Web 2.0 - The Steady Jog

So the web has evolved...or rather, is evolving.  I suppose that's something that will always be true, this monster we have created, the World Wide Web, has gone from the crawl of the nineties into a steady jog in the last decade.  It has become instrumental to our lives in so many ways, from personal experience I remember when it was a novelty, something I would 'surf' without any real destination in mind, but rather just seeing what was out there.  I am old enough to remember the Yahoo! homepage pictures we see in the week 1 reading.  My first ISP was a company called Powerup, and they had a similar type of homepage, mostly a portal page linking me to other search engines.  I can honestly say it was a fantastic service at the time and it was my first 'world at your fingertips' feeling.  That said, if I was to use that sort of thing these days I would probably throw my PC out the window!

It never ceases to amaze how devices continue to get faster, smaller, and all-round better, we have all-in-one PC/Screens now, we have ultrabooks, smartphones.  In fact we have phones out there now that can substitute a computer altogether.  The Motorola Atrix, while flawed, is a fine prototype for what is surely to come.  With it's dual core processor it has the muscle, it sports a HDMI input for your monitor (feel free to just use the TV), two USB inputs and Bluetooth for keyboard, mouse, and any other peripherals.  It makes me wonder if at one point things will have to stop and go in a different direction.  The one example we have seen on this point is phones.  In the previous decade there was a sudden, and obsessive need to make phones smaller and smaller until they were bordering on the ridiculous, and anything that wasn't keeping up with the trend was condemned to be known forever as a 'brick'.  Thankfully the advent of the IPhone and Android models has now replaced this trend with a need for a bigger unit to cram all the tech into.

While not the best example, you can get a good idea of what I mean about the Atrix.

The very idea of blogs and wikis are two areas I must admit to not really knowing a great deal about up to this point.  I had arrogantly dismissed Blogging as the arena of self-absorbed individuals looking for a 'Hey look at me!' platform to share meaningless garbage about their mundane lives.  While for a large part I believe I was right, I feel there is also an avenue to be explored here in the way of sharing information and adding to the 'social web' that has emerged in this 'Facebook era' we find ourselves living in.

As for Wikis, I again own up to being a little presumptuous in this department.  Wikis were Wikipedia to me and nothing else, and through that line of thought, they were simply a handy off-hand reference point to read up on general interest subjects, historical events and personalities when curiosity strikes.  If we can put aside the occasional poorly constructed (or vandalised) page, we find we've built ourselves an extremely valuable public resource.  The idea that if you are knowledgeable on something, you can go and either create or add to a page on a given subject, and that will then be read by countless people all over the world, this is something truly special and cannot be undervalued.

I do admit to my skepticism at data from Google trends showing wiki is a more popular search term than blog, I believe if we took Wikipedia out of the equation the stats would plummet, although that said you can Google most areas of interest these days and you will find a Wikipedia-independent wiki created for it, so I could be wrong...it has been known to happen on occasion!

This is the world we live in people, we live in a world were all those stories your mother told you when you were younger are true, you CAN go out there and speak to the world and they will hear you, you CAN create something, something that everyone can benefit from.  And the best part...is that you don't have to do it all yourself, we don't have to go it alone, the word of the day is 'collaboration'.  We can build something, and slowly but surely chip away at it until we have our great construct.

I love to hear a choir. I love the humanity to see the faces of real people devoting themselves to a piece of music. I like the teamwork. It makes me feel optimistic about the human race when I see them cooperating like that.
- Paul McCartney