The essence of web 2.0
Ahh, web 2.0.
Means little to most of my friends, and means absolutely nothing to my parents. Intended to capture our current web boom, complete with it’s $1.6 billion rags to riches deals, personal broadcasting and networking pages (a la myspace), and wiki-driven content, it seems no one is really able to qualify what exactly it means. Tim O’Reilly’s assessment of ‘the web as platform’ is probably the most quoted, but the meat of his article consists of comparisons (web 2.0 is wikipedia and not Encyclopedia Britannica, Adsense and not Double Click, tagging and not taxonomy, etc). The authors of Wikipedia’s article suggest other phrases, such as ‘network of participation’, ‘perpetual beta’, and ‘the long tail’.
That’s all well and nice, of course, but we all know that web 2.0 really consists of pastel colours, boxes with rounded corners, fuzzy user profile images, and the phrase ‘cool new’. Or, as Bill Amend, Foxtrot comic artist, suggests, web 2.0 is essentially blank web pages:
All this talk has fueled my own creative web 2.0 juices, and so, with help from walter zorn’s considerable talents, I submit my own response to Bill’s comic: The web 2.0 essence.
Hint: draw some raindrops. Click here to erase them. Or, try a larger canvas.
