The Web done right
Robert Forkel has a cool post up about Web 2.0 for librarians. From the piece:
It’s no longer cool - or even ok - to publish a web site in PDF to browsers and some other data via a WS-* type web service to others. Instead, once you forget about browsers being the only user agents, quite a bit of the web 2.0 developments seem very natural.
So the participative aspect of web 2.0 starts well before everyone creating content; it starts with not making restrictive assumptions about who and how people - or programs - will use your site. Let the web participate in reusing your content.
With much of the 2.0 hype coming from a non-technical direction theses days, it is easy to overlook that access is what greases the wheels of the social web. Web 1.0 basically treated every user the same and forgot who you were or what you had just done a moment ago each time you clicked on a link. Data and design were essentially inseparable and websites were conceptualized as real estate on the Net - the more you had, the better (this was the age in which Yahoo still wanted to be a portal). We now get that websites are not like real estate and that our content is not synonymous with our website. People will want to use your content in ways you haven’t anticipated and it hardly matters whether they use it “here” (on your site) or “there” (on a portable device, their own site etc). As Robert points out, Web 2.0 is about making up for technical mistakes that were made in the past and about losing the spatial metaphor that makes us see the Web as consisting of sites and pages.
