There seems to be a great deal of controversy surrounding the label ‘Web 2.0′. For myself, I’ve only recently noticed that such a thing exists. Personally I’ve been too busy playing with all the new services available on the web these days. You know the ones… for example Wikipedia, del.icio.us, flickr and blogging of course. Then I read Tim O’Reillys article entitled “What Is Web 2.0″ and discovered that I’d probably been participating in Web 2.0 after all!

Is it any good?

My partner, Clare, opened a free account with flickr to accompany her new found interest in photography. This gives me a chance to play around with interesting software and camera gear under the cover of it being ‘her hobby’. I’ve been using this site for a while to find good quality free images and I’ve always been impressed. The images are grouped and tagged to make searching fun and easy. Now I’ve tried uploading images with Clare, it was also apparent how simple Flickr makes this process during uploading. This results in an attractive, user friendly site with powerful search capability.

More recently I’ve opened an account with del.icio.us and I don’t quite understand why I didn’t do it before. Firstly, it allows me to gather useful bookmarks so that I can access them from any computer. I can also keep them private for my use only or open them up to anyone interested. Searching del.icio.us, I’ve already found a few interesting new sites the like of which I’ve been looking for specifically for some time using Google. It would appear that the tagging people use in their bookmarks might have been more specific than Google. Additionally, the huge number of directory sites that inevitably turn up during a Google search never get bookmarked.

I’m also trialling NetNewsWire for the Mac to manage my Really Simple Syndication, or Rich Site Summary according to O’Reilly, (RSS) news feeds. Up until now I’ve relied on Safari to do this job and it has been adequate, but I think I’m getting into this enough to justify a more powerful toy… I mean tool. So far I’m reasonably impressed and may continue to use it after my free month. What particularly appealed today was using the del.icio.us and flickr news feeds via NetNewsWire. This has effectively given me a photo album and bookmark file inside my newsreader. NetNewsWire has a pretty good web browser too, so I hardly need anything else!

What’s in a name?

Maybe I’m a little simple, but I’m impressed with how easy these new tools make accessing and sharing information with whom so ever I wish, as long as they have an internet connection. From earlier posts you might be aware that this information sharing idea definitely rings my bell. And that appears to be the nub of the Web 2.0 label, the sharing not the bell ringing! It isn’t about amazing new technology or a reconstruction of the internet we’ve come to know and love. It is about a change in thinking and a new approach to the use of what is already well established. It isn’t a replacement for the Web, but an significant extension. For the most part the label, as is usually the case with any label, is purely arbitrary.