Reading into the reader I realised further my ideas of how I could use these technology to my advantage had already been put into theory and I must have been on the right track which was a breath of fresh air and gave me more confidence in my own abilities. i explored the theories discussed and looked at the point others had taken form the reader and believe the section and exercise will be valuable to me.
Web 2.0 is understanding the newtork is the platform, and on the network as a platform the rules to business are diffrent, and the main rule is, users add value. and figuering out how to build data bases that get better the more people use then is the secret sourse of every web 2.0 company like www.peaceofthepye.com
Advantages of Social Media/ web2.0
Democratization of media
Relationships and conversation
Creativity and re-mix culture
Embrace your passion and identity
Community, sharing, and connecting
Increase transparency in government and organizations.
harnasing collective inteligence
Disadvantages of Social Media/ web2.0
Lots of great content still gets overlooked. Current lack of good filters creates problems finding the best content
Writers have problems delivering content consistently
Anonymity can engender polarization and hate
Information overload and social networking overload
Social Networking: Establishing Connections
In a tradition started by the now defunct SixDegrees.com and followed quickly by Friendster, social networking is the power added to an application when users specifically designate their relationship to other users of the same site or application.
In a typical networked application, there is just your data and everyone else's. You can browse your data and you can ask to review all the data everyone has entered.
However, when you introduce a social network into the mix, you can separate out the people in your inner circle from those people you don't know. And sometimes, that separation adds tremendous value.
The photo sharing, Flickr, probably has the simplest social networking capabilities we've seen. As a user peruses the images of other users, they can designate those users as a "contact". Once a contact, Flickr makes is easier to see any new images from those users. Contacts can also be designated as "Friend" or "Family", allowing users to have images that they only show to close connection. (Images of the baby taking a bath may only be of interest to family connections, whereas images of last night's toga party may only be of interest to friends.)
Netflix, the DVD rental site, takes the social network a step further. Once two people agree they are connected, Netflix will share specific information, such as movie reviews, recommendations, recently rented videos, and what movies are currently waiting in their rental queue. As users look at prospective movies to watch, icons designate those movies that their friends have seen and how they felt about them.
LinkedIn is one of the more advanced social networking sites. Users enter their professional history, listing jobs and other activities relative to their professional growth path. As they conduct business, they add their professional connections to their network. The ever growing network allows these professionals to take advantage of who-knows-who, making introductions for new business opportunities and job hunting more effective.
Putting Web 2.0 to Work, Quickly
APIs, RSS, Folksonomies, and Social Networking have been around for a while. What's interesting to us right now is that our current understanding of them and the tools available to implement them make it possible to create powerful applications very fast and relatively inexpensively.
Web 1.0-->Web 2.0
DoubleClick-->Google AdSense
Ofoto-->Flickr
Akamai-->BitTorrent
mp3.com-->Napster
Britannica Online-->Wikipedia
personal websites-->blogging
evite-->upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation-->search engine optimization
page views-->cost per click
screen scraping-->web services
publishing-->participation
content management systems-->wikis
directories (taxonomy)-->tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness-->syndication
Harnessing Collective Intelligence
The central principle behind the success of the giants born in the Web 1.0 era who have survived to lead the Web 2.0 era appears to be this, that they have embraced the power of the web to harness collective intelligence:
Hyperlinking is the foundation of the web. As users add new content, and new sites, it is bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it. Much as synapses form in the brain, with associations becoming stronger through repetition or intensity, the web of connections grows organically as an output of the collective activity of all web users.
Yahoo!, the first great internet success story, was born as a catalog, or directory of links, an aggregation of the best work of thousands, then millions of web users. While Yahoo! has since moved into the business of creating many types of content, its role as a portal to the collective work of the net's users remains the core of its value.
Google's breakthrough in search, which quickly made it the undisputed search market leader, was PageRank, a method of using the link structure of the web rather than just the characteristics of documents to provide better search results.
eBay's product is the collective activity of all its users; like the web itself, eBay grows organically in response to user activity, and the company's role is as an enabler of a context in which that user activity can happen. What's more, eBay's competitive advantage comes almost entirely from the critical mass of buyers and sellers, which makes any new entrant offering similar services significantly less attractive.
Amazon sells the same products as competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, and they receive the same product descriptions, cover images, and editorial content from their vendors. But Amazon has made a science of user engagement. They have an order of magnitude more user reviews, invitations to participate in varied ways on virtually every page--and even more importantly, they use user activity to produce better search results. While a Barnesandnoble.com search is likely to lead with the company's own products, or sponsored results, Amazon always leads with "most popular", a real-time computation based not only on sales but other factors that Amazon insiders call the "flow" around products. With an order of magnitude more user participation, it's no surprise that Amazon's sales also outpace competitors.
Now, innovative companies that pick up on this insight and perhaps extend it even further, are making their mark on the web:
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia based on the unlikely notion that an entry can be added by any web user, and edited by any other, is a radical experiment in trust, applying Eric Raymond's dictum (originally coined in the context of open source software) that "with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," to content creation. Wikipedia is already in the top 100 websites, and many think it will be in the top ten before long. This is a profound change in the dynamics of content creation!
Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr, two companies that have received a great deal of attention of late, have pioneered a concept that some people call "folksonomy" (in contrast to taxonomy), a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keywords, often referred to as tags. Tagging allows for the kind of multiple, overlapping associations that the brain itself uses, rather than rigid categories. In the canonical example, a Flickr photo of a puppy might be tagged both "puppy" and "cute"--allowing for retrieval along natural axes generated user activity.
Collaborative spam filtering products like Cloudmark aggregate the individual decisions of email users about what is and is not spam, outperforming systems that rely on analysis of the messages themselves.
It is a truism that the greatest internet success stories don't advertise their products. Their adoption is driven by "viral marketing"--that is, recommendations propagating directly from one user to another. You can almost make the case that if a site or product relies on advertising to get the word out, it isn't Web 2.0.
References
(1) YouTube. 'Tim O'Reilly on What is Web 2.0', [online] - Available at: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCQibri7gpLM> [Accessed 2011]
(2) Proffesional Communications Technologhy, reader , A.durrrent (2011)
(3) OReilly. 'What is Web2.0?', [online] Available at: <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html> [Accessed 2011]
(4) UIE. 'Web2.0 - The power behind the hype', [online] - Available at: <http://www.uie.com/articles/web_2_power/> [Accessed 2011]
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