Coming to Grips with Web 2.0

Having read our course materials and watched the iLecture on "Intro to Web 2.0". I've realised that Web 2.0 is a concept to be grappled with. No wonder I've never been able to make head nor tails of it from what I've read in newspapers and the odd computer magazine. Merely defining it as "interactive websites" is way too simplistic O'Reilly's remark "Like many important concepts, Web 2.0 doesn't have a hard boundary, but rather, a gravitational core" puts it into a good perspective for me. The YouTube video on Web 2.0 is also helping crystallise this concept.

Both of the above sites were found after joining Delicious and searching for net11_test, so thanks to those other students who had previously bookmarked these sites. Using other search terms in Delicious wasn't so fruitful, and I found a lot of irrelevant content. Maybe, with experience, I can get better at finding useful material in Delicious, and hopefully I can achieve Tama's target of bookmarking 5 new sites. I haven't found anything really good so far that doesn't have the net11_test footprint already.

So, what is this Delicious thing? It's got a delectable name certainly. My first thought is that it is a "WikiGoogle", i.e. mainly a search engine but one where we, the users, collectively dictate the ranking rather than the secret mathematical algorithm adopted by the conventional search engines. That term has no doubt been use elsewhere, but I haven't seen it personally. (Searching for that tag on Delicious produces mostly links about Google Maps.) I haven't yet cottoned on to the social nature of Delicious - that might come later.

I liked Tama's presentation on McAfee's SLATES, so searching for that produced the blog by Hinchcliffe, 2006 which had a cute graphic but didn't really seem to add much to my undertstanding of Web 2.0, other than that you can buy a PDF of O'Reilly's report on its Principles & Best Practices for a mere $US375. For less than double that, I can get to see and hear Tama's almost certainly more entertaining expositions on the subject.