Web 2.0 Memetic Attributes
(Contained in prior Web 2.0 descriptions of thought leaders)

Underlying Philosophy:

1. Web as a ‘computing’ platform:
   
   
   
   • Web-based applications (online services-oriented, free ‘right-to-use’) instead of software packaged product (distribution-oriented, priced ‘license-to-use’);
   
   
   • Multiple device connectivity (transcending a single device) and data availability;
   
   
   • Open, public application programming interfaces (i.e., provide programmatic interfaces through Web services APIs, which accord formal semantic meaning to data). Adherence to open standards;
   
   
   • Release data from ‘proprietary & copyrighting’ shackles, i.e. low barriers for data reuse (Relinquish control over and make data, code, content, services & even ideas shareable & transformable that permit their recombinant use). Permit screen-scraping.
   
   
   • Leverage value-added data services (for e.g., in the form of mashups) for competitive advantage (e.g., housingmaps.com);
   
   
   • ‘Perpetual beta’, i.e., continually updated application services software (juxtaposed to periodic releases of software products)
   
   
2. User Empowerment:
   
   
   
   • Customer self-service (Do-It-Yourself) and ‘Point of Presence’ – users are present virtually on the Web
   
   
   • ‘Hackability’ – flexibility to easily remix (and consume remixed) content / data in (presumably) innovative ways, i.e., rights granted to use the content in new & exciting contexts. It encourages ‘collective & cumulative creation’ of (emergent) systems with higher utility / usefulness. Support creation of mashups;
   
   
   • Vox populi / Democracy-based, i.e. uses voting to filter content for quality (often doing the job significantly better than editors);
   
   
   • Users, their creations & remixed ‘concoctions’ are radically trusted. They are treated like co-developers (e.g., Wikipedia) – erase the boundaries between producers & consumers (radical decentralization of power);
   
   
   • Enhanced user participation, communication & collaboration, even connecting communities & facilitating (online) social networking
   
   
   • Inversion of control: individuals and groups slacken copyright & intellectual property ownership rights to create a culture in which amalgamated, intermixed media has more value (not less).
   
   
   
   
3. Creator-Consumer(s) 2-way & multi-way interaction:
   
   
   
   • Participation-enabled architecture (e.g., read and write systems such as Wikis, Weblogs, etc.) used to create network effects
   
   
   • Harnessing collective intelligence – users contribute & add value, for e.g., annotating content to enhance richness of data, contributing to metadata definitions using tags, etc. which facilitates (unintended) discovery of exotic, ‘out of the ordinary’ content created in new contexts gets better the more people use it), etc. To promote this ‘(system) learning’ mechanism, implicit means are often used to collect user data (e.g. popular tags) during normal use of the application;
   
   
   • Real-time monitoring of user behavior to study feature acceptance;
   
   
   • Attention-based (democracy based) aggregation of content. Aggregators use the most-traversed navigation paths (i.e. most frequently visited microcontent) for determining relevance.
   
   


4. Data Exposure & Management:
   
   
   
   • Open accessibility of and granular addressability of data / content (microcontent, regardless of media types, such as image, audio, video, hyperlink, blog, etc.), thus allowing data discovery & manipulation in new ways;
   
   
   • Support data / content syndication (without being concerned about how such syndicated data gets aggregated) and lightweight user interfaces, development & business models. Features notification for syndicated content changes;
   
   
   • Filtering of data in context sensitive ways using recommendations (contextualized trust, respect & relations), reputation (typically rooted in cultural contexts) and personalization (profile-based)
   
   
5. Mass service of micro-markets (i.e., the ‘Long Tail’):
   
   
   
   • Increasingly cost-effective to focus on the interests of large number of small entities (individuals, groups, etc.);
   
   
   • Large transaction volumes necessitate ‘operations becoming a core-competency’ and (cost-effective) scalability becoming a key success factor;


6. Glocalization of content:
   
   
   
   • Making global information available to (conceptually) local social & cultural contexts and giving people the flexibility to find, organize, share and crate information in a locally meaningful (interests, goals, values, projects, even geographies) fashion that is globally accessible. In the extreme sense, ‘local’ is just the ‘individual’.

Enabling Technologies, Features & Applied Techniques:

1. Rich Web application UI: Semantically valid (X)HTML and / or microformats, Advanced UI languages such as XUL & SVG; CSS, XML, AJAX, Flash Remoting; Blogrolling / logrolling / link-logging; Separation of structure & style; GreaseMonkey
2. Web Services: RSS / ATOM (with trackbacks, permalinks & comments for syndication & aggregation), SSE, RDF; REST, SOAP or XML Web service APIs;
3. Techniques: Tagging for multiple overlapping associations, rather than rigid categories (folksonomy, not taxonomy)
4. Rich Media: Podcasts, Video-blogging, etc.
5. Application Framework: Ruby on Rails
   

Emergent Application Systems:

1. Social Applications: Search, Networking - YASNs (Yet another Social Network such as FOAF & XFN systems – Friend of a Friend & XHTML Friends Network respectively), Bookmarking, News, Media / Content Sharing, Knowledge Sharing, Recommendation Systems, Annotation Systems, Reputation, Calendaring, etc.
2. Collaboration Applications: Project Management, Event & Activity Planning, Fiction (or Non-Fiction) Publishing, etc.
3. Mashups: Auction mapping, Classifieds mapping, Local Business, Real Estate Listings, Business Directory mapping, etc.