from the horizon

I introduced the concept of Web 2.0 in my last post (link) so I could talk about how some of the principals and technology is being carried over the not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) world. The internet is providing new tools for organizations to use, and is leveling the field for smaller organizations to compete on the same level.

Many of the things which organizations used to do in the real world can now be done virtually. Petitions, advocacy campaigns and even fund raising is now done online. Because of the scale of the internet, specialized sites such as JustGiving and FirstGiving have been set up to help any sort of raise funds online. MSF (Medicins sans Frontiers/Doctors without Borders) even has its own podcast! Read the rest of this entry »

Although this may have appear to have little to do with the regular subject matter on my blog, it’s a hot topic at the moment and I want to write about some related stuff, so I thought I’d write a brief intro piece about it.

What is Web 2.0? That’s actually a good question. There is no clear answer, and many people have different ideas about what it is. Web 2.0 is used to describe new uses of the internet, where users participate in generating the content, not just as passive consumers. Blogs (such as this one), Wikipedia, TradeMe/EBay, YouTube and MySpace are all examples of websites which exist because of the regular internet users posting information on them. This is significant enough to inspire Time magazine to name Internet Users as the Time Person of the Year for 2006 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html).

I think Web 2.0 is all about dequantization. Traditionally information was quantized, coming from a limited number of sources, due to the costs involved in publishing/distributing/broadcasting. Now thanks to the internet we are getting an explosion in the amount of information and the sources from which we can get that information.

There are a number of key ideas behind Web 2.0, and I’ll go through them with some examples: Read the rest of this entry »