The term “Web 2.0″ is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing and user-centred design and collaboration on the World Wide Web.

What is Web 2.0 ?

A Web 2.0 website allows its users to interact with each other as contributors to the website’s content, in contrast to websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.

Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs and mashups.

Our Web 2.0 websites are State-of-the-Art Mashups mixing interactivity with blogging, web pages, social media and syndication of content.

The Web we know today which loads into a computer screen browser is essentially just static screen fills and is only the embryo of the World Wide Web to come in the near future. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop.

The Web will be understood not as screen fills of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism in to the ether through which interactivity happens. It will appear on your computer screen, your TV, car dashboard, mobile phone and your hand-held game machines, possibly even your fridge!

Web 2.0 is about community and sharing

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis of FaceBook and Twitter.

It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

Web 2.0 draws together the capabilities of client- and server-side software, content syndication and the use of network protocols. Standards-oriented web browsers may use plug-ins and software extensions to handle the content and the user interactions. Web 2.0 sites provide users with information storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities that were not possible in the environment now known as “Web 1.0″.

Web 2.0 websites typically include some of the following features and techniques. Andrew McAfee used the acronym SLATES to refer to them:

Search – Finding information through keyword search.

Links -Connects information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, and provides low-barrier social tools.

Authoring – The ability to create and update content leads to the collaborative work of many rather than just a few web authors. In wikis, users may extend, undo and redo each other’s work. In blogs, posts and the comments of individuals build up over time.

Tags – Categorisation of content by users adding “tags” – short, usually one-word descriptions – to facilitate searching, without dependence on pre-made categories. Collections of tags created by many users within a single system may be referred to as “folksonomies”

Extensions – Software that makes the Web an application platform as well as a document server.

Signals – The use of syndication technology such as RSS to notify users of content changes.

Blogs and RSS - are often held up as exemplary manifestations of Web 2.0. A reader of a blog or a wiki is provided with tools to add a comment or even, in the case of the wiki, to edit the content.

Web 2.0 for better business ?

Read the next instalment to see why web 2.0 is better for business and why the traditional static website is or should now be history!

Do you have an old static website ? If yes, do you think you should be thinking of upgrading it ?