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Web 2.0 As A New Wave of Innovation?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the learning-2.0 dept.

Vitaly Friedman writes "In his article in the recent Educause magazine, Bryan Alexander, Director for Research at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE), presents a comprehensive analysis of the rising web 2.0 companies and describes the emerging of web 2.0. From the article: ' ... larger players have entered the field, most notably Yahoo, which has been buying up many projects, including Flickr and del.icio.us. Microsoft is considering a massive extension of RSS. And Google has been producing its own projects, such as the Lens RSS reader and Google Maps. Meanwhile, academic implementations are bubbling up, like the social bookmarking and search projects noted earlier. This Web 2.0 movement (or movements) may not supplant Web 1.0, but it has clearly transformed a significant swath of our networked information ecology.'"

3 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. networked information ecology by linvir · · Score: 3, Interesting
    networked information ecology
    Reminded me of a hilarious advert on UK television a while back. It used to make me laugh so much that I can't remember who it was about or what they were selling, but basically it had loads of mundane stuff like meetings and presentations, only it all took place about 100m in the air above a city, and businesspeople were somersaulting into their chairs, and throwing their notes over their heads to be caught by a guy on a motorbike who sped them away. It was something to do with "the digital network economy", and was basically a perfect visual representation of hype.

    Making the link between this and my views on Web 2.0 As A New Wave of Innovation is a task left to the reader. No points will be awarded for answering this question.

  2. Maybe O'Reilly was trying to save us? by Zaiff+Urgulbunger · · Score: 3, Interesting

    You know the other week when we were all down with O'Reilly trying to patent/copyright/whatever "Web 2.0", well, perhaps they were just trying to save us from all this hype over nothing. I mean, if we had just accepted that "Web 2.0" was now owned by O'Reilly and we couldn't even mention it's name, we'd be free of TFA. All of them. Whilst, in every other sense, the web would develop as it is now. We just wouldn't be subjected to all this articles _about_ Web 2.0!!

    All hail O'Reilly -- they tried to save us but we wouldn't listen! :D

  3. Ajax isn't always better by Twillerror · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Funny that Web 2.0 is taking off so much. The problem with it is that everyone I interview is now "learning" Ajax. I feel like if I go to an interview I'll be asked a million Ajax questions, that I really don't want to answer.

    Using hidden Iframes and JScript was one way to do what Ajax does years ago. There are definately a few cases where it is really useful. A little div popup, pre-populating city state after a postal code was entered, testing a value etc. Debugging is much harder, and the Javascript/DOM model is hard to code bug free. Javascript errors don't get reported to the server admin, and they are often hard to replicate. This is partly a lack of good tools, but view source on HTML is almost always easier then trying to step thru some buggy jscript.

    It can be very easy to abuse Ajax. I recently had someone show me a search example that "pre-populated" as you typed. It was super clunky and really didn't work. Ajax's biggest problem at this point is that everyone thinksd everything has to be instant now. You can make a user go to another page to edit something that is not edited every other minute.

    As much as I love Google maps, Yahoo Flash maps kick their ass. Adobe's new Flex tech is really going to give Ajax a run for the money. Java is just to sluggish, but Flash is pretty quick. Yes you'll have to turn off your flash ad blockers.

    The thing that has to happen is that SVG or a new standard needs to be born to handle GUI apps. People don't like flash because there is a name behind it, HTML is a standard, Javascript is a standard, etc. Java is Sun/IBM, Flash is Adobe ( formally Macromedia ).

    Personally I would love to see an HTML 5.0....A pure XML based HTML is great, but pretty impractical given the huge amount of content that doesn't have the
      tag, and just have
      tags, etc. WTH did no one think to have a tag? Now I'm stuck with a million different Javascript/UL combos out there. Even adding a target to div would be great. Imagine a that would turn on a div and tell the browser to turn it on. With some style sheet properties you could make some powerful divs without code.

    I guess my biggest gripe with Web 2.0 is that almost everything that we spend hours figuring out in JScript could be done if people would create more and better HTML tags. Then the browser developers take care of all the testing, and we will have more stable apps.

    Personally I'm going down the Flash path. If you haven't tried Flex yet, labs.adobe.com, do yourself a favor and see what you've been missing....no I don't work for Adboe or even really like them :)
    You can do more in less time, and you can create content that really looks good. I'd love to see a Flex slashdot version.