Anne Truitt Zelenka

Dion Hinchcliffe’s Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005 list provides a great intro to the Web 2.0 concept. As a fashionably late arrival to the Web 2.0 party, I understand the landscape in general; Hinchcliffe’s list and the others that will surely follow give me the particulars.

I was disappointed that newsreader apps don’t make it onto his list—too 1.0 perhaps? I was hoping for a recommendation since Bloglines has failed me. The nearest thing on Hinchcliffe’s list might be the Web 2.0 Start Page—”Ajax start pages that allow your favorite content to be displayed, rearranged, and viewed dynamically whenever you want.” But My Yahoo! or something similar couldn’t come near to substituting for the Bloglines categorizing, clipping, and blogrolling capabilities.

It makes me wonder: just what is Web 2.0? I went to Wikipedia’s definition, the obvious first step, and here’s the features it notes:

• a transition of websites from isolated information silos to sources of content and functionality, thus becoming a computing platform serving web applications to end users
• a social phenomenon referring to an approach to creating and distributing Web content itself, characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation”
• a more organized and categorized content, with a more developed deeplinking web architecture.
• a shift in economic value of the web, potentially equalling that of the dot com boom of the late 1990s.

To me, newsreaders represent a very important manifestation of these characteristics.

UPDATE 9:50 am: Here’s a useful intro to Web 2.0 with lots of links to other posts (via Read/WriteWeb).