The concept of Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 was introduced by O’Reilly. He has since produced a report on the differences, which I have just read and found very interesting in his thoughts and differences between the two. Below is my interpretation, and views on Web1.0 and Web2.0.
When the world wide web was introduced, it was very much considered as a read-only source as it allowed users to search for information and read upon it. As society and culture developed users wanted to be involved in what information is available, and voice their opinions and views on things. Hence Web 2.0 was born, as before Web 1.0 was considered to be as a read only source Web 2.0 is considered to be read and write. A good comparison is to compare Britannica Online to Wikipedia , Britannica is very much Web1.0 as you can search and read a specific article which has been written by paid professionals. Whilst on the other hand Wikipedia lets users add their own content to the website, the entries are firstly checked by Wikipedia to make sure they contain relevant content once passed this check its published. This saves a lot of money for the business as they are not employing professionals to write articles as the general public are full filing this necessity. It also gives the user a sense of achievment as they have had an involvment in helping others. According to O’Reilly Wikipedia is now in the top 100 websites, and in the future expects it to be in top 10, this shows this is what people want, which was the reason for the movement to Web 2.0 technology.
The development of Web 2.0 has also brought some disadvantages to the market, as P2P technology became available. P2P stands for peer to peer, which is a method used for file sharing over a network, in this case the network is the Internet. As p2p grew a new piece of technology was introduced known as torrents. A big pioneer in the P2P technology was BitTorrent, O’Reilly explains very well the concept of torrents “files are broken up into fragments that can be served from multiple locations, transparently harnessing the network of downloaders to provide both bandwidth and data to other users. The more popular the file, in fact, the faster it can be served, as there are more users providing bandwidth and fragments of the complete file“. Because of this service some people abuse it, and allow people to download music and other illegal content which is a crime. Because of this there is one huge problem in the music Industry today which is sales on music is down, due to this.
