If youve been following the latest developments in Web publishing, design and development, then youve certainly heard about “Web 2.0.”
Its a term that is, in most cases anyway, meant to define the bleeding edge of Web technology, best practices and implementation. Depending on whos using the term, you could be talking about the Web as a platform for applications, a philosophy in building and designing Web applications, a group of powerful Web technologies, and much more.
You can find the generally accepted “official” definition on Wikipedia.
“Web 2.0” as a term, in other words, is pretty meaningless. And yet, many people are talking about it—and you will only hear more about Web 2 dot 0.
Todays Web and What Really Matters
As part of my weekly column here at Publish.com Im going to talk about many things that fall under the vast umbrella that you could call Web 2.0.
- Technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), Ruby on Rails, Atom, RSS and CSS. Many of which are part of the Web right now, if not widely adopted.
- Methodologies like 37 Signals “Getting Real” and my own ideas of a people-centric Web.
- Harder to define subjects like folksonomy and tagging, the long tail, and more.
Its an exciting time on the Web, both for publishers and application developers. I thought Id take a quick minute to talk about why I feel some of the above items are important and worth paying attention to.