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Aurilla Aurelie Bechina and Eli Hustad
Willams, 2006). The second generation of the web corresponds more to the original objective and
vision of the Internet which did not originally differentiate between the users and creators of
information since the same software was to be used to browse the web and to create new web-pages
(Berners-Lee, 2000). Nor did he distinguish between internal business resources and the external
web, while companies did develop and still have closed intranets.
Web 2.0 is a platform for interacting with content. Information is broken up into “micro-content” units
that may be distributed across the Web. A new set of tools such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication)
provide mechanisms that creates a "feed" of updates from specified news sites, blogs and so forth.
RSS contributes to publishing, aggregating and combining micro-content in new and useful ways.
The collective intelligence of users encourages more democratic use and participation (Boulos &
Wheeler, 2007). Initially, the primarily goal of the World Wide Web (WWW) was to foster a better
collaboration among the scientific communities by sharing ideas and knowledge. However, it is only
with the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies that we start to recognize its impacts on leveraging
knowledge exchanged and enhancing business processes in organizations.
Web 2.0, could be seen as the emergence of mass collaboration (Tapscott & Willams, 2006), in
which several users participate actively and thereby create mutual benefits in terms of increasing
returns (Shapiro & Varian, 1999). Web 2.0 relies on network effects that cause increasing returns as a
consequence of mass collaboration (Tapscott & Willams, 2006). It follows that data directories and
web-sites get richer the more people interact with them. The foundation for mass collaboration is the
overlapping structure of social networks that constitutes the overall Internet representing an
information infrastructure of web-based communities, technologies and hosted services.
Through social networking sites, Wikis and Folksonomies the second generation of the web aims to
facilitate collaboration and sharing of knowledge and best practices between users, and the web is
becoming a platform for user-created content.
Thus, Web 2.0 as such represents a renaissance of the original idea – which needed to mature
gradually for being implemented in practice in order to foster collaboration amongst the users.
Social software applications and tools are perceived as the outcome of the popularity and the rapid
development of Web 2.0 concepts. The next part reviews the different Web 2.0 technologies.
2.1 Web 2.0 technologies
Although the term Web 2.0 implicitly symbolizes an upgrade to a new version of the World Wide Web,
it does not refer to an update of technical specifications or new releases of software, but rather “the
2.0” intends to illustrate the changes in the ways software developers and end-users are using the
web.
Typical technologies that support user-created content are: wiki’s, like Wikipedia; blogging, such as
Blogger; social networking such as Facebook; and social bookmarking, such as Del.Icio.Us.
Wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for fast. Wiki is a collaborative mechanism that allows people to
contribute or modify content using a simplified markup language. Wiki is usually used to support the
community building website. Wikipedia, an open content encyclopedia, is considered as one of the
most popular examples of a wikis. Wikis allow users to enter, aggregate, and annotate content. The
underlying concept lies on the collective wisdom to produce an organized, thorough, and searchable
database in various domains such as political, humanitarian, education, history, and so forth.
Although, security issues in organizational use of wikis Security have been tackled by putting in place
some mechanisms to restrict viewing or editing content; there are still some concerns to limit the
access as it against the concept of freely contribution. In addition, the quality of the content can be
questionable if the self-organizing editing and vetting is not adequate.
Blogs are the most personal and controversial of the Web 2.0 applications and more especially in
business contexts. Web sites can be created spontaneously and maintained by individuals making it
possible to maintain an online journal on which others can comment for private use or business
purpose. Hence, activities discussions can emerge from dynamic use of the Blogging feature. The
biggest advantage resides in the possibility for participants to interact with others. For example, HP is
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