TopIntroduction: Concepts, Services, And Applications Of 2.0
A new wave of so-called 2.0 has arisen over the past decade. The new idea of 2.0 has been evolved during a series of O’Reilly meetings and conferences, and, as a result, Web 2.0, a new version of the Web has been formed (O’Reilly, 2005). Timothy O’Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, emphasized at the Web 2.0 Summit that: “Web 2.0 is all about harnessing collective intelligence.” (O’Reilly & Battelle, 2009). Tim O'Reilly (2006) explained his reasoning in his commencement speech at UC Berkeley:
A true Web 2.0 application is one that gets better the more people use it. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a link on the web. Google gets smarter every time someone makes a search. It gets smarter every time someone clicks on an ad. And it immediately acts on that information to improve the experience for everyone else. It's for this reason that I argue that the real heart of Web 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence.
Since the introduction of Web 2.0, numerous attempts have been made to adopt the 2.0 as a new paradigm or approach, and applied it to resolve the issues and problems in various disciplines and fields: Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006), E-business 2.0 (Kalakota & Robinson, 2001), E-Government 2.0 (Nam, 2012), health/medicine/healthcare 2.0 (Hughes, Joshi, & Wareham, 2008), e-learning 2.0 (Ebner, 2007), Library 2.0 (Casey & Savastinuk, 2007), to name only a few.
The Web has been perceived as a collection of information, but in the 2.0, the Web is served as a platform supporting applications and services that run on the Web (O’Reilly, 2005). Web 2.0 goes beyond the emergence of new technologies and services. It is often recognized as a revolution or new paradigm in information production process (Bernal, 2009; Bleicher, 2006; Ebner, Holzinger, & Maurer, 2007; Lin, 2007), as in that the boundaries between traditional information providers and consumers become blurred as information consumers (i.e., information users) more actively participate in the process of creating, providing, and sharing new information through tagging, reviewing, etc. in Web 2.0 applications. There is no clear distinction between the two parties, information providers and consumers under the new paradigm of 2.0.