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How Simplicity and Transparency Are Building the Web
2.0
A White Paper by Chris Boone, Hypsometry, for Dartmouth Web Publishing
Services
Overview
The new generation of Web technologies — Web 2.0, as it’s called — is an
advance in technologies: We have more tools available to us; they are simpler,
more transparent, and more flexible than ever before. They allow us to do more
on the Web than we ever could before. From those technologies emerge new
methods of creating and interacting with content. And from those new methods
emerge new communities and new forms of community.
Simplicity
The new technologies themselves are simple. Creating a free blog is as
simple as choosing a name; posting an article is as simple as clicking
"Post."
Their simplicity lowers the barrier to publishing, and to finding what
others have published, and to responding to that work. This makes it easy to go
from idea to published idea; from published idea to feedback; from feedback to
collaboration; from collaboration to new idea.
Transparency and Flexibility
Web 2.0 technologies are also marked by a high level of transparency and
flexibility. That allows for easy integration of one technology with another.
This is key: The Web 2.0 tools don’t just allow you to communicate well with
your audience — they communicate well amongst themselves.
Easy integration of one technology with another allows for new authoring
possibilities. You can build here on work you’ve done there, without
duplicating your efforts or your results. And I can build on your work, you on
mine, and we can work together.
This transparency also facilitates the dissemination and location of
content. Since the content is more
visible, its audience is broadened. The audience can then, in turn, respond
to it and interact with it. Web 2.0 is marked by a blurring of the distinction
between content producer and content consumer.
Categorization and Valuation
To go along with the new methods of authorship, we need new methods of
sorting and valuing. In the same ways that the means of production are
simplified, made transparent, and integrated, the means of categorizing and
valuing have been updated.
The new method is referred to as tagging, or folksonomy. Tagging is novel
in that it allows for categorization and valuation by the consumer, and not
just by the producer. Which is to say, the audience, while in the very act of
consuming, categorizes the content and assesses its value. Each consumer
responds directly to what she reads, and those responses aggregate into something
potentially more meaningful than just one person’s thoughts.
Community
From these varied acts of creation and feedback and collaboration and
categorization and valuation emerge communities of producers and consumers.
Grouping
Simple groups, both passive and active, emerge first.
On Flickr, the social photo sharing site,
groups emerge spontaneously. I tag — I label, that is, in a non-hierarchical
fashion — a photo of the
Green with the word ‘Dartmouth.’ You tag a photo of an old friend with the
word ‘Dartmouth.’ Our photos are automatically linked, for anyone to see, by
this tag in common. Anyone who wants can look at
all the photos on Flickr tagged with the words ‘Dartmouth’ and ‘College.’
Both our photos will be there, along with a wide range of others.
From that passive group can come active groups. I see that other people are
tagging photos with ‘Dartmouth,’ and I then create what Flickr calls a pool —
which is a formalized, non-generated group — for Dartmouth photos. You see that
I’ve done so, and you join. We’ve now formalized our relationship; and a new
group has emerged.
The process continues. I upload more photos and continue to tag them. Some
of my tags are new, and so my use of them creates a space into which content
may grow. Some of my tags are already in use, and so I add that content to a
pre-existing space. I join another pool; others join my Dartmouth pool. I
comment on other people’s photos; people comment on mine. While browsing your
contacts, I find a photo that I love, and so I mark it as a favorite of
mine.
Dartmouth
College Group Pool
From all these activities, bonds are formed: Some strong, some weak; some
long-lasting, some transient; some interesting, some not; but all of them real,
and all of them emergent from the simple act of posting some photos on the Web.
And from these actions, finally, comes a community.
Content Aggregation
The new technologies allow these emergent communities to reach out beyond
their original domain.
For example, you might set up a site that displays all the photos in
Flickr's ‘Dartmouth College’
pool and updates itself automatically.
This is possible, since Flickr makes available all public photos through
feeds. A feed is simply a simplified, standardized,
and more flexible means of making content available. You can track a feed
in a program, either on your desktop or on the Web, called a feed reader; other
programs can take feeds and make use of the content they contain, integrating
it with other content, modifying it, re-interpreting it, and so on.
Your site that displays all photos tagged with ‘Dartmouth’ could also pull
in Hanover’s weather
forecast,
news items that reference ‘Dartmouth,’
weblog entries that reference ‘Dartmouth,’ classified ads from uvList,
posts from local blogs, and aggregate it all to create a new work — a sort of
dashboard for Hanover.
Application Integration
In addition to passively aggregating and displaying information pulled in
from other sites, the dashboard could be extended so that it accesses other
sites’ data and functionality.
More and more sites make APIs
available for public use. An API — an Application
Programming Interface — is another, lower-level, means of interacting with
the site and its content. If you want to find out where an address is, you can
go to
the Google Maps site and enter it and find out. Or your Web site can use the Google Maps API to query the
Google Maps servers directly to find out the precise location of the address,
to display a map of it, to find driving directions from it — all the tasks that
Google Maps can perform. And all those tasks can be integrated directly into
your Web site.
Not only that, but you can use the Google Maps API to enhance the other data
on the site. If the dashboard pulls in event information
from Dartmouth, it can map the location of each event by calling Google
Maps. In that way, it moves beyond the simple recombinatory form of the
dashboard-as-feed-aggregator, and allows for the creation of substantially new
content.
Conclusion
The Web was made famous largely for its ability to empower producers and
consumers. Web 2.0 will be known for its ability to connect the two and make
them the same.
Continuum of Consumption to Production
There’s a continuum now that ranges from simple interaction to full-blown
community. That continuum is supported by the new technologies. People start on
one end — authoring and publishing content — and move toward the other —
responding to other people’s work, interacting with it, creating new content
based on it, integrating it with their own, and so on. Communities emerge along
the way.
Web 2.0 and the Social Web
The advance in technologies that supports this movement along the continuum
is what we call Web 2.0. The community end of the continuum is the Social Web.
The Social Web is both what is emerging from those technologies and what is
impelling their creation and refinement. The Web 2.0 tools allow us to interact
with each other in new ways; those interactions, and the communities that arise
from them, form the Social Web.
If the Web is the aggregate of the content available through HTTP and other
protocols, the Social Web is the aggregate of the communities formed around
that content. And if the Web 2.0 technologies enhance our abilities to create
and interact with that content, they will likewise enhance our abilities to
create and interact with those communities.
References: Views of Dartmouth from the Social Web
Automated sources of Web content about Dartmouth: news, blogs, photos,
bookmarks, podcasts, and videos.
For more information related to this topic, see:
- Dartmouth Now (demo) - What's
Happening at Dartmouth, Updated Hourly
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