Key Web 2.0 Themes

According to Troy Angrigon, there are several key themes associated with Web 2.0

•Collaboration: the first theme is about people working together, collaborating, to create software, content, communities, art, music, literature, and a multitude of other things. Web 2.0 tools and applications support this type of interaction at their core.

•Conversation: There is a conversation happening and it’s not just happening in your corporate website forum. It is happening on blogs. It is public conversation about politics, business, social issues, and anything else you can imagine, including your company. Tools are developing rapidly in this area and we have a long way to go, but these are exciting times. There is a conversation going on right now that you could contribute to or learn from. What are you waiting for? Join in!

•Community: We have had online communities now for at least fifteen years or more. But the tools for building online communities are now becoming more widespread and communities are forming around every imaginable (and unimaginable) subject, product, and industry. If you are looking for your “tribe”, they are probably out there somewhere.

•Connection: we are building messaging systems that now connect people to people, people to machines, and machines to machines. The names of these systems are not important but their function is.

•Content Creation: It turns out that if you give people the tools to create “stuff”, they do just that. In fact, they create so much stuff that it quite frankly upsets our assumptions about who in our society are the creators and who are the consumers.

•Cumulative Learning: think of cumulative learning as peer reviewed journals for every person on the planet with internet access. People can now build on the knowledge of others (through the miracles of search and wikis) faster than at any time in history.

•Collective Intelligence: In certain conditions, it turns out that groups of people are smarter than individuals. This is counter-intuitive and odd but apparently true.

•Change of scale: Web 2.0 companies can scale up fast. Because of the spread of broadband internet and the sheer number of people on the internet, we are seeing key measures (number of users, time to market, time to exit) that are quite extraordinary.

•Core values: Openness, transparency, and a respect for users are three core values that seem to permeate Web 2.0 definitions and discussions.

•Cheap and Fast: A lot of what is possible with Web 2.0 is that developers can build applications cheap and fast and entrepreneurs can do the same.