La Historia De La Web 2.0

Introduccion

At the end of 2006, Time magazine’s Person of the Year was ‘You’. On the cover of the magazine, underneath the title of the award, was a picture of a PC with a mirror in place of the screen, reflecting not only the face of the reader, but also the general feeling that 2006 was the year of the Web - a new, improved, 'second version', 'user generated' Web. But how accurate is our perception of so-called 'Web 2.0'? Is there real substance behind the hyperbole? Is it a publishing revolution or is it a social revolution? Is it actually a revolution at all? And what will it mean for education, a sector that is already feeling the effects of the demands of Internet-related change? In this TechWatch report I argue for the distinction between Web technologies (ongoing Web development overseen by the W3C), the more recent applications and services that are emerging as a result of this ongoing technological development (social software), and attempts to understand the manifestations and adoption of these newer applications and services. I start with a brief discussion of the historical context, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for a single, global, collaborative information space and contrast this story of the technology with the ideas of Tim O'Reilly, who has attempted to understand the ways in which knowledge about the technologies, and the adoption of the technologies, can be used to make predictions about technology markets. Media coverage of Web 2.0 concentrates on the common applications/services such as blogs, video sharing, social networking and podcasting—a more socially connected Web in which people can contribute as much as they can consume. In chapter two I provide a brief introduction to some of these services, many of them built on the technologies and open standards that have been around since the earliest days of the Web, and show how they have been refined, and in some cases concatenated, to provide a technological foundation for delivering services to the user through the browser window (based on the key idea of the Web, rather than the desktop, as the technology platform). But is this Web 2.0? Indeed, it can be argued that these applications and services are really just early manifestations of ongoing Web technology development. If we look at Web 2.0 as it was originally articulated we can see that it is, in fact, an umbrella term that attempts to express explicitly the framework of ideas that underpin attempts to understand the manifestations of these newer Web services within the context of the technologies that have produced them. In section three I articulate six 'big' ideas, based on concepts originally outlined by Tim O’Reilly, which can help us to explain and understand why Web 2.0 has had such a huge impact. In short, these are ideas about building something more than a global information space; something with much more of a social angle to it. Collaboration, contribution and community are the order of the day and there is a sense in which some think that a new 'social fabric' is being constructed before our eyes. These ideas though, need technology in order to be realised into the functioning Web-based services and applications that we are using. Education and educational institutions will have their own special issues with regard to Web 2.0 services and technologies and in section five I look at some of these issues. By special request, particular attention has been given to libraries and preservation and the issues that present themselves for those tasked with preserving some of the material produced by these services and applications. Finally, I look to the future. What are the technologies that will affect the next phase of the Web’s development: what one might call, rather reluctantly, Web 3.0?
http://www.ictliteracy.info/rf.pdf/Web2.0_research.pdf

Desaroll

Wikis A wiki3 is a webpage or set of webpages that can be easily edited by anyone who is allowed access (Ebersbach et al., 2006). Wikipedia’s popular success has meant that the concept of the wiki, as a collaborative tool that facilitates the production of a group work, is widely understood. Wiki pages have an edit button displayed on the screen and the user can click on this to access an easy-to-use online editing tool to change or even delete the contents of the page in question. Simple, hypertext-style linking between pages is used to create a navigable set of pages. Unlike blogs, wikis generally have a history function, which allows previous versions to be examined, and a rollback function, which restores previous versions. Proponents of the power of wikis cite the ease of use (even playfulness) of the tools, their extreme flexibility and open access as some of the many reasons why they are useful for group working (Ebersbach et al., 2006; Lamb, 2004).

Tagging and social bookmarking A tag is a keyword that is added to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture or video clip) to describe it, but not as part of a formal classification system. One of the first large-scale applications of tagging was seen with the introduction of Joshua Schacter’s del.icio.us website, which launched the ‘social bookmarking’ phenomenon. Social bookmarking systems share a number of common features (Millen et al., 2005): They allow users to create lists of ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favourites’, to store these centrally on a remote service (rather than within the client browser) and to share them with other users of the system (the ‘social’ aspect). These bookmarks can also be tagged with keywords, and an important difference from the ‘folder’- based categorisation used in traditional, browser-based bookmark lists is that a bookmark can belong in more than one category. Using tags, a photo of a tree could be categorised with both ‘tree’ and ‘larch’, for example. The concept of tagging has been widened far beyond website bookmarking, and services like Flickr (photos), YouTube (video) and Odeo (podcasts) allow a variety of digital artefacts to be socially tagged. For example, the BBC’s Shared Tags 4 project is an experimental service that allows members of the public to tag BBC News online items. A particularly important example within the context of higher education is Richard Cameron’s CiteULike5 , a free service to help academics to store, organise and share the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the Web that interests you, you click a button and add it to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so you don’t have to type them in. This tool was used during the research for this report. The idea of tagging has been expanded to include what are called tag clouds: groups of tags (tag sets) from a number of different users of a tagging service, which collates information about the frequency with which particular tags are used. This frequency information is often displayed graphically as a ‘cloud’ in which tags with higher frequency of use are displayed in larger text.

Folksonomy versus collabulary One outcome from the practice of tagging has been the rise of the ‘folksonomy’. Unfortunately, the term has not been used consistently and there is confusion about its application. More will be said about this in the section on network effects, but for now it is sufficient to note that there is a distinction between a folksonomy (a collection of tags created by an individual for their own personal use) and a collabulary (a collective vocabulary).

 Multimedia sharing One of the biggest growth areas has been amongst services that facilitate the storage and sharing of multimedia content. Well known examples include YouTube (video) Flickr (photographs) and Odeo (podcasts). These popular services take the idea of the ‘writeable’ Web (where users are not just consumers but contribute actively to the production of Web content) and enable it on a massive scale. Literally millions of people now participate in the sharing and exchange of these forms of media by producing their own podcasts, videos and photos. This development has only been made possible through the widespread adoption of high quality, but relatively low cost digital media technology such as hand-held video cameras. 2.5 Audio blogging and podcasting Podcasts are audio recordings, usually in MP3 format, of talks, interviews and lectures, which can be played either on a desktop computer or on a wide range of handheld MP3 devices. Originally called audio blogs they have their roots in efforts to add audio streams to early blogs (Felix and Stolarz, 2006). Once standards had settled down and Apple introduced the commercially successful iPod MP3 player and its associated iTunes software, the process started to become known as podcasting6 . This term is not without some controversy since it implies that only the Apple iPod will play these files, whereas, in actual fact, any MP3 player or PC with the requisite software can be used. A more recent development is the introduction of video podcasts (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast): the online delivery of video-on-demand clips that can be played on a PC, or again on a suitable handheld player (the more recent versions of the Apple iPod for example, provide for video playing). A podcast is made by creating an MP3 format audio file (using a voice recorder or similar device), uploading the file to a host server, and then making the world aware of its existence through the use of RSS (see next section). This process (known as enclosure) adds a URL link to the audio file, as well as directions to the audio file’s location on the host server, into the RSS file (Patterson, 2006). Podcast listeners subscribe to the RSS feeds and receive information about new podcasts as they become available. Distribution is therefore relatively simple. The harder part, as those who listen to a lot of podcasts know, is to produce a good quality audio file. Podcasting is becoming increasingly used in education (Brittain et al., 2006; Ractham and Zhang, 2006) and recently there have been moves to establish a UK HE podcasting community 

RSS and syndication RSS is a family of formats which allow users to find out about updates to the content of RSS-enabled websites, blogs or podcasts without actually having to go and visit the site. Instead, information from the website (typically, a new story's title and synopsis, along with the originating website’s name) is ISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0 11 collected within a feed (which uses the RSS format) and ‘piped’ to the user in a process known as syndication. In order to be able to use a feed a prospective user must install a software tool known as an aggregator or feed reader, onto their computer desktop. Once this has been done, the user must decide which RSS feeds they want to receive and then subscribe to them. The client software will then periodically check for updates to the RSS feed and keep the user informed of any changes.

Technically, RSS is an XML-based data format for websites to exchange files that contain publishing information and summaries of the site’s contents. Indeed, in its earliest incarnation, RSS was understood to stand for Rich Site Summary (Doctorow, 2002). For a variety of historical reasons there are a number of RSS formats (RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0) and there are some issues of incompatibility 8 . It is worth noting that RSS 2.0 is not simply a later version of RSS 1.0, but is a different format. As it has become more widely used for blog content syndication, in later versions RSS became known as Really Simple Syndication9 . A lot of blogging tools now create and publish these RSS feeds automatically and webpages and blogs frequently display small RSS icons and links to allow a quick process of registering to get a feed from the site (see above, right). In 2003 a new syndication system was proposed and developed under the name Atom in order to clear up some of the inconsistencies between RSS versions and the problems with the way they interoperate. This consists of two standards: the Atom Syndication Format, an XML language used for Web feeds, and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), a HTTP-based protocol for creating and updating Web resources. There is considerable discussion between proponents of RSS and Atom as to which is the best way forward for syndication. The two most important differences between the two are, firstly, that the development of Atom is taking place through a formal and open standards process within the IETF10 , and, secondly, that with Atom the actual content of the feed item’s encoding (known as the payload container) is more clearly defined. Atom can also support the enclosure of

Newer Web 2.0 services and applications As we have seen, there are a number of technology services that are often posited as representing the Web 2.0 concept in some way. In recent months, however, there has been an explosion of new ideas, applications and start-up companies working on ways to extend existing services. Some of these are likely to become more important than others, and some are certainly more likely to be more relevant to education than others. There is such a deluge of new services that it is often difficult to keep track of what’s ‘out there’ or to make sense of what each provides. I suggest there are two ways of helping with this process. Firstly, to make sense of what the service is trying to do in the context of the overall Web 2.0 ‘big ideas’ presented in section three. Secondly, as new services become available they can be categorised roughly in terms of what they attempt to do, e.g. aggregate user data, construct a social network etc. In Table 1 I make a first attempt at such a categorisation process based on a small range of some of the newer services. Such a table is only the beginning of the process and can only be snapshot as this is a fluid market with new tools and start-up companies being announced on almost a daily basis (see, for example, TechCrunch’s regular updates 12 on start-ups and new ideas; or eConsultant’s Web 2.0 directory which recently listed over 1,200 services in fifty categories ranging from blogging to Wifi) 13 . 

The big ideas behind Web 2.0 As outlined in section one, there is considerable speculation as to what Web 2.0 might be, and it is inevitable that some of this would become confused as various people vie for attention in the ongoing conversation. What I have tried to do in this section is to uncover what I believe are the core ideas and to show, where possible, points at which various strands of related thought start to be developed. I also try to raise some questions about how closely these strands are related to some kind of evidence base. By looking at the history of, for example, network theory, it is possible to see how assumptions made about the rate at which networks grow could have contributed to the last technology boom and bust. This is important, not only for avoiding a similar situation in the future, but also, for getting a more realistic understanding of the role that Web 2.0 might play within education. In this section I put forward six 'big' ideas, based on concepts originally outlined by Tim O’Reilly, that can help us to explain and understand why Web 2.0 has had such a huge impact. In short these are ideas about building something more than a global information space; something with much more of a social angle to it. Collaboration, contribution and community are the order of the day and there is a sense in which some think that a new 'social fabric' is being constructed before our eyes. However, it is also important to acknowledge that these ideas are not necessarily the preserve of 'Web 2.0', but are, in fact, direct or indirect reflections of the power of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and macro level that a billion Internet users produce. Key Idea

 1 Individual production and User Generated Content 

2 Harness the power of the crowd 

3 Data on an epic scale 

4 Architecture of Participation 

5 Network Effects

 6 Openness 

Data on an epic scale ‘Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric rain’ von Baeyer, 2003, p.3 In the Information Age we generate and make use of ever-increasing amounts of data. Some commentators fear that this datafication is causing us to drown. Many Web 2.0 companies feel that they offer a way out of this, and in the emerging Web 2.0 universe, data, and lots of it, is profoundly important. Von Baeyer’s invisible rain is captured by Web 2.0 companies and turned into mighty rivers of information. Rivers that can be fished. In his original piece on the emergence of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly (2005a) discusses the role that data and its management has played with companies like Google, arguing that for those services, ‘the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it helps to manage’ (p. 3). These are companies that have database management and networking as core competencies and who have developed the ability to collect and manage this data on an epic scale. A recent article in Wired magazine emphasised the staggering scale of the data processing and collection efforts of Google when it reported on the company’s plans to build a huge new server farm in Oregon, USA, near cheap hydro-electric power supplies once used to smelt aluminium (Gilder, 2006). Google now has a total database measured in hundreds of petabytes 17 which is swelled each day by terabytes of new information. This is the network effect working at full tilt. Much of this is collected indirectly from users and aggregated as a side effect of the ordinary use of major Internet services and applications such as Google, Amazon and Ebay. In a sense these services are ‘learning’ every time they are used. As one example, Amazon will record your book buying choices, combine this with millions of other choices and then mine and sift this data to help provide targeted recommendations. Anderson (2006) calls these companies

long tail aggregators who ‘tap consumer wisdom collectively by watching what millions of them do’ (p. 57). This data is also made available to developers, who can recombine it in new ways. Lashing together applications that take rivulets of information from a variety of Web 2.0 sources has its own term—a mash-up. As an early, oft-quoted example, Paul Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com combined Google Maps (an online mapping service) with the USA-based CraigsList of flats available for rent. These kinds of mash-ups are facilitated by what are known as ‘open APIs’–Application Programming Interfaces (see section 4.5). Much as these services have made life easier on the Web (who can imagine life without Google now?) there is a darker side. Who owns this data? Increasingly, data is seen as something – a resource – that can be repurposed, reformatted and reused. But what are the privacy implications? Google’s mission is ‘to organise the world’s information’ and in part this means yours. There is a tension here. Some argue that a key component of Web 2.0 is the process of freeing data, in a process of exposure and reformatting, through techniques like open APIs and mash-ups (Miller, 2005, p. 1). Others are not so sure. Tim O’Reilly makes a telling point: ‘the race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring of public events, product identifiers and namespaces’ (2005a, p. 3). Brown and Duguid (2000) argue that the mass dis-intermediation of the Web is actually leading to centralization.

What shape is the Web?: the role of Power Laws In addition to the physical network effects of the telecoms-based Internet, there are also Webspecific network effects at work due to the linking that takes place between pieces of Web content: every time users make contributions through blogs or use services that aggregate data, the network effect deepens. This network effect is driving the continual improvement of Web 2.0 services and applications as part of the architecture of participation. In the previous section we saw how Briscoe et al. had made the argument that the size of the Network Effect was proportional to n log(n) rather than Metcalfe’s n 2 . They argue that this is quantitatively justified by thinking about the role of ‘value’ in the network: adding a new person to the network does not provide each and every other person on the network with a single unit of additional value. The additional value varies depending on what use an existing individual might make of the new one (as an example, some of your email contacts are many times more useful to you than the rest). As this relative value is dictated by a power law distribution, with a long tail, it can be shown mathematically that the network effect is proportional to n log(n) rather than n 2 . A power law distribution is represented by a continuously decreasing curve that is characterised by ‘a very small number of very high-yield events (like the number of words that have an enormously high probability of appearing in a randomly chosen sentence, like 'the' or 'to') and a very large number of events that have a very low probability of appearing (like the probability that the word 'probability' or 'blogosphere' will appear in a randomly chosen sentence)’ (Benkler, 2006). Such power law distributions have very long ‘tails’ as the amplitude of a power law approaches, but never quite reaches zero, as the curve stretches out to infinity 23 . This is the Long Tail referred to by Chris Anderson (see below)

Technology and standards ‘The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.’ Dion Hinchcliffe, blog post, 11th Sept. 2006. One of the key drivers of the development of Web 2.0 is the emergence of a new generation of Web-related technologies and standards. This has been underpinned by the powerful, though not particularly new, idea of the Web as platform27 . Whereas in the past, software applications ran on the user’s machine, handled by a desktop operating system such as MacOS, Windows or Linux, under the Web as platform, umbrella software services are run within the actual window of the browser, communicating with the network and remote servers. One consequence of the Web as platform is that there is less emphasis on the software (as a package: licensed and distributed) and far more on an application providing a service. The corollary of this is that there is much less emphasis on the release of software and, indeed, many well known Web 2.0 services remain in a kind of ‘perpetual beta’. So why has the idea of the Web as platform become more feasible now? The answer is that browser technology has moved on to a new stage in its development with the introduction of what are known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA) 28 . Currently the main technology for delivering RIAs is Ajax, but there are some alternatives which are mainly based on Flash technology. N.B Tim O’Reilly’s conceptualisation of Web technology with respect to Web 2.0 has since moved on to the idea of the network as platform. This is especially important for another one of his key ideas: software above the level of a single device. O’Reilly cites iTunes and TiVo as exemplars of this approach as, although not Web applications themselves, they leverage it as part of their infrastructure. 4.1 Ajax The delivery of Web 2.0 applications and services has been driven by the widespread adoption of one particular group of technologies which are referred to as Ajax – Asynchronous Javascript + XML – a term first coined by Jesse James Garrett (Johnson, 2005; Garrett, 2005). As a term, Ajax attempts to capture both an approach to working with the Web and the use of a specific range of technologies. One of the big frustrations for users of traditional HTML-based websites is the time spent waiting for pages to reload and refresh after the user has chosen an option or clicked on a hypertext link. Several attempts have been made over the years to improve the dynamism of webpages through individual techniques such as Javascript, hidden frames, Dynamic HTML (DHTML), CSS and Microsoft’s XMLHttpRequest ActiveX tool. However, it is really only 27 This idea was pioneered by Netscape, the company that developed one of the first successful Web browsers back in the 1990s, but eventually succumbed to competition from Microsoft, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. This ‘competition’ was not without considerable controversy (see, for example, Auletta, 2001, for further details). O’Reilly (2005a) argues that the next phase will be between Windows/the desktop paradigm ‘the pinnacle of proprietary control’ and the open platform of the Web, and that ‘battle is no longer unequal, a platform versus a single application, but platform versus platform, with the question being which platform, and more profoundly, which architecture, and which business model, is better suited to the opportunity ahead’ (p. 2). 28 For an example of the sophistication and power of these types of interfaces see the Flex demo at: http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/dashboard/dashboard.html [last accessed 14/02/07]. JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0 28 with the introduction of Ajax that this has come together successfully. With Ajax, only small amounts of information pass to and from the server once the page has first been loaded. This allows a portion of a webpage to be dynamically reloaded in real-time and creates the impression of richer, more 'natural' applications with the kind of responsive interfaces that are commonly found in desktop applications (Google calendar is a good example of this).

Microformats Microformats are widely used by Web developers to embed semi-structured semantic information (i.e. some level of ‘meaning’) within an XHTML webpage (Khare, 2006). Information based on open data formats (a microformat) is buried within certain XHTML tags (such as ‘class’ or ‘div’) or attributes (such as ‘rel’ or ‘rev’). The information is not used by the browser for display or layout purposes but it can be picked up by applications such as search engines36 . An example of a microformat is the hCard format which allows personal or organisational contact information based on the vCard standard to be embedded in a webpage37 . Proponents argue that microformats will have significant benefits for the development of the Web because they will allow bloggers or website owners to embed information that services and applications can make use of without the need to go and visit the application’s website and add the data. Of course, to a certain extent, Web search engines already do this when they crawl a website or blog and index the content for other people to locate. Microformats provide additional information for these kinds of services. As an example, provision of information in the hListing microformat (which is for small ads) on a blog would allow a small ads service (such as Craigslist) to automatically find your listing. Future versions of the Firefox browser (possibly version 3) are likely to incorporate functionality that makes use of microformats in order to automatically move such data into one’s chosen applications or online services (for example moving any contact information buried in a webpage into Gmail contacts list)–a process described as being more ‘information broker’ than browsing (Wagner, 2007). An illustration from Mozilla shows clearly how this vision fits with the Web as Platform idea38 :

Conclusion This report has covered a lot of ground. It has looked at Web 2.0, tried to separate out some of the sense from the sensational, reviewed the technologies involved and highlighted some of the issues and challenges that this poses to higher education in the UK (see appendix A for a summary of these and some tentative recommendations). This is a complex and rapidly evolving area and this report can, perhaps inevitably, seem to raise as many questions as it answers. I believe, however, that there are a few core points that we should hold on to when thinking about Web 2.0 and how it might impact on education: firstly, that Web 2.0 is more than a set of ‘cool’ and new technologies and services, important though some of these are. It is actually a series of at least six powerful ideas or drivers that are changing the way some people interact. Secondly, it is also important to acknowledge that these ideas are not necessarily the preserve of ‘Web 2.0’, but are, in fact, direct or indirect reflections of the power of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and macro level that a billion Internet users produce. This might well be why Sir Tim Berners-Lee maintains that Web 2.0 is really just an extension of the original ideals of the Web which does not warrant a special moniker; but the fact that business concerns are starting to shape the way in which we are being led to think and potentially act on it means that we need to at least be more aware of these influences. For example, many of the Web 2.0 services are provided by private, often American companies. Start-up companies tend to either fail or be bought out by one of a triumvirate of corporates: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. This raises questions about the ownership of the user data collected. The UK HE sector should debate whether this is a longterm issue. Maybe delineating Web from Web 2.0 will help us to do that. Finally, it is important to look at the implications of Web 2.0. The changes that are taking place are likely, I think, to provide three significant challenges for education: Firstly, the crowd, and its power, will become more important as the Web facilitates new communities and groups. A corollary to this is that online identity and privacy will become a source of tension. Secondly, the growth in user or self-generated content, the rise of the amateur and a culture of DIY will challenge conventional thinking on who exactly does things, who has knowledge, what it means to have élites, status and hierarchy. These challenges may not be as profound as some of the more ardent proponents of Web 2.0 indicate, but there will be serious challenges none the less (ask any academic for his/her views on Wikipedia as a research tool). And finally, there are profound intellectual property debates ahead as individuals, the public realm and corporations clash over ownership of the huge amounts of data that Web 2.0 is generating and the new ways of aggregating and processing it.