A furly one

Web 2.0 is all about giving the user the ability to contribute to an online community.

Some web 2.0 indicative sites are:

1. furl
2. delicious
3. design float
4. Wikipedia
5. Flickr
6. StumbleUpon
   
7. blogging
8. and more..........
   

Social bookmarking, "Folksonomy" (O'Reilly, 2005)
The idea of this new way to search the web is for people to tag sites that will allow the site to be more easily found via a popularity link. This in effect "harnesses collective intelligence" (Ibid) by "a style of collaborative categorization of sites using freely chosen keyword" (Ibid) which acts "as a kind of filter" to produce better search results through "the wisdom of crowds"(Ibid).

Putting it into practical use—I work in the design industry for print, when I search for new ideas I like to see other designers work for inspiration. One way to find these sites would be to do a Google search which would return over 300 million results when searching for common words or phrases.
A better way for me to search is to use a service like design float or delicious which other users have already tagged content to a common theme and then use these tags such as 'graphic design' to quickly navigate to view these sites and see any current design trends.

The gain in efficiency by using the collective conscious far out ways the effectiveness of the Google search.




Problems with users content
User contribution can be a bit dodgy sometimes if people feel inclined to mislead or if they think they're hero's on a subject and boast about their knowledge without substantial proof. These people just end up being villains that should leave well enough alone.

(Folksonomy, 2009)


Yes I like web 2.0, but use it with caution!


Reference:
O'Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html?page=1

Folksonomy [image] (2009). Retrieved April 7, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy