Last Thursday, I listened to an interesting American Marketing Association (AMA) web seminar, Invisible Marketing: 3 Things Every Organization Needs to Know in the Era of Blogs, Podcasts and RSS Feeds. This has got me thinking about the concept of Web 2.0.

What is Web 2.0? I’ll summarize what how the Wikipedia defines it:

Web 2.0 … has come to refer to what some people describe as a second phase of architecture and application development for the World Wide Web.

Web 2.0 applications often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs (dating from 1998), Ajax (1998), and web syndication (1997).

They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis.


The definition also includes:

  • The transition of websites from isolated information silos into sources of content and functionality, where the web become a computing platform
  • A social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation”
  • A more organized and categorized content, with a far more developed deeplinking web architecture

      • Many find it easiest to define Web 2.0 by associating it with companies or products that embody its principles. Some of the more well known Web 2.0 entities are Google Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, digg, and Technorati.

      Many recently developed concepts and technologies are seen as contributing to Web 2.0, including weblogs, linklogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds and other forms of many to many publishing; social software, web APIs, web standards, online web services, and others.

      In the web 2.0 world, web content will become less under the control of specialised, so-called web designers and closer to Tim Berners-Lee‘s original concept of the web as a democratic, personal, and DIY medium of communication. Content is less likely to flow through email and more likely to be posted on an attractive webpage and distributed by RSS.

      Over the next several days, I’ll post more about Web 2.0 and what it means for corporations, marketing, blogs, etc., so stay tuned.