Monday, 04 May 2009 00:00

We opened our revised web site at the beginning of May to become more "Web 2.0". We have also sourced a number of newsfeeds and created an events scheduling list, within our news section, and we hope you find these useful. We will continue to develop this site and hope to create a degree of interactivity and feedback in the future. Read on for more about Web 2.0.

In the meantime, we hope you find this resource useful. We will create relationships within and between articles which should allow you to access the most relevant areas more easily. The search facility will also try to guess what you are searching for, as you type, and this may also enable you to source the article or information you are looking for in a more efficient manner. 

"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." Tim O'Reilly"Web 2.0" refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design, that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities, hosted services, and applications; such as social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies (Wikipedia).

The term was first used by Dale Dougherty and Craig Cline and shortly after became notable after the O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. 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 cumulative changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

Tim O'Reilly has noted 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.

Interestingly, 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.

UPDATE 26 JUN 09: added comments feature to blog topics.