today mostly refers to a binary code when using this term. More complex ma-chines later also allowed to automatically manipulate information. But the last technological quantum leap in the way one can work with information was the ability to represent, transport and manipulate complex information based on a list of instructions using electricity. This kind of machines is usually referred to as computers [Wik08b]. Table 3.2 gives an overview of the according develop-ments.
Where the distribution and manipulation of information was almost always time-consuming and involved a loss of quality (especially concerning complex information), information represented digitally can be manipulated and dis-tributed very fast and almost without any loss of quality using today’s com-puters.
3.2 The World Wide Web
In the same way that an infrastructure exists for transmitting radio or TV sig-nals, one today uses the Internet and especially the World Wide Web as means of accessing and providing arbitrary digital information. Visions of a networked knowledge-base existed long before the World Wide Web: Amongst others, in-tellectual fathers of the World Wide Web are Paul Otlet as the inventor of the
“Mundaneum” [Ray94], Vannevar Bush with his famous article “As we may think” [Bus45] and Douglas Engelbart [Eng62], who later invented “hypertext”
together with Ted Nelson.
The starting point of the World Wide Web that was introduced by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 was laid in the 1960s, when first computer networks such as the ARPANET were developed for research and military. Table 3.3 gives an overview of some of the most important steps towards what is today called the Internet and the World Wide Web.
Date Event
1958 Researchers at the Bell Labs invent the modem as a means of enabling the communication between computers [MPS99].
1965 The terms hypertext and hyperlink are first coined by Ted Nel-son.
1969 Creation of the ARPANET, initiated by the Advanced Research Projects Agency that sponsored research institutes to save or extend the US’ technologically dominating position.
The intention is to securing fail-safe communication.
Date Event
1973 First international connections to the ARPANET 1979 Start of the bulletin-board system USENET
1982 Invention of the TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol / In-ternet Protocol) transfer protocol (sometimes referred to as the Internet’s hour of birth in a technical sense)
1983 All ARPANET hosts switch from NCP (Network Control Pro-tocol) to TCP/IP.
1984 Creation of the Global Domain Name System (DNS) to connect Internet addresses via nodes in a network
1989-1992 Creation and release of the World Wide Web (WWW) by Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organisation for Nuclear Re-search (CERN) (March 13, 1989 is considered as the birthday of the World Wide Web.)
1993 Release of the Mosaic Browser
1995 15 million people with Internet access.
March 2008 1.4 billion (21 per cent of the world population) with Internet access1
Table 3.3:The development towards the World Wide Web
With the World Wide Web, an infrastructure existed that allowed potentially anyone to connect to it, and to freely access and publish information for a world-wide audience – with the benefits of digital representations as presented in the previous section. This switch from broadcast media to networked media funda-mentally changed the structure in which information flows.
But although the infrastructure and technology existed, it took several years until the World Wide Web was not only used as a means to mainly consume information passively, and where end users created content (e.g., an html page) only in exceptional cases. The term Web 2.0 originated in the attempt to describe the change from a mostly passive medium with a focus on textual resources to a multimedia platform with lots of participation possibilities.
1See http://www.internetworldstats.com
3.3 Web 2.0
3.3 Web 2.0
Along with the prevalence of high-speed Internet connections, the dropping of The World
Wide Web
costs for being online, and the development of advanced web based applica-tions that can easily be used by almost anyone, the World Wide Web has been – and still is – changing from a place where information was usually only con-sumed by most of the users to a more social and participatory system. As many studies show (see Section 3.4.4), more and more users contribute information in the World Wide Web (so called user generated content), using tools like blogs, wikis, social bookmarking services or file sharing platforms such as Flickr2 and
YouTube3. In addition to these rather object-centric networks, people-centric
Object-centric networks and
user-centric networks
networks (also often referred to as social networks) such as Twitter4 and Face-book5 became more and more popular in the last years. Usually, this group of technologies, platforms and tools facilitating “a more socially connected web where everyone is able to add and edit the information space” [And07], and where sharing of resources through an individual’s social network is eased, is denoted as Web 2.06. In [O’R05a], Tim O’Reilly gives the following definition of the term Web 2.0:
“Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices;
Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advan-tages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated ser-vice that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an ‘architecture of participation,’ and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.”
According to O’Reilly, there are seven principles which characterise Web 2.0 Seven
principles of Web 2.0 applications
applications [O’R05b].
The Web As Platform: Web 2.0 applications are hosted on the World Wide Web and accessed entirely via a browser. Thus, not only platform independence can be ensured, but the applications can also be permanently improved
2Flickr is resource sharing platform focusing on photos, see http://www.flickr.com.
3YouTube is a video sharing platform, see http://www.youtube.com.
4See http://www.twitter.com
5See http://www.facebook.com
6The term Web 2.0 was officially coined by Dale Dougherty (a vice president of O’Reilly Media Inc.) in 2004 during a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International [O’R05b].
(“perpetual beta”) without requiring the user to install updates or new versions of a software.
Harnessing Collective Intelligence: The power of the World Wide Web and the existence of various participation possibilities such as rating, tagging, writing reviews etc. allow to harness Collective Intelligence (this concept will be introduced in detail in Section 3.6.3). According to O’Reilly, “Net-work effects from user contributions are the key to market dominance in the Web 2.0 era” [O’R05b].
Data is the Next Intel Inside: Specialised databases are a key aspect in most of the significant Web 2.0 tools. For example, the success of applications such as Amazon7or Google Maps8can to a large extent be attributed to the large amounts of data that were created and made available.
End of the Software Release Cycle: Software in a Web 2.0 context is deliv-ered as a service and not as a product. Thus, operations must be a core competency and the software has to be maintained on a daily basis (oth-erwise it will cease to perform), and it is important to treat users as co-developers.
Lightweight Programming Models: Lightweight Programming Models, espe-cially in the area of Web Services, enable to easily syndicate and inte-grate data and functionalities from different applications (often referred to as “mashups”), while still allowing to only loosely couple the involved components. A well-known example is the Representational State Trans-fer (REST) approach. REST is often contrasted to the “heavyweight” and rather formal techniques of Web Services.
Software Above the Level of Single Devices: By delivering software as a service, Web 2.0 applications are no longer limited to the Desktop PC as a platform. They can be accessed with numerous clients platforms, e.g., portable devices.
Rich User Experiences: By using techniques such as AJAX9, full scale appli-cations can be delivered through the World Wide Web. Due to quick re-sponse times, users can be offered an experience that is similar to what
7See http://www.amazon.com
8See http://maps.google.com
9Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML and is a collection of several technologies.
For further information see:
http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000385.php.
3.4 The Paradigm Shift from Traditional to Social Media
they are used to when interacting with Desktop applications. The rise of Desktop applications ports such as Google Docs10 or Adobe Photoshop Express11provides good examples for this principle.
The changes leading to the creation of the term Web 2.0 can also be illustrated with the comparisons itemised in Table 3.4 [WD06, p.4].
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
Table 3.4:A comparison of characteristics in Web1.0 and Web 2.0