As the World Wide Web celebrates its 10th birthday (more or less) some interesting new developments are emerging. Some say the new generation of Web-delivered services are as much a quantum leap forward as the original WWW was. Some are calling it Web 2.o. Apparently many of us have begun to use the web in whole new ways. Web 1.0 was pretty much the 20th century paradigm on steroids…sure you could get information fast, but it was still served up in largely static, one dimensional “pages” much like the books we’ve depended on for centuries. Even the advent of broadband video and audio only brought us up to speed with radio and television. But Web 2.0 is the idea of the Web expanded into new dimensions.

One of the aspects of the Web 2.0 paradigm already taking off are the services using “tagging” to create new intersections of information, and even new communities. The first of these I became aware of was Audioscrobbler (now lastFM). At lastFM, you build a database of your musical taste simply by playing your music on your computer. Your most-played songs and groups become “tags” that lastFM matches up with other users with similar tastes. The result is that you get playlists of songs and groups that intersect with your lists, suggesting to you new music that you might like but never would’ve known about otherwise. Flick’r does a similar thing with your image collection. In this case, you manually add tags (keywords) to your photos which Flick’r uses to link you up with images from other users.

Even the online program I’ve started using to catalog my library (LibraryThing) does this. First of all, it automatically retrieves all the bibliographical information for my books just from the titles or ISBN’s I enter by intersecting with the Library of Congress online database (with Amazon as a backup). Next, it allows me to get beyond the linear traditional library catalog subjects by applying my own set of keyword tags to each book. Here’s an example of the usefulness of this method. Take the book A Rabbi Talks with Jesus by Jacob Neusner. The LoC catalogues this book as “Jesus Christ — Jewish interpretations” which is accurate as far as it goes. In my LibraryThing catalog I added the tags “judaism, new testament, nti class, jesus, gospels, matthew” — all the things about the book that interest me. The “nti class” tag allows me to mark a group of books as ones that I read for a particular seminary class. The final step you will have guessed by now. If I choose to make my catalog public, LibraryThing compares my “cloud” of tags to those of other users, giving me access to lists of books from other people whose cloud of interests intersects with mine.

Another example of Web 2.0 thinking is the increasing number of tools being created by people merging one source of data with another. This has accelerated with the decision of major Internet data points, such as Google and Amazon, to open source their data and software. A great (and useful!) example of such a tool is Cheap Gas, which connects a constantly updated database of gas station prices with Google maps. The hybrid result is a map of your area showing all the gas stations and their prices. Click on one in the list with a price you like, and you’ve got it pinpointed on the map. Sweet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 at 7:56 pm and is filed under Pop Culture, Randomness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.