What is the web? A way to make money, vehicle to communicate ideas, express creativity, find information/long lost friends, create new connections, have fun or any one of a thousand other things... Well I think the web is what ever you want it to be and it's impact is as influential or irrelevant as we make it. We support it, feed it, mould it and become dependent on it. It is, or becomes, whatever we form it to be.
OK, what am I rabbiting on about? I haven't a clue, sounds good though, I was just looking for a way to start this page and look where I ended up...
Well I guess it's only right that I write a bit about the web, after all this is where I make my living, as you might know I am a full time web designer/developer; building bespoke content managed websites and web applications.
Note: I now develop almost exclusively for RealWire, the sites to the right may have changed and almost certainly are no longer under my care...
Since the web has become popular we have seen many trends. Luckily since the first so called bubble burst, the web wasn't abandoned and we now seem to be in or approaching the next bubble. We have developed it from an 'Information Super Highway' which unlike it's name was more conserned with e-commerse to a social web which itself is part of the supposed second generation of the web or 'web 2.0'.
Web 2.0 is a term that seems to me to be used by anyone trying to describe new trends in the operation of the web. For example the first time I heard it it was in relation to the emergence of an underused existing technology. A combination other technologies; AJAX enables information to be exchanged within a webpage without the page itself having to refresh or sending the user to another page altogether. The use of AJAX and related methods have led to a new and exciting use to the internet; making websites behave more like the applications you might find on your desktop. So, as a developer, web 2.0 is more about the technology and it's application.
However, we have also seen the meteoric rise of social websites. For the longest time I just didn't get it; I guess myspace was one of the first, and to me I couldn't understand why people were getting excited about having "a page". After all why have a page when you could have an entire site? Some of the systems I had developed could easily be extended to allow for this, it would be a simple thing for these big names to do similar. What I missed out on was the social aspect of these sites, and though I eventually succumbed created a myspace page - it wasn't until I joined facebook that I began to understand this evolution. So as a user, this aspect is a evolution from the service and information orientation of the web.
Whether it be advances in data handling or moves to a more social web, web 2.0 I guess is nothing more than a way to generically describe the evolution of the web which I don't think does it any justice.