Introduction to Web 2.0

What is Web 2.0 ? • It is a term that describes changing trends

in the use of internet technology and web design  that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.

• Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs and folksonomies.

What does Web 2.0 encourage?

1. Communication

2. Conversation

3. Collaboration 4. Co-creation

In April of this year, Clay Shirky gave a talk on Web2.0. This talk was revised for an article called ‘Gin, Television, and Social Surplus’.

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”

There’s a great African proverb: “If you want to travel fast, travel alone. If you want to travel far, travel together”.

New technology offers exciting opportunities to do both.

Web 2.0 tools.

Having social media sites such as flickr, facebook and twitter will also enable an entirely new audience to open up to you.

A good example of how this can easily work can be seen with Stephen Cassidy of UNICEF.

He posted 2-3 minute videos on the UNICEF home page but wanted to spread them virally, so Cassidy's team experimented with a Myspace page and then tried other video sharing sites, all of which are free.

Within a year, the number of views on all those sites exceeded the views on the homepage, essentially doubling the agency's exposure

Crucial to the video success was using appropriate titles and tags. These allow web searchers to find the content on the major search engines and on the video sites.

The web2.0 tools remain as independent sites but will have swatches and links that can operate between your website and theirs.

Sites such as youtube, slideshare and flickr also reduce the amount of space needed for hosting on your website.

• Are you sold yet?

• LETS GET STARTED !!!!!!!