The definition of Web 2.0, a buzzword that is used often in the Internet industry, is a bit unclear. But Web 2.0 sites regularly include interactive resources, i.e. sites that enable users to share opinions, ideas, photos, videos, even favorite web links. This is distinct from a simpler variety of websites (Web 1.0) that are generally static sources of information. The credit is given to executives of O’Reilly Media for coining this term while brainstorming names for a technology conference some years ago.

Social software has appeared as a most important constituent of the Web 2.0 movement. The idea can be traced back to the 1960s and JCR Licklider’s thoughts on using networked computing to connect people in order to improve their knowledge and their capability to learn. The Internet technologies of the following generation have been overwhelmingly social, as listservs, Usenet groups, discussion software, groupware and web-based communities have connected people throughout the world. During the past few years, a group of web projects and services were thought as especially connective, receiving the rubric of “social software”: blogs, wikis, trackback, podcasting, videoblogs, and enough social networking tools like MySpace and Facebook to give rise to an abbreviation mocking their very occurrence as YASN (Yet Another Social Network).

Consider the differences between these and static or database-driven web pages. Wikis are based on user modification; CNN’s front page is resolutely not. It is true that blogs are Web pages, but their reverse-chronological structure implies a different symbolic purpose than a Web page, which has no intrinsic timeliness. That altered expression helped shape a different audience, the blogging public, with its emergent social practices of blogrolling, extensive hyperlinking, and discussion threads attached not to pages but to content chunks within them. Reading and searching this world is notably different from searching the entire web world. Still, social software does not indicate a sharp break with the old but, rather, the gradual emergence of a new type of practice.

These sections of the web separate from from the page image. Rather than following the notion of the web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are flows of conversation, revision, alteration and truncation. Podcasts are moved between web sites, RSS feeds and different players. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects. Browsers respond to this boom in microcontent with bookmarklets in toolbars, letting users fling something from one page into a web service that produces another page. AJAX-style pages feed content bits into pages without refreshing them, like the frames of old but without such obvious seams. They combine the widely used, open XML standard with Java functions. Google Maps is a popular example of this, which provides effortlessly drawn directional information and satellite images down into a browser.

Like social software, microcontent has been around for a while. Banner ads, for example, are often imported by one site from another directory. Jointly designed web pages sometimes aggregate content created by different teams over a spread out timeline. And if we consider e-mail messages, discussion-board posts, Usenet-hosted images and text messages to be microcontent, then users have generated this material for decades. But Web 2.0 builds on this original microcontent drive, with users developing web content, often collectively and open to the world. Moreover, technical innovations suggest still further refinements in microcontent.

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