Some technological revolutions arrive at the scene surprisingly. There are so many technological innovations taken place in the recent past. For many of us, our first encounter 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.

There is a comparably quiet revolution under way right now, one that is likely to fundamentally transform the way we use the Web in the coming years. The changes are technical and involve thousands of individual programmers, dozens of start-ups and a few of the largest software companies in the world. The result is the equivalent of a huge software upgrade for the entire Web, what some experts have gone the distance to call Web 2.0.

Part of the beauty and power of the original Web lay in its 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 creative 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. Each new addition to the mix can be exploited in countless new ways, both by human bloggers and by the software programs that track changes in the overall state of the Web. Information in this new model is analyzed, repackaged, digested and passed on down to the next link in the chain. In the coming years, you will come across even more innovation in Web 2.0.

Tags: Web 2.0 Quietly Changing World Wide Web