Social Web
In latest years, the number of Social Web Sites has increased very quickly; these webs allow the knowledge to be generated just by using the contributions of the users via blogs, wikis, forums, online social networks, and so forth (Kinsella et al., 2009). The Web 2.0 phenomenon made the Web social, initiating an explosion in the number of users of the Web, thus empowering them with a huge autonomy in adding content to web pages, labeling the content, creating folksonomies of tags, and finally, leading to millions of users constructing their own web pages (Breslin & Decker, 2007). Therefore the user participation is the key and the main value of the Social Web. This participation concludes in a “collective intelligence” or “wisdom of crowds” where the opinion taking into account is the one expressed by a group of individuals rather than single or expert opinions answering a question.
The concept of collective intelligence, or “wisdom of the crowds” (Surowiecki, 2004), stands that when working cooperatively and sharing ideas, communities can be significantly more productive than individuals working in isolation. Moreover, the ability of multitudes to generate accurate information from diverse data sets has been well documented elsewhere and is not unique to Web 2.0 (Surowiecki, 2004). That’s why social web has demonstrated its success with efforts like the Wikipedia, in which the “wisdom of the crowds” is creating and maintaining world’s largest online encyclopedia.
The Social Web can be used by anybody with internet connection, but for the Social Web to work properly, the web developers have to provide websites with the capability of being social. This is becoming easier because the costs of gathering and computing the user’s contributions have decreased and today, even the companies with very modest budgets can offer to the users social websites (Gruber, 2007).
With the purpose of summarize, the evolution of the web has brought about the Social Web which is based on dynamic public content that is changing depending on the people’s input. The communication inside this web is not just between the machine and the person, but between all the people that is using the web application (Porter, 2008). And it is very important to remark how important has been the mind change into the users, that used to enter into the Internet just to read the webs and at the present time they are involved in the web creation process converting the web in a Social Web.