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In Stanley Kubrick’s film,
2001: ASpace Odyssey
,there is a classic scene where the astronaut DaveBowman is confronted by an alien artefact, the black monolith, and discovers that inside it is awhole universe; an entire world of possibilities. Itwould be nice to think that Tim O’Reilly and hisassociates went through the same kind of processin 2004, when they went into a brainstormingsession, examined the web and discovered that, farfrom being a wasteland following the smash andgrab of the dotcom boom and bust, there wasactually a whole world of new possibilities
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.At the time, there was a clear resurgence increativity around web application design, withrenewed interest and innovation in online services.It also became apparent that, while the dotcom boomhad clearly impacted the level of trust that manylarger businesses had in the web as a viable platformand an area for investment, this had not impactedpeople’s ability to interact, do real business, workand research in online environments. Indeed, if anything, those methods of interaction were becomingly increasingly diverse. In short, O’Reillyfound that the web was full of people.Acritical mass of online users meant that therewere many more options for businesses exploringthe online arena. The web
was
a sustainableeconomic platform, and a huge amount of efforthad been invested into standardizing a number of key technologies to ensure that the web would bea stable environment.Attempts to understand and define Web 2.0 areoften confounded by a confusing array of buzzwordsand phrases like ‘folksonomy’, ‘digital natives’,‘the wisdom of crowds’, and ‘long tail’. O’Reilly’sown definition
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runs for several pages and resortsto describing eight general design patterns whilecontrasting exemplars of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0companies. While the article is a good expositionof the principles, it is far from being a recipe forWeb 2.0 success. Web 2.0 is a difficult concept topin down because of its many facets: it is definitelynot a (single) technology and is really more of amindset. Web 2.0 is not a sudden leap forward: it ismore the culmination of a number of related social, business and technical trends. The aim of thisarticle is to take a slightly different approachto defining Web 2.0 and, rather than resort to buzzwords, to try to tease out and highlight thefundamental trends – the individual ‘threads’ –that make up the concept. Each of the threads hasits roots in the early development of the web and,in combination, should illustrate the evolution of the web we see today.
Users and community
The first of these threads is the notion of community.Communities have always been an aspect of theonline environment. Originally, website ownersfretted about adding discussion forums andsimilar features to their sites in order to build acommunity, in an attempt to make the service‘sticky’ and ensure that users would keep returning.
The threads ofWeb 2.0Leigh Dodds
Serials
 – 21(1),March 2008
4
The threads of Web 2.0
Based on a presentation given at the UKSG seminar ‘Caught up in Web 2.0? Practical implementations and creative solutions for librarians and publishers’,London,22 November 2007 
Explanations of ‘Web 2.0’ often resort to buzzwords and incom-prehensible phrases like ‘long tail’ and ‘crowdsourcing’,confounding thereader and making the topic inaccessible to users not familiar with theterms.This article attempts to take a fresh look at Web 2.0,teasing apart theconcept into five fundamental trends or ‘threads’,each of which isexplained in isolation,with reference to illustrative examples.
LEIGH DODDS
Chief Technical Officer Ingenta
 
Serials
 – 21(1),March 2008
Leigh DoddsThe threads ofWeb 2.0
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It was this ‘Venus fly-trap’ model of engaging withusers that gave rise to the notion of the online‘portal’ that would become your definitive view of the web, the only resource you would ever need.The Web 2.0 mindset stands this view on its head,recognizing that these communities already exist.For a site to be successful, it needs to reach out tothis global audience and identify how it canprovide information and services to those existingcommunities in a way that fits in naturally withtheir existing ways of interacting, their existingtools and workflow.The other aspect to the community thread is therecognition that a large, global user community isan asset in its own right and one that can enablenew business models and features. These users arenot an ‘asset’ in the original, Web 1.0 world-viewthat aimed to monetize users through advertisingrevenues. Instead, a user community is an asset inthe sense that it can contribute towards improvingan application.The archetypal example of this is the Amazonrecommendation engine. Amazon mine the aggre-gated data of their users’ purchasing patterns inorder to recommend other products that theymight wish to buy. In essence, this is nothing new;all businesses use market and sales analysis to im-prove their products and services. The difference isthat, on the web, the feedback cycle can be muchquicker and there is much more fine-grained dataavailable. Within a web application it is possible tocollect much more information about what peopleactually do, as opposed to what they
say
they do!Usage analysis allows a service to adapt to itsusers without them having to sit down and fill in alot of preferences and wade through configurationoptions in order to tailor the site for their ownneeds. The goal is to analyse the behaviour of auser community and use that to improve the userexperience. While many view Web 2.0 as beingabout users annotating, commenting on, or explicitlycontributing towards online resources, implicit inter-actions are just as important. The user experienceshould improve through the continual ongoingimplicit participation that takes place through theuse of a service by the combined user community.
Openness and open data
Another key shift towards Web 2.0 involved lettingusers more directly participate, more explicitlycontribute. This is the area of Web 2.0 which receivesthe most attention, and is where the second‘thread’ in Web 2.0 comes into play.The Web 1.0 environment was largely about basic document sharing: publishing documents,and letting users download content and exchangedocuments through e-mail, and was about thecreation of websites that served as contentrepositories.The natural extension to this was to move awayfrom the Internet as simply a platform forexchanging information, towards the Internet as aplatform for creating and working with inform-ation; moving from a distribution system towardsa collaborative environment. Collaboration andparticipation are key ideas in Web 2.0. Whatpossibilities arise when there is not only easy accessto information, but also the tools to manipulateand enrich that information in order to use it innew, unforeseen, ways? There are a number of illustrative examples that can be drawn upon toanswer that question.Photo sharing has always been a commononline activity. Early photo publishing websiteslike Webshots
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provided users with the means toupload photos and share them with family andfriends. But now there is one website thatdominates the online photo-sharing space: Flickr
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.Flickr is a poster-child for Web 2.0 and as a servicehas always embodied many of the Web 2.0 prin-ciples. But what is the difference between Webshotsand Flickr; how did Flickr manage to corner themarket?Without underplaying the clear and well designeduser interface, it is safe to say that the keyinnovation in Flickr was making the public sharingof photos the default option. Photos are not lockedaway so only friends and family can access them, but open and accessible to all. This simple changemade it much easier for photos to be shared, andenabled a whole new set of social activities aroundthe content. There are Flickr communities basedaround photos of particular locations and themes,there are communities that will critique your photosand tell you how to become a better photographeror suggest ways to better crop and present aphotograph. None of that would be possiblewithout open, public sharing of photos being theencouraged norm. As a result, Flickr has amasseda huge database of photos
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and related metadata, amassive user base, and now offers much more thansimple photo-sharing: the site is an excellent
 
source of freely available stock photography, and asecondary set of applications are now able to buildtheir own business models around the content,offering, for example, photo printing and editingapplications
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.Another example of where open, public sharingof information creates new possibilities is in thearea of social bookmarking. The ability to bookmark favourite websites was an early browserfeature, but sites like del.icio.us
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launched, whichoffered the facility to share bookmarks online. Onthe surface this might have seemed a fairlyuninteresting option unless faced with the need toroutinely transfer bookmarks between computers.But, like Flickr, del.icio.us proved to be popularand has quickly gathered a database of not just bookmarks but also keywords that users had asso-ciated with the content. From this was born thenotion of folksonomies
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: users cataloguing andcategorizing content, enabling new ways to findinformation. Again, publishing seemingly uninter-esting, personal information has led to unforeseensocial applications and benefits. The del.icio.ushomepage is a useful resource for finding new andpopular information, as is browsing through thesite itself. Sites like Connotea
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and Citeulike
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aredemonstrating the utility of social bookmarking inthe academic area.It is not only content that is moving online, butalso the tools to content authoring. For example,the Google Docs
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service allows users to createdocuments and spreadsheets using a browser- based application. Again, on the surface this seemslike a step backwards: tools like Word and Exceloffer a much richer set of features and a better userinterface. But they are inherently single-userapplications. Online office suites allow users tocollaborate on a document at the same time, ratherthan having to pass it back and forth via e-mail.And, as the information is already online, there isno separate publishing process involved indistributing the finished version.The extreme end-point of moving more contentcreation online is to open up the entire authoringand review process, resulting in the creative anarchyexemplified by Wikipedia: anyone can publishanything, anywhere. Whether Wikipedia is a reliableresource or not, it is undeniably a good example of a successful social application
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. The debate sur-rounding Wikipedia, particularly issues such asquality
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, trust
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and identity
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, clearly illustrates thepotential pitfalls present in this aspect of Web 2.0.
Networked services
The third thread of Web 2.0 is the move towardsnetworked services.The software industry goes through a cycle on aregular basis where at any one time, either theserver or the client is deemed to be the keycomponent in an application. In the beginning wasthe mainframe, and then came Windows and therise of the desktop application. And then, later, Sunand Oracle announced that “the network is thecomputer” and that all users needed were simplenetworked terminals that would download appli-cations on demand. This cycle continues anewwith applications moving off the desktop and ontothe web. However, there may be an end in sight, asa kind of equilibrium has been reached.On one side of this equilibrium there areservices like Flickr and del.icio.us that offer usersthe means to share and annotate information and,crucially, also expose web services or APIs that letthat data be accessed from other applications. Onthe other side there is the evolution of the browserfrom a simple document viewer into a fully-fledged application platform capable of combiningdata from multiple sources in order to create newapplications.This ability to mix together multiple serviceshas been dubbed a ‘mash-up’. These applicationstypically run entirely in the browser, on the client, but draw data and functionality from a number of different networked applications. ProgrammableWeb
15
provides a useful resource for exploring thehuge variety of applications that are now being built in this way, as well as the growing range of data sources available for remixing.The potential for networked services to driveusage has been clearly demonstrated by Amazon,who recently reported that web service traffic nowaccounts for more traffic than all of the globalwebsites combined
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.
New dimensions
The fourth thread of Web 2.0, and a spark for a lotof the creativity that surrounds mash-ups, is theexploration of new forms of information visual-ization and presentation.Originally, the web was one-dimensional:people read through documents from start tofinish. Documents could be linked together into a
The threads ofWeb 2.0Leigh Dodds
Serials
 – 21(1),March 2008
6
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