Web 2.0 - The WWC

After reading a quick news post about cracks in web 2.0 on Wired News, I was lead to a particularly enlightening essay about what exactly Web 2.0 is. This term has been travelling around the net for some time now and I had been curious as to what exactly was meant by it, what caused a new web to form and how it differed from the first versions.

Well, I knew about Web 1.0 from a marketing point of view, we studied that enough in classes. Basically referring to the upsurge of the ‘dot com’ models of economy on the web, Web 1.0 was the first version of what the net was for. Big companies opening up online stores and new ones forming virtual ones with no physical ones were the most prominent thing in that first version. The ones that survive are now really common, like Amazon and even Ebay. Also corresponding to this age and version were the bbs, email and irc communities that began to form.

Web 2.0 is what we see now on the web. First the applications and communities like Flikr, Bit Torrent and Forums, it’s the rise of the WWC (World Wide Community). Communities sprang up from forums becoming something larger, like Deviantart, Neopets and Gaia Online (for examples closest to me) and also community-content pages like the famed Wikipedia.

And of course, Blogs. I’ve been reading blogs for some time now, have had this one for a bit longer and now even my friends are starting to make their own ones. I’ve seen blogs used as personal pages, and as community editorial sites, such as A List Apart with really great articles on things that interest me the most. With RSS syndication, reading news and tips about what you most like is really easy, just subscribe to those blogs that seem more interesting, and you get free daily content of your choosing. Yep, all for free.

And that’s one of the charms of Web 2.0, it’s offering us free content suited to our needs and tastes. I think that’s the best part really. You should probably read the essay that got me writing about all this to see some of the downsides. But I think I can see one example that affects me personally, and it has more to do with the communities than with blogs.

Specifically, what the essay made me think about was Deviantart. That site started as a place to share widgets, skins and the like, and quickly grew into a complete art community, where artists of all qualities join in on sharing works. This is really great for small artists since they get more attention, and thus more commisions. But it also makes for rivalry and trivializes art as a whole. Like cel-phone ringtones takes great music like Beethoven and has it ‘trivialized through reduction to electronic burps and gurgles.’ It makes little artists like me feel swamped by the greatness of the greatest, and makes you feel that your art is no more worth than a 5 second glance by those people who deem you good enough to be on their watch-list. I know it’s 5 seconds, because that’s probably the average time *I* spend looking at the deviations on my own devwatch.

So the whole idea of WWC has it’s downsizes, but it still feels good to know there’s at least 130 people who find your art good, and it is even better when you get comments on your art, even if it’s as simple as ‘cool!’ or ‘this is so cute!’. Besides, sometimes you even get great comments, and constructive criticism in the mix.