There is a silent uprising in progress at the moment, one that is probably alter the approach we make use of the Web in the near future. The transformations are technological and engage thousands of individual programmers, dozens of start-up companies and a few of the biggest software companies in the world.

The consequence is a massive software upgrade for the whole Web, what some specialists have gone the extent to entitle ‘Web 2.0’.

Some technical revolutions appear at the picture unexpectedly. There are so many technological advances taken place in the immediate past. For many of us, our first meeting with the World Wide Web a decade ago was one of those transformative experiences. You clicked on a word on the screen and instantly you were transported to some other page that was served up from a computer located somewhere else across the planet perhaps. After you followed that first hyperlink, you knew the universe of information was at your finger tips.

The original Web lays its emphasis on simplicity: Web sites were made up of pages, each of which could contain text and images. Those pages were able to connect to other information on the Web through links. You could link to the information on a particular page by inserting a few simple lines of code. From that point on, your site was connected to that other page and subsequent visitors to your site could follow that connection with a single mouse click. In some basic sense, those two pages of data were interacting with each other, but the exchange between them was only elementary.

But in Web 2.0, a user can subscribe to a virtual clipping service offered by Google News and instructs the service to scan thousands of news outlets for any articles that mention a particular word and to send him an e-mail alert when one of them comes down the wire. By following a link to an original article and using a standard blogging tool like TypePad or Blogger, the user can post a quick summary of the review and link to the Amazon page for the book from his blog.

Within a few hours of publishing the note about the new book, a service called Technorati scans the website of the user and notices that he has added a link to a book listed on Amazon. Technorati as the Google of the blog world constantly analyzes the latest blog posts for interesting new developments.

Another innovative service called del.icio.us, categorizes a user’s blog entry and tags it with his content-specific title. The creators of del.icio.us call the program a social bookmarking service and one of its key functions is to connect people as readily as it connects data. The difference from the traditional web mode is in the fact that one small piece of new information, a review of a book, flows through an entire system of reuse and appropriation within hours. In the Web 2.0 model, we have thousands of services scrutinizing each new piece of information online, grabbing interesting bits, remixing them in new ways and passing them along to other services. In the coming years, you will come across even more innovation in Web 2.0.

Tags: Web 2.0 for Long Lasting Impact