Link: sevenload.com
At Web 2.0 Expo Berlin, Tim O’Reilly kindly agreed to try solving the one issue all of us are sharing: How to tell our parents what we do? So here’s Tim, explaining to his parents: What’s Web 2.0?
“So Web 2.0: First off, it’s the idea that the Web, rather than the personal computer is the most important platform for computer applications today. The applications that matter to people are no longer things like Microsoft Word or a spreadsheat. It’s things like Google, or Amazon, or if you’re a kid maybe it’s MySpace.
When we think about this, though, we have to realize whenever we have a new platform in the computer industry things work differently. So we started thinking about what makes the Web different.
And what makes the Web different is that on the network there’s the potential to build applications that actually get better the more people use them. And they actually grow organically in kind of a conversation with the users.
You can look at this with every major company that succeeded on the Web. They’re all in some way using the network to harness collective intelligence, to get better by user contribution. And I think that’s really the heart of Web 2.0.
As to why we call it Web 2, it was really after the Dotcom Bubble, and the Dotcom Bust, which was really a stock market phenomenon, everybody thought maybe the Web was over, and we thought it was still going. So Web 2 really refers not to a new technology so much as the second coming of the World Wide Web as an important technological phenomenon.â€
Disclosure: Once again, this is a cross-posting from my work for Blogpiloten.de. Tim was great, as he took the time for this little experiment although he was clearly pressed for time. Thanks a lot, Tim! The video is released under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-sa 2.0).
Update, 8 Nov: I just got notice that this video made the Web 2.0 Expo website front page. Yay!
