from the horizon

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:

Participation
The internet can provide a voice for anyone, and more people a choosing to use this voice. Information is no longer solely controlled by companies, universities and the likes of BBC or CCN. Blogs (or web logs), such as this one, are allowing everyday people to become amateur journalists. This hugely increases our information choices, reducing the quantization loses,resulting from getting all our information from a small number of sources. According to some numbers, there’s about 63.2 million blogs (http://technorati.com/about/) on the internet – so there’s everything from: American soldiers in Iraq (http://wordsmithatwar.blog-city.com/); to Iraqi citizens (http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/); to technology reviews (http://www.engadget.com); to right wing news (http://newsbusters.org/); to advise from a ninja (http://askaninja.com/) to random amusements from the web (http://raincoaster.com/) to a New Zealander talking about all the foreign countries they’ve been working in, and now trying to explain Web 2.0 (www.fromthehorizon.com).
To find more blogs have a look at Technorati (http://www.technorati.com/). Or you could even create your own – Blogger (http://www.blogger.com/) is one site that allows you to do this, although there are many others.
Of course there’s a lot of rubbish out there, but you get that with freedom of speech!

Another example of participation is auction sites like E-Bay (www.ebay.com) or TradeMe (www.trademe.co.nz), which allow internet users to sell items over the internet. Although many may just consider these sites to be the online equivalent of a garage sale, they provide many people with the ability to sell their wares online, without the high start up costs of setting up their own (physical) stores. E-commerce doesn’t need to be dominated by the multi-nationals.

Collaboration
The internet is being used more people to gather and work on projects together. The best example would be Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. What makes Wikipedia unique, is that is hasn’t been published by a single institution, but it is the work of thousand of online volunteers. Any internet user is free to add their own articles, or contribute to existing ones. Although this exposes Wikipedia to abuse, the community of so called Wikipedians monitor all additions removing any mistakes and vandalism. Wikipedia has amassed 1.6 million articles in its English version alone (There are 250 language editions of Wikipedia, and 19 of them have more than 50,000 articles). This makes it the largest encyclopedia available, bigger than even the Encyclopedia Britannica!

Sharing
I couldn’t talk about web 2.0 without mentioning YouTube (www.youtube.com) – the video sharing website which was sold to Google for US$1.65 billion last year. YouTube allows people to share their own videos, and view any of the 6 million videos on YouTube (that number is out of date, so the current total is probably much higher). Combined with the increasing availability of digital cameras and mobile phones with video recorders, YouTube has the effect of putting a television news crew on every street corner. YouTube is being used for everything from exposing human rights abuses to launching the careers of bands with funky music videos.

Flickr is a similar website for sharing photos.

Social Networking
When you’re 15 years old, going to High School where you don’t really have any friends and don’t feel like any really understands you; it would be easy to feel that you’re all alone in the world. No longer thanks to MySpace (www.myspace.com). MySpace is a social networking site which provides a forum for angsty teenagers from all over the world to gather, share, express themselves and realize that despite their emotional turmoil and bad poetry, they’re not alone.

OK, so maybe I’m being a little critical of MySpace,it’s not just for angsty teenagers (surely it’s 120 million (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myspace)members can’t all be angsty teenagers). It’s also a hot spot for small independent bands to publicize and attract more fans and apparently it’s the website to go to if you’re looking for casual sex in LA.
MySpace is just one (very big) example. There are all sorts of similar social networking websites and online communities. Some of these are just the virtual manifestations of real world communities, some of them are groups of people from all over the world who have never met, but are united by a common interest. Tools such as GoogleGroups (http://groups.google.com/), make it very easy to start your own online social network.

The Long Tail
This is a fairly tricky concept to try to example, hope the following picture helps, and if you’re completely confused, but somewhat intrigued by what I’m saying, click on the picture to read a far more expansive article on the subject.

As we a can see from this picture, the market can be roughly divided into the short head and the long tail. The short head is represented on the left hand side of the graph, the small number of items which sell in large volumes. The long tail is represented on the right hand side of the graph – the large number of items which only sell in small volumes. Traditionally retailers prefer to sell items from the short head. This is because the retailer must pay a fixed cost for each item it sells, for self space, storage space, etc, and therefore prefers to only stock items which sell in high volumes. By tending towards the short head, the market has been quantized to the popular tastes, making it hard to find uncommon items.
However online stores are turning this paradigm around, they pay minimal fixed costs for each of the items they sell because their self space is virtual and storage space can be centralized in one location. This makes it more profitable to stock items further down the long tall (which don’t sell in high volumes). Amazon is a great example of a store like this, where you can get gazillions of books, movies and other items. In fact 57% of Amazon’s products aren’t even available in offline stores. In The Long Tail, it is about selling smaller quantities of a larger range of products, rather than large quantities of a small range of products.
The Long Tall is stretched even further when you start looking at online stores selling electronic content. Although Amazon has huge economies of scale, it still needs a physical space to store and handle the items it sells. Some online music stores such as ITunes (www.itunes.com) simply sell you music to download, so there are virtually no fixed costs, they don’t need to store any physical stock, just some files in a database. This means that they can offer a wider range of music at virtually no extra cost.
By exploring the profits to be made in the Long Tall, retailers are increasing choices available to the consumer.

User Classification
Blogs, Video Sharing, the Long Tail, more information, increased choices, are we just heading for information overload? How do we tell the good from the bad? The signal from the noise? Now that the internet has been dequantized, how can we requantize it again to make sense of it? Fortunately in the true spirit of Web 2.0, a number of options to help us out:
Reviews
In the participative internet, reviews are no longer just the domain of newspaper writers. Most books for sale on Amazon have reviews written by people who have previously purchased the book. On internet auction sites you can read reviews for a seller, before buying an item from them, to see if other people have found them reliable, before trusting them yourself. Internet users are applying their massive collaborative workforce to tell you what is hot, and what is not.
Popularity
Well, I hate to say it, but despite all my claims of increased information options, it’s still true that once something becomes popular, it’s likely to attract more attention. However the internet is getting smarter. By tracking your tastes (eg. purchases at an online store, favorite websites (http://del.icio.us/)), it can determine what other items you may be interested in based on popular choices of people with similar tastes.
Tagging (Folksonomy)
This is the idea that users can categorize (or tag) webpages, blog posts, photos, link or any other content with their own labels. For example, I have “tagged” this post with the categories: quantization, technology and 2.0. You can then go to http://technorati.com/tag/technology, and see all other blog posts which all have the tag “technology” Allowing people to categorize information as the see fit, is a much more flexible way of sorting through the vast amount of information on the internet, than forcing people to fit into a ridged top down categorization system.

I prepared a PowerPoint presentation on Web 2.0 for a gathering I attended recently, if anyone’s interested. Feel free to download it, and use it as you wish.

Some people would argue that Web 2.0, is just the latest craze, and will lead to huge over-investment in a bubble which will eventually burst. However I believe that regardless of this, the underlying principles are here to stay. Individual people have already started challenging journalists with their blogs, retailers with their online auctions and stores and television networks with their shared videos. There are more choices available. Thanks to the increased use and adoption of technology, I think that some of these principles can also be carried over into other segments of society.

In the spirit of Web 2.0, all comments are welcome.