Web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0 technologies

Web 2.0 networking sites image from; http://phun-ky.net/img/blog/img8d06a1a05b394f8e2ad5e323f23f5c6c.jpg

I was going through my friend, Ed’son de Pary’s Masters degree research paper; “Enhancing an Organizations’ Knowledge Management System using Web 2.0 Technologies”, when Icame across very good definitions of web 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. I have always had a difficult time trying give an explanation when asked. Ed’son, don’t worry, I have credited you!

Web 2.0 technologies are user-centred form of information management and retrieval using collaborative creation and tagging of digital knowledge repositories to effectively enhance KM. Web 2.0 has the potential to advance online learning, knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer beyond traditional methods of knowledge delivery.

Web 2.0 comes along with a set of technologies with collaborative and user centred characteristics. By stimulating imperatives for unlocking participation, Web 2.0 enables the transformation to a bottom-up culture that needs help from the top, by empowering the workers from down above, collective intelligence harnessing is stimulated. Because of its novelty, Web 2.0 contrary to other conventional technologies is often separated from mainstream work ways. Participatory technologies like that of Web 2.0 have the highest chance of success when incorporated into the user’s daily workflow.

The transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 was a tremendous flip from one-way information exchange to two-way read-write functionality. Read-only content and static pages characterized web 1.0. Web 2.0 brought changes to this by making those pages dynamic, rich, and interactive with the advent of tools such as AJAX.

Web 3.0 seems to be able to offer that possibility, although Web 3.0 is based on semantic web and is a conceptual technology. In the semantic web, all content, whether it’s text, images, video or other forms of content will have descriptors that bring meaning, context and relevance to it. Smart search engines will infer what users are looking for and will thoroughly explore the Internet to find only relevant information to the user’s query. However, Web 3.0 is till many years away from its maturation, although organizations already can Figure how it might play out in enterprise. A future research could be to find out in what way, and what role Web 3.0 would play in organizations, and what would be its benefits for organizations. Does the advent of Web 3.0 means we will as well take the step to Enterprise 3.0 in order to synchronize the technology in the rest of the enterprise as Nicholas Carr (2006) argues? Would it as Markoff argued "provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion ... In its current state, the Web is often described as being in the Lego phase, with all of its different parts capable of connecting to one another. Those who envision the next phase, Web 3.0, see it as an era when machines will start to do seemingly intelligent things"(Markoff, 2006).

Web 2.0 is not based on a technology shift, but rather a usage paradigm shift, thanks to the simplicity of use. It’s surrounded by social media, which is centred on interactions of people, not the interaction of computers.