Talking Web 2.0

Along with Carl from e2-media I gave a talk on Web 2.0 tonight, to 20 or so folks from the Canterbury Software Cluster. Just 20 minutes each, and it was frightening how fast those minutes wizzed by.

I was particularly pleased that a few folks there told me that they’d been been using Interclue and enjoying it. Thanks very much to Dave Tinkler of Holliday Corporation for inviting me to speak and helping to steer me in the right direction as I began to run out of time!

It was good to have an excuse to talk about the 2.0 Big Picture for once. Normally I lose people in the first few sentences…for a more gentle introduction, I’ve got some great videos on my 2.0 page linked in my menu above.

Of course lots of folks wanted to know what I thought Web 2.0 really is, and I put forward my opinion that “Web 2.0 is what Tim O’Reilly says it is“. I’m at least half serious about that. Tim and his company have been the thought leaders of this revolution, almost as much as they’ve just been “Watching the alphageeks” as Tim calls it. Of course they wanted specifics, so I gave them Tim’s compact definition, which is:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

If I’d tried to give them the long version I would have been there all night…

Of course, I live in a slightly different universe to most folks, so I was somewhat thrown by the followup question “So, who is Tim O’Reilly anyway?”. This is why I love the web. We can explain these things with hyperlinks, and not slow down the information flow for the people who already know. Interclue makes it even better because you can view the main body content at the end of the hyperlinks in the context of the current page, without all the cruft around the outside of the page that could distract you off into the distance.

I wasn’t quite sure which bits of 2.0 the audience was going to be interested in, but I had faith in my ability to wing it, so I prepared a little mindmap of the various things 2.0ish that have caught my attention over the past couple of years (distracting me and slowing down the progress of Interclue quite considerably as a result). Unfortunately it’s a bit large. Click the image for a version large enough to actually read!

Also please note that this certainly isn’t a map of all things 2.0 – just the people, projects, platforms and protocols that I think I know a little bit about. And it’s not a complete map of those either.

I wish I’d had time to highlight the bits I find particularly interesting/important, hyperlink relevant articles, and add some more detail, but I’ll regard this as a starting point and post an update later. If anyone sees something they want to have a chat about, feel free to get in touch, or just leave a comment about something they’d like me to blog about in the future.