The Hindu Business Line : ‘Web 2.0? What’s that?

Bangalore, Dec. 27 When the first-ever Web Innovation Conference opened in Bangalore recently, the organisers were aware that the subject of the event — Web 2.0 initiatives in India — might create some confusion. What was Web 2.0, a buzz word much bandied about?

Opening speakers were asked to clarify.

For Mr B.V. Naidu, Managing Director of SemIndia, Web 2.0 was ‘opportunity 2.0’ for India — a “booster shot for the networked economy”.

Mr Naresh Gupta, Managing Director, Adobe India, said it was an evolution of the Worldwide Web from its earlier, avatar, to include communities and conversations.

Mr Mohit Hira, Marketing Director for Times Internet, called it “a collaborative two-way street”.

For MindTree Consulting’s Chief Executive, Mr Krishna Kumar Natarajan, Web 2.0, was “four Cs”: Content, commerce, community and context.

MSN India’s Country Manager Mr Jaspreet Bindra saw it as Web’s Second Coming turning the user from a static object to the very subject of Internet.

Frost & Sullivan’s Director ( Consulting) Mr T.R. Madan Mohan homed in on the finances: Web 2.0 was as yet not making much money for any one, he said.

The huge backdrop on the podium, featured dozens of Web 2.0 buzzwords – and for most of the two-day event, delegates were quizzing each other to find out how much they really knew of the jargon generated by the Web’s second innings.

Business Line made a note of the less well-known phrases and acronyms and has trawled the Net to offer this ‘cheat sheet’ of ‘in’ words (in no particular order) to help you dazzle your friends at Web 2.0 discussions in 2008:

Perpetual beta: a software or system which is always in a testing phase.

Mr Tim O’Reilly, the man who coined the term Web 2.0 in 2004, writes: The open source dictum, “release early and release often” in fact has morphed into an even more radical position, “the perpetual beta,” in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slip-streamed in, on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis.

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social tagging): The practice collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorise content.

OpenID: Free and easy way to use a single digital identity across the Internet. It eliminates the need for multiple user names across different web sites, simplifying your online experience… not yet a reality.

R emixability: A process in which the information and media one has organised and shared can be recombined and built on to create new forms, concepts, ideas, mashups and services

Mashup: A web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool

Microformats: A set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats try to solve simpler problems with them.

SEO (Search engine optimisation): The process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines. The earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site.

XFN (XHTML Friends Network): A simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. XFN enables web authors to very simply indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blog rolls.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): A simple mechanism for adding style, like fonts, colours, or spacing to Web documents.

The Long Tail: A term first coined by Mr Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com, which are able to sell a greater volume of otherwise hard-to-find items at small volumes, than of popular items at large volumes. (Known among Indian techies as a ‘Hanuman’).