So we have discussed a few topics so far focusing on statistics of South Africans online, and how the media landscape has changed with the evolution of the web.

Today, we cover an very important topic - where is the web today, and where has it come from?

This can be explained through helping you understand the buzzwords “web 1.0″ (where the web has come from) and web 2.0 (where the web is going).

Thanks to wikipedia for the following definitions:

Web 1.0 Web 1.0 is a retronym which refers to the state of the World Wide Web, and any website design style used before the advent of the Web 2.0 phenomenon. It is the general term that has been created to describe the Web before the ‘bursting of the dot-com bubble’ in 2001, which is seen by many as a turning point for the internet. [1]

It is easiest to formulate a sense of the term Web 1.0 when it is used in relation to the term Web 2.0, to compare the two and offer examples of each.

Web 2.0: The term “Web 2.0” describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis and blogs.

The term first became notable after the O’Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004.[1][2] Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. According to Tim O’Reilly:

“ Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.”

O’Reilly has said that the “2.0? refers to the historical context of web businesses “coming back” after the 2001 collapse of the dot-com bubble, in addition to the distinguishing characteristics of the projects that survived the bust or thrived thereafter.[4]

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has questioned whether one can use the term in any meaningful way, since many of the technological components of Web 2.0 have existed since the early days of the Web.

“Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing
Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities
Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer
Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML
Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs
Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS
Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags
Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless
Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing
Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales
Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google
Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications
Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs
Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband
Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs” Source

Need more information?

For more videos click here

For more text content on this topic go here

Stay tuned for our next part in the series on a new concept called “recruitment 2.0″ and how it relates to the web 2.0 phenomenon.

http://www.baitbox.co.za/?p=53