Practice In Context

This information about Web 2.0 is extracted and summarised from Bryan Alexander’s article about Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning?

According to Alexander (April 2006), the label itself is far less important than the concepts, projects and practices. To understand how my research topic, which is Flickr works, I have to identify the concepts behind Flickr which is a part of Web 2.0.

Concepts

• Social software – networked program with extensive hyperlinking attached to the contents within them not just to the pages.
• Microcontent – are smaller contents/ components within the pages (banners ad, e-mail messages, usenet-hosted images collaborated to aggregate content created by different teams over a staggered timeline and open to the world. According to Arnaud Lee, it’s characteristics including variable licences, feeds, Web APIs, and single identity. These content blocks can be saved, summarized, addressed, copied, quoted, and built into new projects.
• Openness – Flow of microcontent between domains, servers and machines depends on two-way access. In Web 2.0, users play a foundational roles in information architecture. As services responds deeply to users, it leads to a new form called metadate, the folksonomy where the consists of words that users generate and attach to contents instead of hierarchical structured and predetermined by content authorities. Using tags that rapidly enough to make information professionals take notice by arranging it to concept maps called the tag clouds.

Implementations of this set of concepts of making, sharing and consuming digital documents are not uniform.

Projects and Practices

The important element in Web 2.0 is social bookmarking. Bookmarking itself is not new but what the word “social” here conveys the plurality. One example of a very elegant storage service of social bookmarking is del.icio.us created by Joshua Schacter. This service stores, describes and shares bookmarks. It shares by using ‘tag’ which is connected to other bookmarks all over the world with the same ‘tag’.