What is Web 2.0?
Howard Lake | 20 July 2007 | Blogs
You’re likely to read a lot of references to Web 2.0 in the posts that follow here, so I thought it’d be handy to kick-off with a very quick explanation of just what is meant by the term.
In short, Web 2.0 is used to describe web-based services which specifically facilitate collaboration and sharing between their users – such as social network sites (e.g. MySpace and Facebook); wikis (e.g. Wikipedia); and folksonomies (e.g. Flickr and del.icio.us).
The term Web 2.0 is really a bit misleading, in that it could be read as meaning a second generation of the World Wide Web itself – which it is not. The extension ‘2.0’ originally came from Tim O’Reilly at O’Reilly Media and was intended to refer to an evolution in Web use which characterised those internet businesses which survived the bursting of the dot-com bubble in late 2001.
If you’re really keen, you can read Tim O’Reilly’s full explanation of the term in his article ‘What is Web 2.0’.
Advertisement
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.