What is the Web 2.0 Anyway? And Who Cares?

December 26, 2006      Admin

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

For those of you for whom sorting your email is a major tech challenge, all the buzz over “Web 2.0” must be a real mystery. For most pundits, the concept revolves around “user-generated content” posted out there on the web for all to see.

Of course, an email is user-generated content; the difference is that the originator of the email controls its distribution or exposure … that is, til a recipient forwards it along! Isn't sending an email to 10 friends about your trip to Nassau, or lamenting the latest Congressional sex scandal, to be considered “social networking” (a term often joined at the hip to Web 2.0)?

So, we're back to where we started. What is this Web 2.0 stuff? And why might it be important to nonprofit fundraisers and communicators?

Here's the best conceptual discussion of Web 2.0 I've seen, courtesy of the folks at Pew Research Center. It includes some very interesting comparative examples of “then” and “now” — Encarta vs. Wikipedia, GeoCities vs. MySpace, Photobucket vs. KodakGallery.

And why is this 2.0 stuff important to the nonprofit world?

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