What is Web 2.0?
Posted by Arjun ThomasWe’ve all heard of the term Web 2.0, but what exactly is it? and how do benefit from its use?
According to Wikipedia
“The termWeb 2.0 describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. “
Listed below are some of the components that make up Web 2.0.
Social Networking : refers to a system that allows users of a specific site to learn about other users skills, talents, knowledge or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and MySpace. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.
Peer-to-peer Networking : Called p2p, is a technique for efficiently sharing files over the internet of with a closed set of uses. Unlike traditional methods of storing information at a single location a p2p network distributes its files across multiple locations to reduce issues bottlenecks.
Collective intelligence : refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to take decisions.
Mash-ups : are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service.
Podcasts : Are audio or video recordings in the form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes.
Blogs : (short for Web log) are online journals or diaries hosted on a website and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS.
RSS : (Really simple syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts or other information.
Web Services : are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions .
Wiki’s : such as Wikipedia are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion
In future posts as we discuss tools you might encounter during the life cycle of managing projects you will be in a better position to recognize these technologies being used and understand their benefits.
Project Management tools today have started embracing a number of these technologies in an attempt to stay current with technology trends. The open source revolution and the world wide web opened up a whole realm of possibilities with collaboration on a scale that had never been seen before.
I’m currently involved in a large project within the company i work for to roll out a large application that encompasses most Web 2.0 features like Wikis, Blogs, Social networking and such. This combines social networking aspects of day to day life within an organization with traditional project management practices thereby giving the end users a single system to work on and yet preserving information within a single system.
This is something that i personally feel has been long overdue and i can already forsee the huge benefit to the employee within the organization, and the reason i feel this is so powerful is because instead of creating “just another application” we are for the first time working to create a cohesive information system that addresses all knowledge needs without having to bounce back and forth between multiple systems.
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David says:
always interesting to see how these things roll out with a top-down approach, after all, the real beauty of web 2 is giving power and control to individuals
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Swan says:
In my humble opinion, almost every project should be using a wiki to collaboratively develop content and share it across the team.
Many of the project management tools are starting to go towards 2.0, but I have yet to see one that contains all the enterprise ready capabilities of a project plan (especially task dependencies) as well as good collaborative technologies like wikis, open question tracking, risk tracking, issues tracking, etc….
Arjun Thomas says:
Swan,
Thank you for commenting, i couldn’t agree with you more. Good collaboration is the one of the foundations of a successful project. Tools like Wiki’s fit this requirement rather well.
Lets hope that Project Management tools get to the level that we want them to.
Nick says:
I have extensively used wikis for capturing meeting minutes and project knowledge management. They are a fast way to inform your team of change and issues, and when combined with a collaborative toolset such as SharePoint, easily searchable. Team blogs and centralised project sites containing team-centric alerts are also useful – why email (information push) when you can train your team to look in a central location (information pull).
Web 2.0 has historically been something of a buzzword/catch-all for collaborative web services, but is now gaining momentum as technologies become more readily available, and can be effectively utilised in the project space to increase productivity and cut down on information overload through email.
Arjun Thomas says:
Nick,
It’s always encouraging to hear success stories of Web 2.0 implementations within organizations.
Thanks for sharing!
Arjun.
Oren Landgarten says:
Nick,
i am happy to hear of your successful implementation of web 2.0
blogs are an excellent way to keep track of work as well as let your team voice opinions and thoughts
as web 2.0 grows more popular the days of being associated strictly with social networking sties will be a thing of the past