This post is written thinking in my classmates of the “Instructional Software, Internet & Digital Media” Course, in the Boston University. We (the guys working in RedPanal.com, the web page I’ll try to explain in a few lines) think that Internet is in process of deep change. Taking some ideas of our spanish friend David De Ugarte, we could say that the “dot com” stage is ending, and the web is getting -since not to much years ago,up to the actual days- much plural, democratic, diverse. But, What is the meaning of this?
The first moment of internet development was when a bunch of people (we might say companies, in most of the cases) took the initiative and made some webpages. This is what we call the “dot com” stage. We won’t talk to much about this, because is not the objective of the work. The important thing is to understand that in this stage, the web wasn’t yet distributed, because the production of the content was in a few hands, the same hands that in the real world and the traditional media.
Graphic: Markus Angermeier.
The most important change we could say it was the weblogs invention and the spread of simple-to-use software and web applications. This aspect, that could seem not so important, modifies the structure itself of Internet. From now on, the content will be produced not by a few concentrated centers (the “dot com” stage) but by a lot of uncountable nodes.
O’Reilly called this new stage of Internet “web 2.0” (2001-2007), the opposite face of the web 1.0 of the beginning, the “dot com” stage (1998-2001). Transmitter and receiver won’t be separate in the new stage of Internet. All the people may produce content for the web and make his own community to share it.
There’s some applications that could be named as web 2.1, because they allow users to produce, share, modify and redistribute the content interactively. I show a brief list of applications web 2.0 and 2.1 that i took of the web page of David.
Our idea is to make a web 2.1 page for music. The next posts will be about how we are thinking to make it work.
I hope you could get a Weblog. It’s a very simple to use and update web page, that you could get from a blog browser like WordPress or Blogger. The registration is very simple too, just like the one you do for an email account in Yahoo, Gmail or the one you are actually using.
There are lots of spaces where bloggers meet each other, like del.icio.us or del.irio.us.
And, like a gift, a video that I like very much, about the web 2.0. Don’t worry because it has a lot of technical things. It’s the human aspect what I like the most. 😉