Exploring the hills and valleys of Web 2.0

Paul Anderson’s excellent review of Web 2.0: ‘Web 2.0: Ideas, technologies and implications for education’ investigates the substance behind the hype and sets out six big ideas that lie behind Web 2.0, essentially signalling a change in the way people interact. The Web, according to Tim Berners-Lee, was always intended to be an interactive space and the original assumption was that everyone would be able to view and edit within this space, and it was intended that people would have the ability to edit through the Web. However, this feature was omitted during Web browser developments. Therefore, it could be said that Web 2.0 is really a manifestation of what the Web was always intended to be about and simply builds upon the technologies of ‘Web 1.0’. Many of us associate the term Web 2.0 with types of services, and Anderson gives a summary of many of these: blogs, wikis, tagging and social bookmarking, multimedia sharing, rss and syndication. He then moves on to look at the big ideas behind Web 2.0. The first of these is user generated content. One example of this is the way that the media are now using viewer’s clips and images of news events. Another interesting initiative was the BBC Creative Archive pilot which made content available for download to enable people to share, watch, listen and re-use this content under the terms and conditions set out in the Creative Archive Licence. This all seems to herald a shift from the idea of an information provider and receiver to more of a ‘conversation’ approach. But there do appear to be dangers inherent in moving away from a structured and authoritative approach to one that embraces the idea of a ‘collective intelligence’. One issue with this is that it appears to equate intelligence with information rather than thinking about intelligence as intellectual ability. In addition, the will to participate does appear to be a fickle thing. Anderson points out that of the 13 million blogs in Blogger, a major blog provider, 10 million are considered to be inactive. However, it does seem clear that there advantages to be gained by following the principle of acting independently but collectively, as a crowd. A service such as Wikipedia demonstrates very effectively the advantages of this approach. Whilst expanding on the implications of ‘the power of the crowd’, Anderson clarifies the definition of the term folksonomy, emphasising that it was originally defined as personal free tagging – it is not collaborative and it is not a form of categorisation. This may give some comfort to archivists who shudder at the idea of collaborative categorisation! Obviously value can be created by aggregating the results of folksonomy production, but in essence people are simply tagging information for their own retrieval. Anderson points to a comparison of these links to sheep paths, paths that have formed over time as many animals and people have just happened to use them. It may be that the value of folksonomies comes from combining these socially created tags with existing formal ontologies – the best of both worlds perhaps? Or there is the possibility of developing a ‘collabulary’, where domain users and experts work together on a shared vocabulary. Anderson goes on to look at Web 2.0 within the academic environment and does make the point that we tend to assume that students are wedded to MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc. etc. but in fact it may be that many learners are not interested in accessing, manipulating and broadcasting material in this way. We need more understanding of the ways that students learn and the social dimensions of social software. As far as the archive community is concerned, we may well wonder whether these new technologies (services) will allow archives to serve their users in better ways. It does seem that we have an opportunity to increase user participation and creativity and bring in new audiences. But do users want a ‘you looked at this archive, you might also be interested in that one’ kind of service? Whilst such services might work well on sites such as Amazon, we need to think carefully about what is appropriate within an archives environment. One thought that came to me whilst reading the report concerns the concept of the long tail. This supports the notion that everything, no matter how seemingly niche or specialised, is going to be of interest to some people somewhere in the world, and the Web breaks down the old barriers to access for this type of information. This should be of benefit to archivists in so far as archival material that may seem to have a very specialised audience, and therefore may in the past have barely been used, should now reach that audience…as long as we catalogue effectively and make decriptions available online. Of course, there is also the whole challenge of collecting and preserving the Web. The Internet Archive and UK Web Archive have made major strides in this arena. But Anderson points out the problems of the transient nature of the Web and the problems raised by the many complexities of Web technologies. He discusses the characteristics of Web 2.0 content and the implications for preservation and archiving in the context of the main underlying principles of Web 2.0. Certainly one of the conclusions must be that traditional collection and archiving methods are not suitable for the Web, and that we need to think about how to rise to this challenge. We also need to re-think our definition of archives. Anderson writes: “A developing trend will be the growth of people’s personal catalogues-digital collections of music, photographs, videos, list of books, places visited, etc….These collections will become extremely important to people, developing into a form of personal archive of a lifetime.” One thing is for sure, we will need to be willing to learn more about Web 2.0 services, about the ideas behind them and about how people are using them in order that we can have an informed discussion on the merits and pitfalls of these developments and in order that we can take best advantage of them to improve our services and increase levels of access and awareness. Image of the Lake District (which i put there just because it looks nice and because it represents the slightly murky but nevertheless interesting future of technologies.)