What is Web 2.0 anyway?

Good question, & I'm only bluffing my way around the topic myself!

Here's Wikipedia's current take on it:

"the phrase Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users."

My own view has been slightly simpler - I see Web 2.0 as a development where the previous boundaries between writers & readers have become blurred.

The original World Wide Web was, & still is, a democratising & empowering phenomenon because it allowed anyone (well, almost anyone) to become a writer, a producer of content. But it was still very much one-way: a single person, or a small team of people, creates a web page, & the rest of us are merely visitors. In Web 2.0, although there's still a place for passing visitors, the point is to get involved - to produce, as well as consuming.

I see blogs as a transitional stage; not all allow readers to comment, & even those that do, have the comments tucked away, requiring an extra click to access them, & un-searchable. Nevertheless, blogging is a significant advance - Web 1.5, perhaps - because it generally treats readers as almost equal particiapants in the process. I'm a hesitant explorer of new territories compared with many of my colleagues, yet even I've had a blog for almost four years, which suggests it's hardly cutting edge any more!

As far as social networking is concerned, my MySpace page is more recent (June 2005) & I only joined Facebook this year. The proliferation of new Web 2.0 stuff with funny names shy of a few vowels (Flickr) or idiosyncratically punctuated (del.icio.us)is only just starting to impinge on my day to day activities. This blog will partly be a record of my journey into Web 2.0, though given my caution, it's quite likely to be Web 3.0 by the time I get there!

Slidecasting

...I'd been thinking it was time to split off my OU/techie blogging from the "What I did on my holidays" stuff. Keeping them apart worked well when I was blogging for H806, but I'd left that behind when the course ended. Then today I watched Martin's slidecast & was intrigued both professionally & personally.

On a professional level, for the reasons I outlined in a comment on Martin's OU blog. Basically, a slidecast strikes me as an ideal compromise between uploading a set of Powerpoint slides after a presentation (if the presenter is any good, the slides alone will fail to capture more than a tiny fraction of what was actually delivered - I often find them frustratingly cryptic)& full-on webcasting, which is heavy on resources, unsuited to desktop PC screens (especially for those of us with less than perfect vision)& more inhibiting for a presenter than simply having their voice recorded. A slidecast is also - as Martin's post demonstrates - great for embedding in other forms of online media.

At a personal level, I was amused by Martin's "rules" for blogging, which included the "I'm not interested in your cat" line. Now, I don't have a cat - I'm not even particularly fond of them - but if I did, Bluefluff would certainly have blogged about it! This reminded me about my vague intentions to Do Something about sorting out my own blogging.

Hence Bluefluff 2.0 - not only Bluefluff's second incarnation, but one that will be (loosely) focused on what are (loosely) referred to as Web 2.0 phenomena, the second generation web. Slidecasting seems as good a place as any to start.