Web 2.0 is the web as it was originally envisioned – the internet of things is the real departure
The term Web 2.0 was dreamed up to describe community-driven phenomena such as blogs and wikis and the enormously priced businesses they inspired. But not everyone is buying into the label, writes David Reid of BBC News.
Participants at a recent Web 2.0 conference organised by Nomades Advanced Technologies Interactive Workshops (NATIW) [blog] in Geneva, Switzerland were scratching their heads as to what it all means.
Among them were some pretty wily web veterans, including a member of the team from Europe’s Nuclear Research Centre (Cern) that actually invented the web.
Web 2.0 may not be the different species some claim, but sort of what they had in mind from the start.
“The original slogan was always to have a web that was easy to write as it was to read,” said Robert Cailliau of the World Wide Web Consortium.
“We went through a sort of dark ages where the ideas survived, but the technology needed to catch up, so where we are now is indeed the point at which the people take control of the web, make their input, which is what we originally wanted.
“Our idea was for a web that was as easy to write as to read.”
The article then continues on how the concept of user-generated content is also having an impact outside the internet, and particularly on architecture, with some designers now “putting the people in charge of changing the look of buildings”, with the “internet of things” becoming “the real departure from the original vision of the web’s founders.”
Examples of this approach featured in the article are:
- the SMS-enabled buildings in Berlin and Paris by the German Chaos Computer Club
- the interactive Swiss House in Boston, designed by Jeffrey Huang, director of the Media and Design Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (who is also working on the architecture of banking)
- a building designed by Carlo Ratti Associates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the International Exposition in Zaragoza, Spain.
