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Among those who have been using the internet for some time now, almost palpable differences can be sensed in the sorts of sites now available to the online public; whereas the internet was once best used and understood as an almost exclusively third-party information source for the majority of people who surfed online - with a handful of free e-mail providers, small-capacity free personal website hosts, and an inundation of unprofessional and cumbersome personal websites to boot - it has more recently begun to transform into a domain rife with user interaction. This transition, along with the various genres of sites associated with this transition, has been called Web 2.0, a moniker provided by O'Reilly Media in 2004.

Not too long ago, most people would have found it highly difficult to publish information on the internet in any meaningful way. While free personal websites have been offered for well over a decade, they were offered with minimal capacity, ugly URL's, relatively little (if any) aesthetic support and, barring some unusual success, total obscurity. "Web 2.0" refers to the internet phenomenon that has begun to reverse these sorts of trends, making the internet not only more user-friendly, but also more user-oriented: average internet user contribution to the internet is becoming a significant source of both quantitative internet content and interest.

"Blogs", social networking sites, "wiki" sites, RSS feeds, instant messaging software, and a host of other online sites and software that offer free, accessible and popular are generally what is referred to when one hears or uses the term "Web 2.0". In the case of websites - www.blogger.com (blog), www.myspace.com (social networking), www.wikipedia.org (wiki), news and bulletin sites (RSS), and others (such as www.helium.com, for instance) - usage is free, templates are offered (which keeps information clean and presentable), and the attraction rate is high, allowing a person to put information on the internet without charge, in an easy and attractive way, and on a site where readership is almost inevitable.

"Web 2.0" is not an official product or movement in any way; rather, it is a title given to an observation, one that encompasses what is perceived to be a very different internet. Now more than ever, the average person browsing the internet has the chance to come across readable, non-corporate information, and to have their thoughts and ideas read by a truly world-wide audience. While there are benefits to this - namely, the opportunity for any person on the internet to effectively publish their own material and to have it read - there are also downsides: attractive looking content is much easier to take seriously than unattractive content, and the ability for all opinion - from well-thought-out to half-baked and ill-conceived - to be presented in the same fashion and with the same amount of seriousness can often mark a blow to the critical thinking of the internet public.

While the biases of the corporately-sponsored information sites certainly do not deserve to be the only ones heard, they are, in many ways, much more preferable than the lack of thought that permeates a great deal of "Web 2.0" content available nowadays.

Learn more about this author, Daniel Booy.
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