A month ago, I came up with my definition of what I think Web 2.0 is: according to me, the Web 2.0 is what the Internet is right now. But I hadn’t (on purpose) looked at the Web 2.0 from a more technical viewpoint.

In the following video, a very popular one at the moment on the Internet, the Web 2.0 is defined as such: in the early beginnings of the Internet, content and format used to have strong ties as both were embedded together between static HTML tags.

Slowly, some new elements appeared (namely XML tags) allowing to manipulate data independently from format. Indeed, content could be parsed (the technical way of exporting) onto any web page using its own layout. XML hence facilitates automatic data exchange and hence collaboration between different interfaces. Web services like mash-ups were born. However, the Internet still had to be organized, and alongside with Google appeared content storage and sharing websites such as YouTube and Flickr.

One way to organize information (until video and picture search technologies mature) is to tag information. Everytime one adds a tag to an object, or a hypertext link on an expression, the web, a huge network of machines put up by humans, is being taught something (theory retrieved from this eye opening article published on Wired in August 2005: “We are the Web” – highly recommended).

Machines learning means a new paradigm is to emerge – which will help redefine a few things such as privacy, ethics, aesthetics, love, intellectual property, commerce. In the end, the author of the theory, a research assistant from Kansas State University named Michael Wesch (by the way, good job with the video Michael, it’s brillant), advocates that Web 2.0 is linking people trading, sharing, collaborating. And to make the connection with my own definition, this is what the Internet is about today.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE]

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