Introduction
In the last two years the innovation made possible by pioneers of the internet in the early to late 1990s has begun to mature and evolve. Because of easier access to broadband networks, some people and systems have started to focus on, coalesce around and
- most importantly - build exciting digital technologies and services never available before. From these new, social ways ๙ working, practices are emerging that have cultural, philosophical and educational repercussions.
There is growing opportunity for frequent and more reliable connectivity; all over the world specialist social networks and collaborative working groups are forming. All are driven by, and have in common, the fan that they are making intensive use of a collection of emerging technologies to communicate and evolve communities of ideas in virtual spaces that are helping to radically change working practices.
In many parts of the world this activity has been a' ground-up'phenomenon and has been recognised and driven by the commercial and open source software communities. Both of these sectors have evolved new technical infrastructures and what appears to be happening is that people are building these systems almost on the fly. The speed of development is getting faster
- with monthly, weekly or even hourly rapid prototyping taking place. Blogs, wikis, moblogs, vlogs, folksonomies and podcasting are all recent examples of these new ways of communicating that are built on and exploiting these systems. They are all part of what has become known as Web 2.0.
Web 2.0
About a year ago, two key observers of this phenomenon described aspects of Web 2.0. Chris Anderson10 published an article in Wired Magazine outlining the Long Tail of business. This referred to the fact that online companies were now capable of using the web to sell a vast range of products from 'mainstream' popular items right down to the singularity of one unique unit. This has led to greater productivity and sales - for example towards the end of 2005 the iTunes online music store sold more music in the us than some of that country's biggest traditional retailers.