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May 14, 2006

Keeping up With the Next Generation Web

Like many of you, I've been tracking the web 2.0 (and by extension the library 2.0) phenomena. When a new phenomena hits the waves, it takes a little while for the hype to settle. I think the hype has settled and we need to start using/incorporating web 2.0 in to our libraries.

Still not sure about Web 2.0? Take a look at these facts/figures. About 70 million folks are now using myspace.com. The Los Angeles Police Department has just launched a blog. The White House currently has 5 rss/news feeds and 4 podcasts. Blogs have caught up to newspapers. Technorati tracks 39.4 million sites/blogs and 2.4 billion links. Why would this be important? It's a good way to see what people are buzzing about online. What a great marketing tool.

Ok. So web 2.0 is everywhere. What exactly is it? Let me back-track a little to the "rise" of the internet in the mid-late 90s. The first generation internet was all about posting information online. Sites were going up at a phenomenal rate during the late nineties. Remember the days when you discovered "xyz" organization had a site and you wanted to tell everyone about it and statements like "You mean we can look up that information on the web!" were pretty common. SEC filings became easily accessible to everyone. THOMAS made it easier to look up legislative information. Weather information was as easy to obtain as entering a zip code and hitting the "search" button. You didn't have to buy maps anymore... The first generation web was all about companies and organizations making their "stuff" available to everyone. Content hidden in stuffy offices and research centers were hitting cyberspace like never before.

Web 2.0 is just the next-generation of the internet. Web 2.0 is all about regular folks. It's all about "us" as creators of content; making our knowledge/experience available to everyone. Here is an example. I create a bookmark list of all my favorite and useful-to-me sites and share it with everyone. You decide to see my list [go ahead] and take the ones that are useful to you and share it with others. I like a link on another person's list and want to see who else has linked to it. This leads me to discover more sites to use for myself and to share with others and so on.

Web 2.0 is participatory. It's about sharing and collaboration. It's about creating forums where we perfect something using our collective wisdom. What are some other examples of this trend? Wikipedia is one. eBay was before that. Amazon.com saw the importance of ordinary wisdom and started allowing customers to write reviews. Other ventures include YouTube (videosharing and commenting), Givezilla (create a fundraising store), MySpace (communicating with & sharing content with your friends), Bloglines (Feed reader & news aggregator), Myhomepoint (calendar tool to collectively share with family or project members.)

Want to see more? See Sacred Cow Dung for a pretty good list of "All Things Web 2.0". How you use them in your library, is up to your creativity and imagination. Of course, I'd love to hear about the great ideas that are being vollied around in your libraries.

Posted by Ranjna Das at May 14, 2006 1:46 PM

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