Defining or labeling the new Internet is often met with a considerable amount of critique due to the expansive reach of such a description. There are so many different things that have changed about the Internet in the past several years; a concise definition is difficult to come by. In addition, the term Web 2.0, while perhaps the most accurate term, is typically scoffed at by the skeptical industry veteran who is wary of a vendor or brass employee attempting to sound Internet savvy. The World Wide Web has existed for almost twenty years. What is so significant about the changes in the last few years that distinguish the current Web to be an upgrade from its previous omnipotent self? The simple answer to this question is you. Web 2.0 represents the user’s needs, hopes, and desires finally manifesting into a definable force of “voluntary motivation.” The blogosphere, social networks, wikis, and other new forms of expression on the Internet have captured the Web population by harnessing their goals, skills, and interests on to a platform of collaborative creation and production. Websites are reflecting an up to the minute common voice, rather than a collection of static informational documents. The Web has never before experienced this level of effective interaction between its users, and for that reason alone its 2.0 upgrade is warranted.
Ease of self-expression, now apparent on the Internet through the popularity of such websites as MySpace and YouTube, is generating massive amounts of original content. Critics of this tremendous increase in creativity and public opinion complain about the dilution of reliable quality content on the Internet. Many social networks, however, naturally weed out undesirable content, and promote popular, well referenced content to the top of searches. In Web 2.0, popular content emerges at the top of searches via a user-generated ranking system that determines the positioning of articles by the number of user votes it receives. This model was made most popular by Digg.com, which joins several other community-based popularity websites, such as Slashdot.com and Reddit.com, in providing a user edited resource for finding news stories, blog entries, and other websites. In Web 2.0, up to date reliable content is produced by the editing abilities of the wiki. Wikipedia, the Internet’s user written and edited encyclopedia, boasts an accuracy level not far from the widely accepted Encyclopedia Britannica. In a study that compared forty-two science entries in both resources, Wikipedia had only four inaccuracies per entry compared to Britannica’s three.
Social network websites in the new Internet also have a way of allowing like-minded people to find each other’s favorite content through a system called social bookmarking. Del.icio.us.com is the most popular example of a social bookmarking website. This system of classification, known as folksonomy, involves users assigning labels, or tags, in the form of keywords, to content on the web. Through this collaborative form of tagging, web content becomes grouped by recognizable categories. Continuous tagging and creation of categories by users increases the content’s ability to be searched by a wider range of people. This social phenomenon happens “because stable patterns emerge in tag proportions [allowing] minority opinions [to] coexist alongside extremely popular ones without disrupting the nearly stable consensus choices made by many users.” Such websites are considered “social” because of the nature in which users’ bookmarks’ are publicly shared for other users to browse and discover what people find interesting.