mobile phones (Anderson, 2007).There are different types and categories of blogs. Such as Arts, Business, Computers and Technology, Education, Entertainment, Food, History, Law, Libraries, Music, Personal, Political, Regional, Sports and finally Web.

Blogging software allows three levels of privacy password-protected most private blog; user’s blog service listed blog most public blog and will be easily found by search engines. An unlisted blog neither fully private nor fully public. Unlisted blog cannot be found without knowing the URL. It could be public only if it contain a link and someone eventually click that link this way these blogs picked by search engines. Since most blogs contain links that anyone might click on, unlisted blogs are not secure, although they may remain relatively invisible if they link to sites that few people access and if the links are not activated (Nardi et al., 2004).

Blogging is well known activity which used for online debate and discussions, shared editing, personal communication and networking. In terms of groups, it allows various authors or writers to communicate with others to present their views, opinions and to write for teams, groups and group work.

1.3.2 FOLKSONOMY/TAGGING AND SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

A tag is a keyword that is added to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture or video clip) to describe it, but not as part of a formal classification system. One of the first large-scale applications of tagging was seen with the introduction of Joshua Schacter’s del.icio.us website, which launched the ‘social bookmarking’ phenomenon (Anderson, 2007). In web 2.0 Folksonomy as a social web service provide facility to users to save and organise online their bookmarks with “social annotations” or “tags”. These are high quality descriptors of web pages’ topics and good indicators of web users’ interests (Xu, et al., 2004).

Social book marking systems share number of common features (Millen et al., 2005), they also provide the facility of tagging these bookmarks and unlike traditional browser-base bookmarks they can be belong more that one category. Tagging is far more beyond then web site bookmarking. Services like Flicker (photos), YouTube (video) and Odeo (podcasts) allow a variety of digital artefacts to be socially tagged (Anderson, 2007). Users contribute not only in posts and articles but also in from of tags which form the metadata of the content which provide valuable information in content search. It also brings benefits of semantic web to current websites which create collaborative tagging or Folksonomy. Del.icio.us is good example of widely accepted and collaboratively created tags, contend creation and blogging (Subramanya & Liu, 2008).

Social bookmarking systems provide a clear incentive for users to participate (Farrell et al., 2007). The idea of tagging has been expanded to include what are called tag clouds: groups of tags (tag sets) from a number of different users of a tagging service, which collates information about the frequency with which particular tags are used (Anderson, 2007).

1.3.3 MULTIMEDIA SHARING

According to Paul Anderson (2007) multimedia sharing is one of the biggest growth areas amongst services. Well known examples are YouTube which provide video storage and sharing Flicker for photographs and Odeo for Podcasts. These services provide writable facility which at the same time makes users as a consumers and initiate active participation and production of web contents. There are million of people participating in sharing and exchange of these types of media by producing their own podcasts, videos and photos. This development was made possible thorough widespread adoption of high quality and low cost media technology. Such as mobile devices which provide high quality video capturing and photography facility, camcorders with huge storage capability.

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Apendix 1.0