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Thursday, November 10, 2005
Toral: A participative Internet
By Janette Toral
Digital Filipino
The Internet has been transformed ino to a much more mature state and is now referred to as Web 2.0.
According to Tim O’Reilly (http://tim.oreilly.com), this is where the Internet has become a platform.
The users are in charge of controlling the data. It is also focused on services that support user participation. More importantly, it harnesses collective intelligence.
To further explain this, instead of an individual having a personal website, we now see blogs taking its place.
Gone are the days when one needs to have a cheesy website, the blog has become an acceptable medium for both personal and corporate dissemination of information. This has made publication much easier and faster than ever before.
In the field of entertainment, music and video can now be downloaded through user-based sharing technologies such as Napster. In the past, these files can only be downloaded by one source.
In the area of advertising, one can now easily advertise online with a budget of P100 per day. Before, it would require a bigger budget and the sites were not easily available for start-ups.
In knowledge management, the typical way would be to access traditional encyclopedias in print or online. Today, there are now wikipedias where Internet users all over the world can contribute and write entries on.
A great example to further demonstrate Web.20 is in Yahoo. Those who visit Yahoo.com will usually find content according to categories. With Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0 (http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com), content is now identified according to keyword tags. Users who will get use to this will be able to click on the tags and see more content identified in that area.
In the area of e-commerce, purchasing decisions are further driven as well through user feedback, review or ranking. It is no longer just a listing of products and users can will decide if they want to purchase.
Another example would be the search engine. Google is very much database-driven and its database is allowed to grow far and beyond.
There are still a lot of competitors and former big players that have not yet caught up with the Web 2.0 technology.
With Web 2.0, technologies such as, Bloglines, Technorati and Google Alert are also available and allow people to regularly monitor particular keywords, websites, blogs and personalities, in an automated manner.
My readers, the Internet is changing. The power it has given users to date is certainly overwhelming.
This brings to mind the Cisco advertisement that asked, “Are you ready?” When you think about it today, none of us really is ready for what the Internet can do.
It is driven by the collective knowledge of great creative people. You should participate today.
(November 10, 2005 issue)
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