A really thoughtful look at the evolution of information

YouTube - Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

I've talked about Web 2.0 before, but not like this.  This video will get you to look at management of information in a new way.  Seriously.

My basic definition of Web 2.0 is user-generated content.  Imagine a web site where a company posts a bunch of pretty pictures and lets people look at them.  That's Web 1.0.  Now, imagine that the company doesn't upload a single photograph.  Instead, it allows users to upload their own photographs.  That's Flickr, and it's Web 2.0.

But this YouTube video points out that Web 2.0 is about a lot more than that.  This new way of using the web is really a revolution in the way we approach information.

"Oh come on.  'Revolution' is such an over-used word, it doesn't mean anything any more."  Maybe, but this is a revolution in the true meaning of the word.  Because Flickr (for example) is more than just a collection of people uploading their own photos.  The photos are also "tagged" with keywords.  If you're looking at an individual picture, you can click on the keyword and it will show you other pictures with the same keyword.  It will sort the pictures based on which pictures other people found interesting.  It will create a "pool" where you can view all the pictures in a single category, regardless of who created them.  Or you can view a map and see where each of these pictures were taken, and zoom in on a specific region or country if you want.

All of a sudden, information is plastic.  You can take the same information and view it in different ways, depending on your context.  A single web site can be seen like a traditional book; it is literally a collection of "pages."  But Web 2.0 shatters this conception; individual paragraphs from the book can be extracted and combined with paragraphs from other books, providing you with a new collection of information.  It's a giant, organic network that is constantly changing and evolving, based on the information that is put into it.

But I can't put it as well as the video can.  Just watch for yourself.