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
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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
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