Martin's blog^2.0

Since the Web 2.0 term was created many different significances were given to it. It's obvious that Web 2.0 implicates a lot of different things but all of them are only consequences of, in my opinion, its key feature. In the same way I think Web 3.0 has a central concept around which much more other characteristics will arise.

Web 2.0

I think Web 2.0 central concept is user generated content (or user interaction with the web). In early internet time, most of the content was generated by each site and users mainly surfed the web con consume this content. Since the appearance of forums, blogs, wikis, social networks, etc internet users started not only to consume content but also to generate content and this was one big change in the web.

Almost every other aspect of Web 2.0 (Or technologies associated with Web 2.0), I believe, is a result of this centralization of the user in the web. These are some examples:

• RIAs: As the user became more active in the web, the need of better User Interfaces were needed, giving the user easier ways to contribute and participate in these sites.
• Ajax: In order to develop these RIAs, this technique, known some time before the term was invented and got a lot of hype since then.
• Folksonomy (a.k.a. Collaborative Tagging): As many users needed to classify the contents in the web, typical taxonomy was not applicable. The problem was that a much more flexible (and fuzzy?) way had to be used, so this way to organize the stuff proved to be better.
• Syndication: As the content started to be generated by the users, it started to grow much more faster than anytime before, that's when Web Syndication, became popular in order to have a really great way to stay updated without having to visit every site you may be interested in periodically.
• APIs: When the users started to put content in the sites, they realized that was difficult to get in or out this information, so the APIs came to the rescue as a way to interconnect different Web 2.0 applications.

Many more can be found, and discussed, but these ones seems to be the most clear examples of the importance of User Generated Content around Web 2.0.

Web 3.0

Here the main content is the web becoming Semantic. The idea is to start giving significance to the content and information that is in the Web. Once again, many applications, technologies and developments are going to take part (some of them already started) but I think this one is going to be much more impressive in the technological view of the change while the Web 2.0 was an incredible change for the user point of view. The one of us that are very related to the development of the web can be sure to expect great changes and new ways to use the web. This will create a whole different playground to creative minds that may take advantage of the Semantic part of the web and I have no doubt that the end will be astonishing applications that maybe we can't imagine now.