WEB 2.0 DEFINITION

WEB 2.0 DEFINITION

 A tag cloud (a typical Web 2.0 phenomenon in itself) presenting Web 2.0 themes. An interactive version is available here.

Web 2.0 is a concept that takes the network as a platform for information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. A Web 2.0 site allows users to interact and collaborate with each other in a social media dialogue as creators (prosumers) of user-generated content in a virtual community, in contrast to websites where users (consumers) are limited to the passive viewing of content that was created for them. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, hosted services, web applications, mashups and folksonomies.

The term is closely associated with Tim O'Reilly because of the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in late 2004.

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specification, but rather to cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the Web. Whether Web 2.0 is substantively different from prior web technologies has been challenged by World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, who describes the term as jargon.His vision of the Web is "a collaborative medium, a place where we [can] all meet and read and write".