What is Web 2.0?

What is Web 2.0?

Ideas, technologies and implications for

education

by

Paul Anderson

Web 2 Executive summary

Within 15 years the Web has grown from a group work tool for scientists at CERN into a global

information space with more than a billion users. Currently, it is both returning to its roots as a

read/write tool and also entering a new, more social and participatory phase. These trends have led to a

feeling that the Web is entering a ‘second phase’—a new, ‘improved’ Web version 2.0. But how

justified is this perception?

This TechWatch report was commissioned to investigate the substance behind the hyperbole

surrounding ‘Web 2.0’ and to report on the implications this may have for the UK Higher and Further

Education sector, with a special focus on collection and preservation activities within libraries. The

report argues that by separating out the discussion of Web technologies (ongoing Web development

overseen by the W3C), from the more recent applications and services (social software), and attempts

to understand the manifestations and adoption of these services (the ‘big ideas’), decision makers will

find it easier to understand and act on the strategic implications of ‘Web 2.0’. Indeed, analysing the

composition and interplay of these strands provides a useful framework for understanding its

significance.

The report establishes that Web 2.0 is more than a set of ‘cool’ and new technologies and services,

important though some of these are. It has, at its heart, a set of at least six powerful ideas that are

changing the way some people interact. Secondly, it is also important to acknowledge that these ideas

are not necessarily the preserve of ‘Web 2.0’, but are, in fact, direct or indirect reflections of the power

of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and macro level that a billion Internet

users produce. This might well be why Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web,

maintains that Web 2.0 is really just an extension of the original ideals of the Web that does not

warrant a special moniker. However, business concerns are increasingly shaping the way in which we

are being led to think and potentially act on the Web and this has implications for the control of public

and private data. Indeed, Tim O’Reilly’s original attempt to articulate the key ideas behind Web 2.0

was focused on a desire to be able to benchmark and therefore identify a set of new, innovative

companies that were potentially ripe for investment. The UK HE sector should debate whether this is a

long-term issue and maybe delineating Web from Web 2.0 will help us to do that.

As with other aspects of university life the library has not escaped considerable discussion about the

potential change afforded by the introduction of Web 2.0 and social media. One of the key objectives

of the report is to examine some of the work in this area and to tease out some of the key elements of

ongoing discussions. For example, the report argues that there needs to be a distinction between

concerns around quality of service and ‘user-centred change’ and the services and applications that are

being driven by Web 2.0 ideas. This is particularly important for library collection and preservation

activities and some of the key questions for libraries are: is the content produced by Web 2.0 services

sufficiently or fundamentally different to that of previous Web content and, in particular, do its

characteristics make it harder to collect and preserve? Are there areas where further work is needed by

researchers and library specialists? The report examines these questions in the light of the six big ideas

as well as the key Web services and applications, in order to review the potential impact of Web 2.0

on library services and preservation activities.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

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CONTENTS

Introduction 4

1. Web 2.0 or Web 1.0?: a tale of two Tims 5

2. Key Web 2.0 services/applications 7

2.1 Blogs 7

2.2 Wikis 8

2.3 Tagging and social bookmarking 9

2.4 Multimedia sharing 10

2.5 Audio blogging and podcasting 10

2.6 RSS and syndication 10

2.7 Newer Web 2.0 services and applications 12

3. The big ideas behind Web 2.0 14

3.1 Individual production and User Generated Content 14

3.2 Harnessing the power of the crowd 15

3.3 Data on an epic scale 18

3.4 Architecture of Participation 19

3.5 Network effects, power laws and the Long Tail 20

3.6 Open-ness 25

4. Technology and standards 27

4.1 Ajax 27

4.2 Alternatives to Ajax 28

4.3 SOAP vs REST 29

4.4 Micro-formats 30

4.5 Open APIs 31

5. Educational and institutional issues 32

5.1 Teaching and Learning 32

5.2 Scholarly Research 34

5.3 Academic Publishing 35

5.4 Libraries, repositories and archiving 36

6. Looking ahead - the Future of Web 2.0 46

6.1 Web 2.0 and Semantic Web 47

6.2 The emerging field of Web Science 49

6.3 The continued development of the Web as platform 49

6.4 Trust, privacy, security and social networks 49

6.5 Web 2.0 and SOA 50

6.6 Technology Bubble 2.0? 51

6.7 And Web 3.0? 52

Conclusion 53

About the Author 53

Appendix A: Recommendations & points for further debate 54

References 57

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

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Introduction

At the end of 2006, Time magazine’s Person of the Year was ‘You’. On the cover of the magazine,

underneath the title of the award, was a picture of a PC with a mirror in place of the screen, reflecting

not only the face of the reader, but also the general feeling that 2006 was the year of the Web - a new,

improved, 'second version', 'user generated' Web. But how accurate is our perception of so-called 'Web

2.0'? Is there real substance behind the hyperbole? Is it a publishing revolution or is it a social

revolution? Is it actually a revolution at all? And what will it mean for education, a sector that is

already feeling the effects of the demands of Internet-related change?

In this TechWatch report I argue for the distinction between Web technologies (ongoing Web

development overseen by the W3C), the more recent applications and services that are emerging as a

result of this ongoing technological development (social software), and attempts to understand the

manifestations and adoption of these newer applications and services. I start with a brief discussion of

the historical context, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and his vision for a single, global, collaborative

information space and contrast this story of the technology with the ideas of Tim O'Reilly, who has

attempted to understand the ways in which knowledge about the technologies, and the adoption of the

technologies, can be used to make predictions about technology markets.

Media coverage of Web 2.0 concentrates on the common applications/services such as blogs, video

sharing, social networking and podcasting—a more socially connected Web in which people can

contribute as much as they can consume. In chapter two I provide a brief introduction to some of these

services, many of them built on the technologies and open standards that have been around since the

earliest days of the Web, and show how they have been refined, and in some cases concatenated, to

provide a technological foundation for delivering services to the user through the browser window

(based on the key idea of the Web, rather than the desktop, as the technology platform). But is this

Web 2.0? Indeed, it can be argued that these applications and services are really just early

manifestations of ongoing Web technology development. If we look at Web 2.0 as it was originally

articulated we can see that it is, in fact, an umbrella term that attempts to express explicitly the

framework of ideas that underpin attempts to understand the manifestations of these newer Web

services within the context of the technologies that have produced them.

In section three I articulate six 'big' ideas, based on concepts originally outlined by Tim O’Reilly,

which can help us to explain and understand why Web 2.0 has had such a huge impact. In short, these

are ideas about building something more than a global information space; something with much more

of a social angle to it. Collaboration, contribution and community are the order of the day and there is

a sense in which some think that a new 'social fabric' is being constructed before our eyes. These ideas

though, need technology in order to be realised into the functioning Web-based services and

applications that we are using.

Education and educational institutions will have their own special issues with regard to Web 2.0

services and technologies and in section five I look at some of these issues. By special request,

particular attention has been given to libraries and preservation and the issues that present themselves

for those tasked with preserving some of the material produced by these services and applications.

Finally, I look to the future. What are the technologies that will affect the next phase of the Web’s

development: what one might call, rather reluctantly, Web 3.0?

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

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1. 'Web 2.0' or 'Web 1.0'?: a tale of two Tims

Web 2.0 is a slippery character to pin down. Is it a revolution in the way we use the Web? Is it another

technology 'bubble'? It rather depends on who you ask. A Web technologist will give quite a different

answer to a marketing student or an economics professor.

The short answer, for many people, is to make a reference to a group of technologies which have

become deeply associated with the term: blogs, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds etc., which facilitate a

more socially connected Web where everyone is able to add to and edit the information space. The

longer answer is rather more complicated and pulls in economics, technology and new ideas about the

connected society. To some, though, it is simply a time to invest in technology again—a time of

renewed exuberance after the dot-com bust.

For the inventor of the Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there is a tremendous sense of

this. When asked in an interview for a podcast, published on IBM’s website, whether Web 2.0 was

different to what might be called Web 1.0 because the former is all about connecting people, he

replied:

déjà vu about all

"Totally not. Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web

2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and

wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in

fact, you know, this 'Web 2.0', it means using the standards which have been produced by all these

people working on Web 1.0."

1

Laningham (ed.), developerWorks Interviews, 22

To understand Sir Tim’s attitude one needs look back at the history of the development of the Web,

which is explored in his book

collaborative workspace where everything was linked to everything in a ‘single, global information

space’ (p. 5), and, crucially for this discussion, the assumption was that ‘everyone would be able to

edit in this space’ (IBM podcast, 12:20 minutes). The first development was Enquire, a rudimentary

project management tool, developed while Berners-Lee was working at CERN, which allowed pages

of notes to be linked together and edited. A series of further technological and software developments

led to the creation of the World Wide Web and a browser or Web client that could view

of marked-up information (HTML). However, during a series of ports to other machines from the

original development computer, the ability to edit through the Web client was not included in order to

speed up the process of adoption within CERN (Berners-Lee, 1999). This attitude to the ‘edit’ function

continued through subsequent Web browser developments such as ViolaWWW and Mosaic (which

became the Netscape browser). Crucially, this left people thinking of the Web as a medium in which a

relatively small number of people published and most browsed, but it is probably more accurate to

picture it as a fork in the road of the technology's development, one which has meant that the original

pathway has only recently been rejoined.

The term ‘Web 2.0’ was officially coined in 2004 by Dale Dougherty, a vice-president of O’Reilly

Media Inc. (the company famous for its technology-related conferences and high quality books)

during a team discussion on a potential future conference about the Web (O’Reilly, 2005a). The team

wanted to capture the feeling that despite the dot-com boom and subsequent bust, the Web was ‘more

important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity’

(O’Reilly, 2005a, p. 1). It was also noted, at the same meeting, that companies that had survived the

dot-com firestorms of the late 90s now appeared to be stronger and have a number of things in

common. Thus it is important to note that the term was not coined in an attempt to capture the essence

of an identified group of technologies, but an attempt to capture something far more amorphous.

nd August, 2006.Weaving the Web (1999). His original vision was very much of aand edit pages

1

txt

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

A transcript of the podcast is available at: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/podcast/dwi/cmint082206.[last accessed 17/01/07].

6

The second Tim in the story, Tim O’Reilly himself, the founder of the company, then followed up this

discussion with a now famous paper,

Next Generation of Software,

is important to note that this paper was an attempt to make explicit certain features that could be used

to identify a particular set of innovative companies, including business characteristics, such as the fact

that they have control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources (something that could become

increasingly significant for H&FE), or that they have lightweight business models. The paper did,

however, identify certain features that have come to be associated with ‘social software’ technologies,

such as participation, user as contributor, harnessing the power of the crowd, rich user experiences

etc., but it should be noted that these do not constitute a

Lee has pointed out, the ability to implement this technology is all based on so-called ‘Web 1.0’

standards, as we shall see in section four, and that, in fact, it’s just taken longer for it to be

implemented than was initially anticipated. From this perspective, ‘Web 2.0’ should not therefore be

held up in opposition to ‘Web 1.0’, but should be seen as a consequence of a more fully implemented

Web.

This distinction is key to understanding where the boundaries are between ‘the Web’, as a set of

technologies, and ‘Web 2.0’—the attempt to conceptualise the significance of a set of outcomes that

are enabled by those Web technologies. Understanding this distinction helps us to think more clearly

about the issues that are thrown up by both the technologies and the results of the technologies, and

this helps us to better understand why something might be classed as ‘Web 2.0’ or not. In order to be

able to discuss and address the Web 2.0 issues that face higher education we need to have these

conceptual tools in order to identify why something might be significant and whether or not we should

act on it.

For example, Tim O'Reilly, in his original article, identifies what he considers to be features of

successful ‘Web 1.0’ companies and the ‘most interesting’ of the new applications. He does this in

order to develop a set of concepts by which to benchmark whether or not a company is Web 1.0 or

Web 2.0. This is important to him because he is concerned that ‘t

widespread that companies are now pasting it on as a marketing buzzword, with no real understanding

of just what it means’ (O’Reilly,

behind the original O’Reilly discussions of Web 2.0 he

as platform, Harnessing collective intelligence, Data is the next 'Intel inside', End of the software

release cycle, Lightweight programming models, Software above the level of single device, and Rich

user experiences. In this report I have adapted some of O'Reilly's seven principles, partly to avoid

ambiguity (for example, I use ‘harnessing the 'power of the crowd'’, rather than ‘collective

intelligence’ as I believe this more accurately describes the articulation of the concept in its original

form), and partly to provide the conceptual tools that people involved in HE practice and decision

making have expressed a need for.

What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for theoutlining in detail what the company thought they meant by the term. Itde facto Web (r)evolution. As Tim Berners-he Web 2.0 meme has become so2005a, p.1). In order to express some of the concepts which werelists and describes seven principles: The Web

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

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Well-known or education-based blogs:

http://radar.oreilly.com/

http://www.techcrunch.com/

http://www.instapundit.com/

http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/

*

http://jiscdigitisation.typepad.com/jisc_

digitisation_program/

Software:

*

http://wordpress.org/

*

http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/

http://www.blogger.com/start

http://radio.userland.com/

http://www.bblog.com/

Blog search services:

http://technorati.com/

http://www.gnosh.org/

http://blogsearch.google.com/

http://www.weblogs.com/about.html

2. Key Web 2.0 services/applications

There are a number of Web-based services and applications that demonstrate the foundations of the

Web 2.0 concept, and they are already being used to a certain extent in education. These are not really

technologies as such, but services (or user processes) built using the building blocks of the

technologies and open standards that underpin the Internet and the Web. These include blogs, wikis,

multimedia sharing services, content syndication, podcasting and content tagging services. Many of

these applications of Web technology are relatively mature, having been in use for a number of years,

although new features and capabilities are being added on a regular basis. It is worth noting that many

of these newer technologies are concatenations, i.e. they make use of existing services. In the first part

of this section we introduce and review these well-known and commonly used services with a view to

providing a common grounding for later discussion.

NB * indicates an open source or other, similar, community or public-spirited project.

2.1 Blogs

The term web-log, or

1997 and refers to a simple webpage consisting of brief

paragraphs of opinion, information, personal diary entries,

or links, called

most recent first, in the style of an online journal (Doctorow

blog, was coined by Jorn Barger inposts, arranged chronologically with the

et al.

, 2002). Most blogs also allow visitors to add a

comment

This posting and commenting process contributes to the

nature of blogging (as an exchange of views) in what Yale

University law professor, Yochai Benkler, calls a ‘weighted

conversation’ between a primary author and a group of

secondary comment contributors, who communicate to an

unlimited number of readers. It also contributes to

blogging's sense of immediacy, since ‘blogs enable

individuals to write to their Web pages in journalism time –

that is hourly, daily, weekly – whereas the Web page

culture that preceded it tended to be slower moving: less an

equivalent of reportage than of the essay’ (Benkler, 2006, p.

217).

Each post is usually ‘tagged’ with a keyword or two, allowing the subject of the post to be categorised

within the system so that when the post becomes old it can be filed into a standard, theme-based menu

system

list of other posts by the same author on the blogging software’s system that use the same tag.

Linking is also an important aspect of blogging as it deepens the conversational nature of the

blogosphere (see below) and its sense of immediacy. It also helps to facilitate retrieval and referencing

of information on different blogs but some of these are not without inherent problems:

below a blog entry.2. Clicking on a post’s description, or tag (which is displayed below the post), will take you to a

•

to a particular post. If the item is moved within the database, e.g. for archiving, the permalink

stays the same. Crucially, if the post is renamed, or if the content is changed in any way, the

The permalink is a permanent URI which is generated by the blogging system and is applied

2

returning to a blog’s homepage after several weeks or months to find a particular piece of content is potentially a

hit and miss affair. The development of the permalink was an attempt to counter this, but has its own inherent

problems.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

Blog content is regularly filed so that only the latest content is available from the homepage. This means that

8

Examples of wikis:

http://wiki.oss-watch.ac.uk/

*

http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/CETIS_Wiki

*

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

*

http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/wiki/index.php/Main_P

age

http://www.wikihow.com

Software:

http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki

*

http://www.socialtext.com/products/overview

http://www.twiki.org/

http://uniwakka.sourceforge.net/HomePage

Online notes on using wikis in education:

http://www.wikiineducation.com/display/ikiw/

Home

*

permalink will still remain unchanged: i.e. there is no version control, and using a permalink

does not guarantee the content of a post.

•

referenced or commented on one of blogger B’s posts. When blog B receives notification from

blog A that a trackback has been created, blog B’s system automatically creates a record of the

permalink of the referring post. Trackback only works when it is enabled on both the referring

and the referred blogs. Some bloggers deliberately disable trackback as it can be a route in for

spammers.

Trackback (or pingback) allows a blogger (A) to notify another blogger (B) that they have

•

similar to a blog ‘bookmark’ or ‘favourites’ list.

Blog software also facilitates

the headline, is made available to other software via RSS and, increasingly, Atom. This content is then

aggregated into feeds, and a variety of blog aggregators and specialist blog reading tools can make use

of these feeds (see Table 1 for some key examples).

The large number of people engaged in blogging has given rise to its own term –

express the sense of a whole ‘world’ of bloggers operating in their own environment. As technology

has become more sophisticated, bloggers have begun to incorporate multimedia into their blogs and

there are now photo-blogs, video blogs (vlogs), and, increasingly, bloggers can upload material

directly from their mobile phones (mob-blogging). For more on the reasons why people blog, the style

and manner of their blogging and the subject areas that are covered, see Nardi

The blogroll is a list of links to other blogs that a particular blogger likes or finds useful. It issyndication, in which information about the blog entries, for example,blogosphere – toet al., 2004.

2.2 Wikis

A

easily edited by anyone who is allowed access

(Ebersbach

has meant that the concept of the wiki, as a

collaborative tool that facilitates the production of a

group work, is widely understood. Wiki pages have

an edit button displayed on the screen and the user

can click on this to access an easy-to-use online

editing tool to change or even delete the contents of

the page in question. Simple, hypertext-style linking

between pages is used to create a navigable set of

pages.

Unlike blogs, wikis generally have a

which allows previous versions to be examined, and a

wiki3 is a webpage or set of webpages that can beet al., 2006). Wikipedia’s popular successhistory function,

rollback

Proponents of the power of wikis cite the ease of use

(even playfulness) of the tools, their extreme

flexibility and open access as some of the many

reasons why they are useful for group working

(Ebersbach

There are undeniably problems for systems that allow such a level of openness, and Wikipedia itself

has suffered from problems of malicious editing and vandalism (Stvilia

are also those who argue that acts of vandalism and mistakes are rectified quite quickly by the self-

function, which restores previous versions.et al., 2006; Lamb, 2004).et al., 2005). However, there

3

Cunningham's concept of the wikiwikiWeb, in 1995.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

Ebersbach et al. traces this from the Hawaiian word, wikiwiki, meaning 'quick' or 'hurry' from Ward

9

Examples of tagging services:

http://www.connotea.org/

http://www.citeulike.org/

*

http://www.librarything.com/

http://del.icio.us/

http://www.sitebar.org

http://www.furl.net/index.jsp

http://www.stumbleupon.com/

http://www.blinklist.com/

http://www.digg.com/

http://www.rawsugar.com

http://del.icio.us/elearningfocus/web2.0

*

moderation processes at work. Alternatively, restricting access to registered users only, is often used

for professional, work group wikis (Cych, 2006).

2.3 Tagging and social bookmarking

A tag is a keyword that is added to a digital object (e.g. a website, picture or video clip) to describe it,

but not as part of a formal classification system. One of the first large-scale applications of tagging

was seen with the introduction of Joshua Schacter’s del.icio.us website, which launched the ‘social

bookmarking’ phenomenon.

Social bookmarking systems share a number of common

features (Millen

lists of ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favourites’, to store these centrally

on a remote service (rather than within the client browser)

and to share them with other users of the system (the

‘social’ aspect). These bookmarks can also be tagged with

keywords, and an important difference from the ‘folder’-

based categorisation used in traditional, browser-based

bookmark lists is that a bookmark can belong in more than

one category. Using tags, a photo of a tree could be

categorised with both ‘tree’ and ‘larch’, for example.

The concept of tagging has been widened far beyond website bookmarking, and services like Flickr

(photos), YouTube (video) and Odeo (podcasts) allow a variety of digital artefacts to be socially

tagged. For example, the BBC’s Shared Tags

of the public to tag BBC News online items. A particularly important example within the context of

higher education is Richard Cameron’s CiteULike

and share the academic papers they are reading. When you see a paper on the Web that interests you,

you click a button and add it to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation

details, so you don’t have to type them in. This tool was used during the research for this report.

The idea of tagging has been expanded to include what are called

from a number of different users of a tagging service, which collates information about the frequency

with which particular tags are used. This frequency information is often displayed graphically as a

‘cloud’ in which tags with higher frequency of use are displayed in larger text.

Large organisations are beginning to explore the potential of these new tools and their concepts for

knowledge management across the enterprise. For example, IBM is investigating social bookmarking

through their intranet-based DogEar tool (Millen

service has set up a del.icio.us account at:

et al., 2005): They allow users to create4 project is an experimental service that allows members5, a free service to help academics to store, organisetag clouds: groups of tags (tag sets)et al., 2005). In education, JISC's e-Learning Focushttp://del.icio.us/elearningfocus [last accessed 07/02/07].

Folksonomy versus collabulary

One outcome from the practice of tagging has been the rise of the ‘folksonomy’. Unfortunately, the

term has not been used consistently and there is confusion about its application. More will be said

about this in the section on network effects, but for now it is sufficient to note that there is a distinction

between a folksonomy (a collection of tags created by an individual for their own personal use) and a

collabulary (a collective vocabulary).

4

http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/archives/2005/05/bbc_shared_tags.html [last accessed 16/01/07].

5

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

http://www.citeulike.org/ [last accessed 16/01/07].

10

Well known photo sharing services:

http://www.flickr.com/

http://www.ourpictures.com/

http://www.snapfish.com/

http://www.fotki.com/

Well known video sharing services:

http://www.youtube.com/

http://www.getdemocracy.com/broadcast/

*

http://eyespot.com/

http://ourmedia.org/

*

http://vsocial.com

http://www.videojug.com/

Well known podcasting sites:

http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcasts.

html

http://btpodshow.com/

http://www.audblog.com/

http://odeo.com/

http://www.ourmedia.org/

*

http://connect.educause.edu/

*

http://juicereceiver.sourceforge.net/index.php

http://www.impala.ac.uk/

*

http://www.law.dept.shef.ac.uk/podcasts/

*

2.4 Multimedia sharing

One of the biggest growth areas has been amongst services

that facilitate the storage and sharing of multimedia

content. Well known examples include YouTube (video)

Flickr (photographs) and Odeo (podcasts). These popular

services take the idea of the ‘writeable’ Web (where users

are not just consumers but contribute actively to the

production of Web content) and enable it on a massive

scale. Literally millions of people now participate in the

sharing and exchange of these forms of media by producing

their own podcasts, videos and photos. This development

has only been made possible through the widespread

adoption of high quality, but relatively low cost digital

media technology such as hand-held video cameras.

2.5 Audio blogging and podcasting

Podcasts are audio recordings, usually in MP3 format, of

talks, interviews and lectures, which can be played either

on a desktop computer or on a wide range of handheld MP3

devices. Originally called audio blogs they have their roots

in efforts to add audio streams to early blogs (Felix and

Stolarz, 2006). Once standards had settled down and Apple

introduced the commercially successful iPod MP3 player

and its associated iTunes software, the process started to

become known as podcasting

some controversy since it implies that only the Apple iPod

will play these files, whereas, in actual fact, any MP3

player or PC with the requisite software can be used. A more recent development is the introduction of

video podcasts (sometimes shortened to vidcast or vodcast): the online delivery of video-on-demand

clips that can be played on a PC, or again on a suitable handheld player (the more recent versions of

the Apple iPod for example, provide for video playing).

A podcast is made by creating an MP3 format audio file (using a voice recorder or similar device),

uploading the file to a host server, and then making the world aware of its existence through the use of

RSS (see next section). This process (known as

directions to the audio file’s location on the host server, into the RSS file (Patterson, 2006).

Podcast listeners subscribe to the RSS feeds and receive information about new podcasts as they

become available. Distribution is therefore relatively simple. The harder part, as those who listen to a

lot of podcasts know, is to produce a good quality audio file. Podcasting is becoming increasingly

used in education (Brittain

moves to establish a UK HE podcasting community

6. This term is not withoutenclosure) adds a URL link to the audio file, as well aset al., 2006; Ractham and Zhang, 2006) and recently there have been7.

2.6 RSS and syndication

RSS is a family of formats which allow users to find out about updates to the content of RSS-enabled

websites, blogs or podcasts without actually having to go and visit the site. Instead, information from

the website (typically, a new story's title and synopsis, along with the originating website’s name) is

6

Coined by Ben Hammersley in a Guardian article on 12th February 2004:

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1145689,00.html

[last accessed 14/02/07].7

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

11

collected within a feed (which uses the RSS format) and ‘piped’ to the user in a process known as

syndication.

In order to be able to use a feed a prospective user must install a software tool known as an

aggregator

or

feeds they want to receive and then

for updates to the RSS feed and keep the user informed of any changes.

feed reader, onto their computer desktop. Once this has been done, the user must decide which RSSsubscribe to them. The client software will then periodically check

Illustration 1: Example of an RSS feed aggregation tool (NetNewsWire).

Technically, RSS is an XML-based data format for websites to exchange files

that contain publishing information and summaries of the site’s contents.

Indeed, in its earliest incarnation, RSS was understood to stand for Rich Site

Summary (Doctorow, 2002). For a variety of historical reasons there are a

number of RSS formats (RSS 0.91, RSS 0.92, RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0) and there are

some issues of incompatibility

later version of RSS 1.0, but is a different format. As it has become more widely used for blog content

syndication, in later versions RSS became known as Really Simple Syndication

tools now create and publish these RSS feeds automatically and webpages and blogs frequently

display small RSS icons and links to allow a quick process of registering to get a feed from the site

(see above, right).

In 2003 a new syndication system was proposed and developed under the name

up some of the inconsistencies between RSS versions and the problems with the way they

interoperate. This consists of two standards: the Atom Syndication Format, an XML language used for

Web feeds, and the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), a HTTP-based protocol for creating and

updating Web resources. There is considerable discussion between proponents of RSS and Atom as to

which is the best way forward for syndication. The two most important differences between the two

are, firstly, that the development of Atom is taking place through a formal and open standards process

within the IETF

(known as the payload container) is more clearly defined. Atom can also support the enclosure of

8. It is worth noting that RSS 2.0 is not simply a9. A lot of bloggingAtom in order to clear10, and, secondly, that with Atom the actual content of the feed item’s encoding

8

See: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssVersionHistory for a history of the versions [last accessed 14/02/07].

9

See RSS Advisory Board service: http://www.rssboard.org/ [last accessed 14/02/07].

10

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

The Internet Engineering Task Force.

12

more than one podcast file at a time (see podcasting section) and so multiple file formats of the same

podcast can be syndicated at the same time

11.

2.7 Newer Web 2.0 services and applications

As we have seen, there are a number of technology services that are often posited as representing the

Web 2.0 concept in some way. In recent months, however, there has been an explosion of new ideas,

applications and start-up companies working on ways to extend existing services. Some of these are

likely to become more important than others, and some are certainly more likely to be more relevant to

education than others. There is such a deluge of new services that it is often difficult to keep track of

what’s ‘out there’ or to make sense of what each provides. I suggest there are two ways of helping

with this process. Firstly, to make sense of what the service is trying to do in the context of the overall

Web 2.0 ‘big ideas’ presented in section three. Secondly, as new services become available they can

be categorised roughly in terms of what they attempt to do, e.g. aggregate user data, construct a social

network etc.

In Table 1 I make a first attempt at such a categorisation process based on a small range of some of the

newer services. Such a table is only the beginning of the process and can only be snapshot as this is a

fluid market with new tools and start-up companies being announced on almost a daily basis (see, for

example, TechCrunch’s regular updates

directory which recently listed over 1,200 services in fifty categories ranging from blogging to Wifi)

12 on start-ups and new ideas; or eConsultant’s Web 2.013.

11

html

More technical detail of the Atom standard can be found at: http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/atompubcharter.and http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library/x-atom10.html [last accessed 14/02/07].

12

TechCrunch is a blog dedicated to profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies:

www.techcrunch.com

13

http://www.econsultant.com/web2/

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

13

Table 1: Newer Web 2.0 services

Categorisation (based on

what they attempt to do)

Explanation and indicative links to the big ideas of Web 2.0 (see

section 3 for more detail)

Examples of service

Social Networking Professional and social networking sites that facilitate meeting people,

finding like minds, sharing content—uses ideas from harnessing the

power of the crowd, network effect and individual production/user

generated content.

Professional networking:

http://www.siphs.com/aboutus.jsp

https://www.linkedin.com/

http://www.zoominfo.com/

Social networking:

www.myspace.com

www.facebook.com

http://fo.rtuito.us/

http://www.spock.com/

(test beta only)

http://www.flock.com/

http://www.bebo.com/

Gather information from diverse sources across the Web and publish in

one place. Includes news and RSS feed aggregators and tools that

create a single webpage with all your feeds and email in one place—

uses ideas from individual production/user generated content.

http://www.techmeme.com/

http://www.google.co.uk/nwshp?hl=en

http://www.blogbridge.com/

http://www.suprglu.com/

http://www.netvibes.com/

Aggregation services

Collect and aggregate user data, user ‘attention’ (what you look at) and

intentions—uses ideas from the architecture of participation, data on

epic scale and power of the crowd.

http://www.attentiontrust.org/

http://www.digg.com/

Data 'mash-ups' Web services that pull together data from different sources to create a

new service (i.e. aggregation and recombination). Uses, for example,

ideas from data on epic scale and openness of data.

http://www.housingmaps.com/

http://darwin.zoology.gla.ac.uk/~rpage/ispecies/

http://www.rrove.com/set/item/59/top-11-us-universities

http://www.blears.net/weather/

(world weather from BBC RSS feed)

Tracking and filtering

content

Services that keep track of, filter, analyse and allow search of the

growing amounts of Web 2.0 content from blogs, multimedia sharing

services etc. Uses ideas from e.g. data on epic scale.

http://technorati.com/about/

http://www.digg.com/

http://www.blogpulse.com

http://cloudalicio.us/about/

Collaborative reference works (like Wikipedia) that are built using

wiki-like software tools. Uses ideas from harnessing the power of the

crowd.

http://www.squidoo.com/

http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia

Collaborating

Collaborative, Web-based project and work group productivity tools.

Uses architecture of participation.

http://vyew.com/always-on/collaboration/

http://www.systemone.at/en/technology/overview#

http://www.37signals.com/

Replicate office-style

software in the browser

Web-based desktop application/document tools. Replicate desktop

applications. Based on technological developments.

http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour1.html

http://www.stikkit.com/

http://www.backpackit.com/tour

Source ideas or work from

the crowd

Seek ideas, solutions to problems or get tasks completed by outsourcing

to users of the Web. Uses the idea of power of the crowd.

http://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

http://www.innocentive.com/

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

14

3. The big ideas behind Web 2.0

As outlined in section one, there is considerable speculation as to what Web 2.0 might be, and

it is inevitable that some of this would become confused as various people vie for attention in

the ongoing conversation. What I have tried to do in this section is to uncover what I believe

are the core ideas and to show, where possible, points at which various strands of related

thought start to be developed. I also try to raise some questions about how closely these

strands are related to some kind of evidence base. By looking at the history of, for example,

network theory, it is possible to see how assumptions made about the rate at which networks

grow could have contributed to the last technology boom and bust. This is important, not only

for avoiding a similar situation in the future, but also, for getting a more realistic

understanding of the role that Web 2.0 might play within education.

In this section I put forward six 'big' ideas, based on concepts originally outlined by Tim

O’Reilly, that can help us to explain and understand why Web 2.0 has had such a huge

impact. In short these are ideas about building something more than a global information

space; something with much more of a social angle to it. Collaboration, contribution and

community are the order of the day and there is a sense in which some think that a new 'social

fabric' is being constructed before our eyes. However, it is also important to acknowledge that

these ideas are not necessarily the preserve of 'Web 2.0', but are, in fact, direct or indirect

reflections of the power of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and

macro level that a billion Internet users produce.

Key Idea

1 Individual production and User Generated Content

2 Harness the power of the crowd

3 Data on an epic scale

4 Architecture of Participation

5 Network Effects

6 Openness

3.1 Individual production and User Generated Content

'I have always imagined the information space as something to which everyone has

immediate and intuitive access, and not just to browse, but to

create.'

Tim Berners-Lee, 1999, p. 169

'We don't hate the media, we become the media'

Jello Biafra (Eric Boucher), 2001

14

In the 1980s the punk rock adage of "I can do that" led to thousands of young people forming

local bands and writing their own fanzines. Today’s generation are pressing ‘record’ on their

video cameras and hitting their mouse keys. With a few clicks of the mouse a user can upload

a video or photo from their digital camera and into their own media space, tag it with suitable

keywords and make the content available to their friends or the world in general. In parallel,

individuals are setting up and writing blogs and working together to create information

through the use of wikis. What these tools have done is to lower the barrier to entry,

following in the same footsteps as the 1980s self-publishing revolution sparked by the

14

From the spoken recording Become the media (Alternative Tentacles, 2001) available online at:

http://www.alternativetentacles.com/product.php?product=380

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

[last accessed 12/01/07].

15

introduction of the office laser printer and desktop publishing software pioneered by Apple

(Hertzfeld, 2005). There has been an out-pouring of production on the Web.

Much of recent media attention concerning the rise of the Web 2.0 phenomenon has focused

on what’s been given the rather ugly moniker of

to this phrase include content self-publishing, personal publishing (Downes, 2004) and ‘self

expression’.

Media interest in this is derived, in part, because the media itself is undergoing a period of

profound change as the true implications of the Web and in particular the new capability of

the viewers, or as the journalist Dan Gillmor (2004) describes them, the former audience, to

contribute materials for programmes, newspapers and websites. The widespread adoption of

cheap, fairly high quality digital cameras, videos, mobile and smartphones, have all

contributed to a rise in what’s sometimes called ‘citizen journalism’ or ‘witness

contributions’, in which newspapers and TV programmes make use of viewer’s clips of news

events. Many media organisations are undertaking major reviews of how they generate

content and investing in facilities to allow the public to have more of a role in newsgathering.

For example, The Sun newspaper now provides a single mobile phone number for members

of the public to submit copy and photos, and in South Korea the OhmyNews service has an

army of 40,000 citizen journalists edited by 50 professionals (Anderson, 2006). Meanwhile,

the BBC is working on a Creative Archive which will allow users to view and make use of

old, archived TV material, possibly ‘mashing-up’ their own versions of TV content. Many

commentators think we are entering a new era in which news is more of a ‘conversation’ and

this kind of change in people’s perception of who has the authority to ‘say’ and ‘know’ is

surely set to be a challenge within education.

So why do people engage in peer production like this? Chris Anderson (2006) says: ‘the

motives to create are not the same in the head as they are in the tail’ (see section 3.5.4).

People are driven by monetary motives at the head, but the coin of the realm at the lower end

of the tail

noticed is everything’ (Tim Wu, Professor of Law, in Anderson, 2006, p. 74).

To some commentators the increasing propensity for individuals to engage in the creation and

manipulation of information and digital artefacts is a major positive benefit. There are, of

course those who worry about where this might take us. The Chief Scientist at Xerox, John

Seely Brown worries about the loss of the structure and authority of an edited newspaper as

an institution in which a process of selection and reflection takes place (Brown and Duguid,

2000). The RSS feed is organised temporally, but what is the more important news? A

designed newspaper has a headline, an ‘above the fold’ story, and the editors have selected

the news based on lots of factors. There are also those who are sceptical over the true scale of

actual participation in all this. Over 10 million of the 13 million blogs in Blogger, a major

blog provider, are inactive according to Charles Mann (2006) who thinks that: ‘The huge

mass of dead blogs is one reason to maintain a healthy scepticism about the vast growth of the

blogosphere’ (p. 12).

user generated content (UGC). Alternativesis reputation’ (p. 73). We are living in more of an exposure culture, where ‘getting

3.2 Harnessing the power of the crowd

The term ‘harnessing collective intelligence’ as used by Tim O'Reilly has several problems

associated with it: firstly, what kind of ‘intelligence’ are we referring to? If we equate

‘information’ to ‘intelligence’ then many of his examples stand up to scrutiny. However, if

your understanding of ‘intelligence’ more naturally focuses on the idea of having or showing

some kind of intellectual ability, then the phrase becomes more problematic. O’Reilly

acknowledges this inherently by bringing in the concept of ‘the wisdom of crowds’ (WoC),

but this, in turn, brings its own set of problems (see below).

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

16

Related to this is the problem of what we mean by ‘collective intelligence’. Again, the WoC

ideas are drafted in by O’Reilly to try to help with this, but there is a critical gap between the

explication of ‘wisdom of crowds’ in its original form, as expressed by James Surowiecki,

and its application to Web 2.0 issues, that should give us cause to pause for thought.

3.2.1 The Wisdom of Crowds

The Wisdom of Crowds is the title of a book written by James Surowiecki, a columnist for the

New Yorker. In it, he outlines three different types of problem (which he calls cognition, coordination

and co-operation), and demonstrates how they can be solved more effectively by

groups operating according to specific conditions, than even the most intelligent individual

member of that group. It is important to note that although Surowiecki provides caveats on

the limitations to his ideas, the book's subtitle (‘why the many are smarter than the few and

how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations’) tends to gloss

over some of the subtleties of his arguments. The book has been very influential on Web 2.0-

style thinking, and several writers have adapted Surowiecki’s ideas to fit their observations on

Web and Internet-based activities.

An example of one of the ways in which WoC has been adapted for Web 2.0 is provided by

Tim O’Reilly in his original paper (2005a). He uses the example of Cloudmark, a

collaborative spam filtering system, which aggregates ‘the individual decisions of email users

about what is and is not spam, outperforming systems that rely on analysis of the messages

themselves’

as a type of cognitive decision making process, or what fans of the TV show

a millionaire

collectively, the ‘crowd’ is more likely to come up with ‘the right answer’, in certain

situations, than any one individual. The Cloudmark system implements an architecture of

participation to harness this type of distributed human intelligence.

This is a fairly unproblematic application of Surowiecki’s ideas to the Internet, but some of

the wider claims are potentially more difficult to reconcile. Whilst a detailed examination of

the issue is beyond the scope of this report, it is important to note that some examples that

supposedly demonstrate the connective forces of WoC to Web 2.0 are really closer to

collaborative production or crowdsourcing (see below) than collective ‘wisdom’. As

Suroweicki does not use the Web to demonstrate his concepts (although he has gone on

record as saying that ‘the Web is 'structurally congenial' to the wisdom of crowds’

difficult to objectively establish how far it should be used for understanding Web 2.0 and

therefore used as an accurate tool for benchmarking how ‘Web 2.0’ a company might be.

However, regardless of this, the way in which WoC is generally understood reinforces a

powerful

of the interesting things about the power of this idea is the implication it may have for the

traditional ways in which universities are perceived to accumulate status as ‘knowers’ and

how knowledge can legitimately be seen to be ‘acquired’.

(p. 2). What this kind of system demonstrates is what Surowiecki would describeWho wants to bewould call ‘ask the audience’. It is the idea that, by acting independently, but15) it iszeitgeist and may therefore discourage a deep level of critical thinking. In fact, one

3.2.2 Crowdsourcing: the rise of the amateur

The term

of Web-based out-sourcing for the procurement of media content, small tasks, even solutions

to scientific problems from the crowd gathered on the Internet. At its simplest level,

crowdsourcing builds on the popularity of multimedia sharing websites such as Flickr and

YouTube to create a second generation of websites where UGC is made available for re-use.

ShutterStock, iStockphoto and Fotolia are examples of Web-based, stock photo or video

crowdsourcing was coined by Wired journalist Jeff Howe to conceptualise a process

15

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12015774/site/newsweek/page/2/ [last accessed 14/02/07].

17

agencies that act as intermediaries between amateur content producers and anyone wanting to

use their material. These amateur producers are often content with little or no fee for their

work, taking pride, instead, from the inherent seal of approval that comes with being

‘chosen’.

This type of crowdsourcing has been chipping away at the edges of the creative professions

for a while now. Photographers in particular have started to feel the pinch as websites make it

increasingly difficult for professionals to find a market for their work. Whilst the quality of

the images may vary considerably (it is often only good enough for low-end brochures and

websites) purchasers are often not able to see the poor quality or just don't care.

At the other end of the spectrum Howe demonstrates how, over the last five years or so,

companies such as InnoCentive and YourEncore have been using their websites to match

independent scientists and amateur or retired researchers with their clients’ R&D

development challenges. The individual who comes up with the solution to a particular

unsolved R&D problem receives a ‘prize’ that runs to tens of thousands of dollars.

More recently, Canadian start-up company Cambrian House has taken the crowdsourcing

model and experimented with open source software-type development models to create a

model that is more closely aligned to the WoC ideal. In the Cambrian House model, members

of the crowd suggest ideas that are then voted on (again, by ‘the crowd’) in order to decide

which ones should go forward for development. This model not only sources ideas and

innovations from the crowd, but also uses them to select the idea that will be the most

successful, accepting that, collectively, the decision of the crowd will be stronger than any

one individual's decision.

3.2.3 Folksonomies: individuals acting individually yet producing a collective result.

The term

whose ideas on what a folksonomy is stem, in part, from his experience of building taxonomy

systems in commercial environments and finding that successful retrieval was often poor

because users could not ‘guess’ the ‘right’ keyword to use. He has, however, expressed

concern in the recent past about the way the term has been mis-applied and his definition,

taken from a recent blog posting, attempted to clarify some of the issues:

'Folksonomy is the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything

with a URL) for one's own retrival [

(shared and open to others).

information.

VanderWal, 2005, blog entry.

Although folksonomy tagging is done in a social environment (shared and open) Vander Wal

emphasises that it is not collaborative and it is not a form of categorisation. He makes the

point that tagging done by one person on behalf of another ('in the Internet space' is implied

here) is not folksonomy

their own vocabulary in order to add explicit meaning to the information or object they are

consuming (either as a user or producer): 'The people are not so much categorizing as

providing a means to connect items and to provide their meaning in their own understanding.'

(Vander Wal, 2005). By aggregating the results of folksonomy production it is possible to see

how additional value can be created.

folksonomy is generally acknowledged to have been coined by Thomas Vander Wal,sic]. The tagging is done in a social environmentThe act of tagging is done by the person consuming the' [my italics].16 and that the value of a folksonomy is derived from people using

16

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

he describes this as 'social tagging'

18

Vander Wal states that the value of a folksonomy is derived from three key data elements: the

person tagging, the object being tagged (as an entity), and the tag being attached to that

object. From these three data elements you only need two in order to find the third. He

provides an example from del.icio.us which demonstrates that if you know the object's URL

(i.e. a webpage) and have a tag for that webpage, you can find other individuals that use the

same tag on that particular object (sometimes known as 'pivot browsing'). This can then

potentially lead to finding another person who has similar interests or shares a similar

vocabulary, and this is one of Vander Wal's key points concerning what he considers to be the

value of folksonomy over taxonomy: that groups of people with a similar vocabulary can

function as a kind of 'human filter' for each other.

Another key feature of folksonomy is that tags are generated again and again, so that it is

possible to make sense of emerging trends of interest. It is the large number of people

contributing that leads to opportunities to discern contextual information when the tags are

aggregated (Owen

unconstrained tagging, in the overall context of the development of hypertext, as 'feral

hypertext': 'These links are not paths cleared by the professional trail-blazers Vannevar Bush

dreamed of, they are more like sheep paths in the mountains, paths that have formed over

time as many animals and people just happened to use them' (Walker, 2005, p. 3).

et al., 2006), a wisdom of crowds-type scenario. One author describes such

3.3 Data on an epic scale

‘Information gently but relentlessly drizzles down on us in an invisible, impalpable electric

rain’

von Baeyer, 2003, p.3

In the Information Age we generate and make use of ever-increasing amounts of data. Some

commentators fear that this

feel that they offer a way out of this, and in the emerging Web 2.0 universe, data, and lots of

it, is profoundly important. Von Baeyer’s invisible rain is captured by Web 2.0 companies

and turned into mighty rivers of information. Rivers that can be fished.

In his original piece on the emergence of Web 2.0, Tim O’Reilly (2005a) discusses the role

that data and its management has played with companies like Google, arguing that for those

services, ‘the value of the software is proportional to the scale and dynamism of the data it

helps to manage’ (p. 3). These are companies that have database management and networking

as core competencies and who have developed the ability to collect and manage this data on

an epic scale.

A recent article in Wired magazine emphasised the staggering scale of the data processing

and collection efforts of Google when it reported on the company’s plans to build a huge new

server farm in Oregon, USA, near cheap hydro-electric power supplies once used to smelt

aluminium (Gilder, 2006). Google now has a total database measured in hundreds of petabytes

datafication is causing us to drown. Many Web 2.0 companies17

which is swelled each day by terabytes of new information. This is the network effect

working at full tilt.

Much of this is collected indirectly from users and aggregated as a side effect of the ordinary

use of major Internet services and applications such as Google, Amazon and Ebay. In a sense

these services are ‘learning’ every time they are used. As one example, Amazon will record

your book buying choices, combine this with millions of other choices and then mine and sift

this data to help provide targeted recommendations. Anderson (2006) calls these companies

17

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

10 to power 15 (a million, billion)

19

long tail

them do’ (p. 57).

This data is also made available to developers, who can recombine it in new ways. Lashing

together applications that take rivulets of information from a variety of Web 2.0 sources has

its own term—a

HousingMaps.com combined Google Maps (an online mapping service) with the USA-based

CraigsList of flats available for rent. These kinds of mash-ups are facilitated by what are

known as ‘open APIs’–Application Programming Interfaces (see section 4.5).

Much as these services have made life easier on the Web (who can imagine life without

Google now?) there is a darker side. Who owns this data? Increasingly, data is seen as

something – a resource – that can be repurposed, reformatted and reused. But what are the

privacy implications? Google’s mission is ‘to organise the world’s information’ and in part

this means

process of freeing data, in a process of exposure and reformatting, through techniques like

open APIs and mash-ups (Miller, 2005, p. 1). Others are not so sure. Tim O’Reilly makes a

telling point: ‘the race is on to own certain classes of core data: location, identity, calendaring

of public events, product identifiers and namespaces’ (2005a, p. 3). Brown and Duguid

(2000) argue that the mass dis-intermediation of the Web is actually leading to centralization.

aggregators who ‘tap consumer wisdom collectively by watching what millions ofmash-up. As an early, oft-quoted example, Paul Rademacher’syours. There is a tension here. Some argue that a key component of Web 2.0 is the

3.4 Architecture of Participation

This is a subtle concept, expressing something more than, and indeed building on, the ideas of

collaboration and user production/generated content. The key to understanding it is to give

equal weight to both words

most basic level, this means that the way a service is actually designed can improve and

facilitate mass user participation (i.e. low barriers to use).

At a more sophisticated level, the architecture of participation occurs when, through normal

use of an application or service, the service itself gets better. To the user, this appears to be a

side effect of using the service, but in fact, the system has been designed to take the user

interactions and utilise them to improve itself (e.g. Google search).

It is described in Tim O’Reilly’s original paper (2005a) in an attempt to explain the

importance of the decentralised way in which Bit Torrent works i.e. that it is the network of

downloaders that provides both the bandwidth and data to other users so that the more people

participate, the more resources are available to other users on the network. O’Reilly

concludes: ‘BitTorrent thus demonstrates a key Web 2.0 principle:

gets better the more people use it

ethic of cooperation, in which the service acts primarily as an intelligent broker, connecting

the edges to each other and harnessing the power of the users themselves.’ (p. 2).

18: this is about architecture as much as participation, and at thethe service automatically. There’s an implicit ‘architecture of participation’, a built-in

3.4.1 Participation and openness.

This concept pre-dates discussions about Web 2.0, having its roots in open source software

development communities. Such communities organise themselves so that there are lowered

barriers to participation and a real market for new ideas and suggestions that are adopted by

popular acclamation (O’Reilly, 2003). The same argument applies to Web-based services.

The most successful seem to be, the argument goes, those that encourage mass participation

and provide an architecture (easy-of-use, handy tools etc.) that lowers the barriers to

18

participation to a simple blurring of the lines between producers and consumers.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

Indeed, Chris Anderson, in The Long Tail, seems to get a little confused, equating the architecture of

20

participation. As a Web 2.0 concept, this idea of opening up goes beyond the open source

software idea of opening up code to developers, to opening up content production to all users

and exposing data for re-use and combination in so-called ‘mash-ups’.

3.5 Network effects, power laws and the Long Tail

‘Think deeply about the way the internet works, and build systems and applications that use it

more richly, freed from the constraints of PC-era thinking, and you're well on your way.’

Tim O'Reilly, O’Reilly Radar, 10

The Web is a network of interlinked nodes (HTML documents linked by hypertext) and is

itself built upon the technologies and protocols of the Internet (TCP/IP, routers, servers etc.)

which form a telecommunications network. There are over a billion people online and as

these technologies mature and we become aware of their size and scale, the implications of

working with these kinds of networks are beginning to be explored in detail. Understanding

the topology of the Web and the Internet, its shape and interconnectedness, becomes

important.

There are two key concepts which have a bearing on a discussion of the implications of Web

2.0. The first is to do with the size of the Internet or Web as a network, or, more precisely, the

economic and social implications of adding new users to a service based on the Internet. This

is known as the Network Effect. The second concept is the power law and its implications for

the Web, and this leads us into a discussion of the Long Tail phenomenon. At the heart of

Tim O’Reilly’s comment about the importance of the Internet as a network is the belief that

understanding these effects and the sheer scale of the network involved, and working ‘with

the grain’, will help to define who the Web 2.0 winners and losers will be.

th Dec 2006.

3.5.1 The Network Effect

The Network Effect is a general economic term used to describe the increase in value to the

existing users of a service in which there is some form of interaction with others, as more and

more people start to use it (Klemperer, 2006; Liebowitz and Margolis, 1994). It is most

commonly used when describing the extent of the increase in usefulness of a telecoms system

as more and more users join. When a new telephone user joins the network, not only do they

as an individual benefit, but the existing users also benefit indirectly since they can now ring

a new number and speak to someone they couldn’t speak to before

confined to telecoms and are, for example, widely referred to in relation to technology

products and their markets. There is an obvious parallel with the development of social

software technologies such as MySpace—as a new person joins a social networking site,

other users of the site also benefit. Once the Network Effect begins to build and people

become aware of the increase in a service’s popularity, a product often takes off very rapidly

in a marketplace.

However, this can also lead to people becoming ‘locked in’ to a product. A widely cited

example is the great commercial success of Microsoft Office. As more and more people made

use of Office (because other people did, which meant that they could share documents with an

increasingly larger number of people), so it became much harder to switch to another product

as this would decrease the number of people one could share a document with.

19. Such discussions are not

19

There are many subtleties to network effects and interested readers are pointed to:http://oz.stern.nyu.edu/io/network.html [last accessed 15/01/07].

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

21

One of the implications of the network effect and subsequent lock-in to technology products

is that an inferior product can sometimes be widely, or even universally, adopted, and the

early momentum that developed behind VHS as a video format (over Betamax) is an example

that is often cited. Although economists provide much nuanced argument as to the details of

this (Liebowitz and Margolis, 1994) it is a powerful driver within technology marketing as it

is believed that a new product is more likely to be successful in the long-term if it gains

traction and momentum through early adoption. This has led to intense competition at the

early adopter phase of the innovation demand curve (Farrel and Klemperer, 2006) where

social phenomena such as ‘word of mouth’ and ‘tipping point’ and the human tendency to

‘herd’ with others play an important role (Klemperer, 2006).

As the Internet is, at heart, a telecommunications network, it is therefore subject to the

network effect. In Web 2.0, new software services are being made available which, due to

their social nature, rely a great deal on the network effect for their adoption. Indeed, it could

be argued that their

access to as many other young people as possible in order to find new friends with shared

interests? Educationalists should bear this in mind when reviewing new or proposed Web 2.0

services and their potential role in educational settings. As one lecturer recently found out, it

is easier to join with the herd and discuss this week’s coursework online within FaceBook (a

popular social networking site) than to try and get the students to move across to the

institutional VLE. There are also implications for those involved in the framing of technology

standards (Farrel and Klemperer, 2006), where the need for interoperability is important in

order to avoid forms of lock-in.

raison d'être is the network effect: why join MySpace unless it is to have

3.5.2 How big is the network effect?: the problem with Metcalfe's Law

How big is the network effect? Can we put a finger on the scale of its operation? The scale of

the effect is important because this may have a bearing on the way the architectures of Webbased

systems are designed and, in part, because discussions over the business models for

new technologies that are developed on the basis of Web 2.0 ideas, see these network effects

as important.

It is popularly believed that Robert Metcalfe (the inventor of Ethernet) proposed, in the early

1970s, a network effect argument whereby growth in the value of a telecommunications

network, such as the Internet, is proportional to n (the number of users) squared (i.e. n

Metcalfe’s original idea was simply to conceptualise the notion that although the costs of a

telecoms network rise linearly (a straight line on the graph), the ‘value’ to customers rises by

n

which means that a critical mass has been achieved.

Although this was originally intended as a rough empirical formulation rather than a hard

physical law it was subsequently described as such (‘Metcalfe’s Law’) in 1993 by George

Gilder, a technology journalist, who was influential during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.

However, recent research work has undermined this and subsequent theories that built on top

of it. Briscoe

value of a network of size n grows in proportion to n log(n)’ (p. 2). A growth of this scale,

whilst large, is much more modest than that attributed to Metcalfe. Briscoe

that: ‘much of the difference between the artificial values of the dot-com era and the genuine

value created by the Internet can be explained by the difference between the Metcalfe-fuelled

optimism of n

2)20.2 and therefore at some point there is a cross-over at which value will easily surpass costs,et al. (2006) argue that these formulations are actually incorrect and that: ‘theet al. further argue2 and the more sober reality of n log(n)’ (p. 2).

20

to by telephone), therefore the total value, it is argued, is n(n-1), which is roughly n

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

A communications network with n users means that each can make (n-1) connections (i.e. place calls2.

22

It is important to appreciate how deeply entrenched Metcalfe’s ideas have become. Long after

the boom and bust the idea that there are ‘special effects’ at work on the Internet driven by the

scale and topology

by sociologists to be one of the defining characteristics of the information technology

revolution or paradigm (Castells, 2000

commentators’ fears of an emerging technology ‘Bubble 2.0’ are founded.

So why is the network effect likely to be proportional to n log(n)? The key to understanding

this is to be aware that the term ‘value’ has been identified by Briscoe

nebulous term. What does it mean to say that the value (to me) of the telecommunications

network has increased when one new person becomes a new subscriber to the telephone

system or another website is added to the Web? To understand this we must delve into the

shape of the Web and become aware of the role of power laws operating on it.

21 of the network remains powerful, and indeed the formula is considered22). In terms of Web 2.0 this will matter again ifet al. as a rather

3.5.3 What shape is the Web?: the role of Power Laws

In addition to the physical network effects of the telecoms-based Internet, there are also Webspecific

network effects at work due to the linking that takes place between pieces of Web

content: every time users make contributions through blogs or use services that aggregate

data, the network effect deepens. This network effect is driving the continual improvement of

Web 2.0 services and applications as part of the architecture of participation.

In the previous section we saw how Briscoe

Network Effect was proportional to n log(n) rather than Metcalfe’s n

quantitatively justified by thinking about the role of ‘value’ in the network: adding a new

person to the network does not provide each and every other person on the network with a

single unit of additional value. The additional value varies depending on what use an existing

individual might make of the new one (as an example, some of your email contacts are many

times more useful to you than the rest). As this

distribution, with a long tail, it can be shown mathematically that the network effect is

proportional to n log(n) rather than n

A power law distribution is represented by a continuously decreasing curve that is

characterised by ‘a very small number of very high-yield events (like the number of words

that have an enormously high probability of appearing in a randomly chosen sentence, like

'the' or 'to') and a very large number of events that have a very low probability of appearing

(like the probability that the word 'probability' or 'blogosphere' will appear in a randomly

chosen sentence)’ (Benkler, 2006). Such power law distributions have very long ‘tails’ as the

amplitude of a power law approaches, but never quite reaches zero, as the curve stretches out

to infinity

et al. had made the argument that the size of the2. They argue that this isrelative value is dictated by a power law2.23. This is the Long Tail referred to by Chris Anderson (see below).

21

the ‘shape’ and ‘connectedness’ of the network

22

(n-1).

Although there is, I believe, an error on page 71, where he describes the formula as n to the power of

23

values of x, and k is the power to which x is raised – the exponent. In the graph the k

measure a frequency of about 1/k

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

Formally, a power law is an unequal distribution of the form y=axk where a is a constant for largeth ranked item willth of the first.

23

Figure 1: The Long Tail

The history of research on network effects and Web topology shows that the network effect

formula is not the only facet of life on the Internet and the Web that follows a power law

distribution. In fact, the shape of the Web (the way in which hypertext materials are linked)

and the connection patterns of Internet routers themselves also follow a power law

distribution.

3.5.4 The Long Tail

The Long Tail is the title of a book by

sets out to demonstrate the economic and social implications of the fact that the distribution

of many facets of life on the Web is unequal and follows a power law. It transpires that not

only do the physical interconnectedness of the Internet and the virtual interconnectedness of

hypertext links follow a power law distribution, but, also, that many facets of the actual

interaction that comes about through using tools that utilise these, also follows such a

distribution pattern.

To help understand this concept, Anderson provides an example from the process of selling

music albums to explain this process in the context of retailing on the Web. If one maps the

number of albums sold in a particular week – the frequency – against the name of the album,

it will be possible to see that the left hand side of the graph is dominated by huge sales of the

popular, chart-listed albums receiving radio air-play. Often, but not always, these will be the

newest albums. As one moves towards the right of the graph sales drop off dramatically,

roughly according to the power law curve described above (i.e. the second highest seller will

sell half the number of albums of the first). The curve continues falling away to the right,

following the 1/n rule, but, and this is the crucial point outlined by Chris Anderson, only

there is no artificial barrier to people buying less popular albums

things like physical shelf space, which is limited and expensive, which means that only the

most popular albums, or those receiving the most promotion, are stocked in shops. In a digital

environment, there is no real limit to ‘virtual’ shelf space, so there is also no real limit to the

number of albums that can be ‘stocked’. Up until now, the presence of artificial barriers has

cloaked the extent of the long tail.

Wired Editor, Chris Anderson (2006). In it, Andersonif. Artificial barriers include

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

24

Towards the end of the long tail the sales become smaller and smaller, in fact, tending

towards zero. However, what economists have noticed is that for sales of albums, books and

other artefacts, even the most unpopular items do have some sales. These are the niches at the

far end of the tail. What has excited economists and business analysts is that the total sales at

the lower reaches of the tail, although the items are individually unpopular, add up to a

substantial amount (the area under the graph). According to Anderson, in traditional retail,

new albums account for 63% of sales [in 2005], but online that percentage is reversed (36%

of sales). It is therefore obvious how Amazon has used the long tail to astonishing effect.

Wikipedia, too, is an excellent demonstrator of the concept as it contains tens of thousands

more entries than any published, book-based encyclopaedia could ever hope to collate.

3.5.5 The Implications of Web topology

Why does this matter? What are the implications of these two topological ‘rules’ with regard

to the developing Web 2.0 agenda? Understanding the shape of the Web and the implications

of power law distribution has important implications in general for making use of the Web

and the development of Internet-based technologies. It also has ramifications for debates

about the role and direction of Web 2.0 technologies, in which social connections between

people are a key part of the mix.

Firstly, there are implications from the development of the long tail. Chris Anderson argues

that we are moving towards a culture and economy where the huge number of people

participating in the niches in the tail really matters. Specialism and niche interests,

personalisation and fragmentation are all potentially driven by the march rightwards on the

graph. One of the forces driving this is the ‘democratization’ of the tools of production—the

number of albums released in 2005 increased by 36% but 300,000 free tracks, many of which

were produced by amateurs, were uploaded to MySpace, demonstrating the fact that ‘We are

starting to shift from being passive consumers to active producers’ (Anderson, 2006, p. 63)

and developing towards a culture which writer Doc Searls

Secondly, what does topology tell us about the shape of what might be called our

‘information environment’? How does this impact on the diffusion of new knowledge and the

sociology of new content creation? In the Web 2.0 era in which blogs and wikis are an

important part of the mix, much is made of the Internet ‘conversation’ afforded, particularly

by the rise of the blogosphere. What does our emerging knowledge on the shape of the Web

(its topology) tell us about the state of this conversation? Does the blogosphere actually work

as a coherent Internet-based cultural conversation? Or is it, as some fear, a case of when

everyone can speak, no-one can be heard

conversations reduces the Web to mush.

These are the kinds of questions that Yochai Benkler attempts to tackle in his book,

Wealth of Networks

is an increasingly important tool in the dissemination of new ideas and because blogs form

powerful social community-building tools. To some, this may sound like history repeating

itself with echoes, for example, of past debates about Web portals concentrating power and

debate in much the same way as ‘old’ media. But in fact, it is quite different.

Benkler’s point is that the topology of the Web and the links and connections that form the

conversation within the blogosphere is such that the system forms a kind of active filtration

process. This means that although individually most blogs should be taken with a pinch of

salt, collectively, they provide a mechanism ‘for topically related and interest-based clusters

24 calls producerism.25, in which an uncontrolled mish-mash ofThe(2006). He argues that we need an analysis of the blogosphere because it

24

Doc Searls blog: http://doc.weblogs.com/2006/01/15 [last accessed 14/02/07].

25

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

What Benkler (2006) calls the Babel objection (p.10)

25

to form a peer-reviewed system of filtering, accreditation, and salience generation’ (p. 252).

He believes that this is proving more than an equal to mainstream media and that that while

the Internet, Web and blogosphere may not be a communications utopia, it is a considerable

improvement, from the point of view of political, cultural and public engagement and

understanding, than traditional mass media.

Such an analysis has been made possible through a deepening understanding of the structure

of information on the Web. Although the deeper subtleties of Benkler's arguments are beyond

the scope of this report, and whilst you might not agree with the conclusions of his analysis as

summarised here, it is wise to be aware of the context of these debates and the importance of

the Web’s topology to their discussion.

3.6 Openness

The development of the Web has seen a wide range of legal, regulatory, political and cultural

developments surrounding the control, access and rights of digital content. However, the Web

has also always had a strong tradition of working in an open fashion and this is also a

powerful force in Web 2.0: working with open standards, using open source software, making

use of free data, re-using data and working in a spirit of open innovation. An important

technology in the development of Web 2.0 has been the open source Firefox browser and its

system of extensible plug-ins which allow experimentation. Readers with an interest in

exploring open source in general are referred to the JISC-funded OSSWatch service hosted at

the University of Oxford

26.

3.6.1 Expose the Data

In general, Web 2.0 places an emphasis on making use of the information in the vast

databases that the services help to populate. There is a parallel trend towards opening the

stores of data that have been collected by public sector agencies using taxpayers' money.

Readers will no doubt be aware of the wide-ranging debate within the academic and

publishing communities over open access to scientific and humanities research and the role of

journals in this regard, and this is not unconnected to moves within Higher Education and the

research community to expose experimental data (Frey, 2006).

However, the apparent drive towards openness has to be tempered by the ‘epic scale of data’

that is being collected and aggregated, in non-standard ways, by commercial companies.

There needs to be continual focus on open data exchange and the adoption of open standards.

As Tim O’Reilly said when speaking to the Open Business forum (2006a): ‘The real lesson is

that the power may not actually be in the data itself but rather in the control of access to that

data. Google doesn’t have any raw data that the Web itself doesn’t have, but they have added

intelligence to that data which makes it easier to find things.’

The sharing of data is an issue within Web 2.0. Lawence Lessig recently noted the difference

between 'true' sharing and 'fake' sharing, using YouTube (now Google) as an example: ‘But

never does the system give users an easy way to actually get the content someone else has

uploaded’ (Lessig, 2006). Other services are more forgiving, for example, Backpack and

Wordpress both allow user data to be exported as an XML text file.

3.6.2 Open APIs.

For this discussion see the technology section.

26

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk [last accessed 14/02/07].

26

3.6.3 IPR

Web 2.0, like open source software, is starting to have an effect on intellectual property rights

(IPR) and how they are perceived. One obvious example is the role of copyright. As Chris

Anderson points out, the influx of ‘creators’ at the far end of the tail, who do not rely on

being paid for their content, are choosing to give up some of their copyright protections. At

the same time the scale and reach of Web 2.0 aggregators means that such systems may be

republishing material for which the process of assigning the rights has been obscured: the

Times Higher recently reported how UK academics had unwittingly stumbled across their

own scholarly outputs available for sale on Amazon for a few dollars. Other examples include

the uploading of copyright protected material to YouTube and other services.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

27

4. Technology and standards

‘The goal? To help us more easily develop the next generation of Web applications that are

every bit as good as or better than desktop PC applications.’

Dion Hinchcliffe, blog post, 11

One of the key drivers of the development of Web 2.0 is the emergence of a new generation

of Web-related technologies and standards. This has been underpinned by the powerful,

though not particularly new, idea of the

applications ran on the user’s machine, handled by a desktop operating system such as

MacOS, Windows or Linux, under the Web as platform, umbrella software services are run

within the actual window of the browser, communicating with the network and remote

servers.

One consequence of the Web as platform is that there is less emphasis on the software (as a

package: licensed and distributed) and far more on an application providing a service. The

corollary of this is that there is much less emphasis on the release of software and, indeed,

many well known Web 2.0 services remain in a kind of ‘perpetual beta’.

So why has the idea of the Web as platform become more feasible now? The answer is that

browser technology has moved on to a new stage in its development with the introduction of

what are known as Rich Internet Applications (RIA)

delivering RIAs is Ajax, but there are some alternatives which are mainly based on Flash

technology.

th Sept. 2006.Web as platform27. Whereas in the past, software28. Currently the main technology for

N.B

moved on to the idea of the network as platform. This is especially important for another one

of his key ideas: software above the level of a single device. O’Reilly cites iTunes and TiVo

as exemplars of this approach as, although not Web applications themselves, they leverage it

as part of their infrastructure.

Tim O’Reilly’s conceptualisation of Web technology with respect to Web 2.0 has since

4.1 Ajax

The delivery of Web 2.0 applications and services has been driven by the widespread

adoption of one particular group of technologies which are referred to as Ajax –

Asynchronous Javascript + XML – a term first coined by Jesse James Garrett (Johnson, 2005;

Garrett, 2005). As a term, Ajax attempts to capture both an approach to working with the

Web and the use of a specific range of technologies.

One of the big frustrations for users of traditional HTML-based websites is the time spent

waiting for pages to reload and refresh after the user has chosen an option or clicked on a

hypertext link. Several attempts have been made over the years to improve the dynamism of

webpages through individual techniques such as Javascript, hidden frames, Dynamic HTML

(DHTML), CSS and Microsoft’s XMLHttpRequest ActiveX tool. However, it is really only

27

browsers back in the 1990s, but eventually succumbed to competition from Microsoft, who had a

vested interest in maintaining the

controversy (see, for example, Auletta, 2001, for further details). O’Reilly (2005a) argues that the next

phase will be between Windows/the desktop paradigm ‘the pinnacle of proprietary control’ and the

open platform of the Web, and that ‘battle is no longer unequal, a platform versus a single application,

but platform versus platform, with the question being which platform, and more profoundly, which

architecture, and which business model, is better suited to the opportunity ahead’ (p. 2).

This idea was pioneered by Netscape, the company that developed one of the first successful Webstatus quo. This ‘competition’ was not without considerable

28

For an example of the sophistication and power of these types of interfaces see the Flex demo at:

http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/dashboard/dashboard.html

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

[last accessed 14/02/07].

28

with the introduction of Ajax that this has come together successfully. With Ajax, only small

amounts of information pass to and from the server once the page has first been loaded. This

allows a

impression of richer, more 'natural' applications with the kind of responsive interfaces that are

commonly found in desktop applications (Google calendar is a good example of this).

Although Ajax is a group of technologies (see

sidebar), the core is the Ajax engine, which acts as

an intermediary, sitting within the client’s browser

and facilitating asynchronous communication with

the server of smaller items of information. So, if a

webpage contains a lot of text, plus, as a side-bar, a

graph of the current stock price of the company

being written about, this graph can be

asynchronously updated in real-time without the

whole page being reloaded every few seconds. The

Ajax engine processes every action that would

normally result in a trip back to the server for a page

reload, before making any really necessary referrals

back to the server.

Ajax relies heavily on JavaScript and XML being

accurately and efficiently handled by the browser.

The need for browsers to adhere to existing standards

is therefore becoming an important issue (Johnson,

2005). There is also an emerging debate with regard

to the adoption of emerging standards. For example

there is a debate over standards for the user interface

for Ajax-style applications. Mozilla, for example, is

committed to the XML User Interface (XUL)

standard

Extensible Application Markup Language

(XAML)

The Ajax technologies:

portion of a webpage to be dynamically reloaded in real-time and creates the29 whereas Microsoft are standing by their30.

-

way of presenting

information within the

browser)

HTML/XHTML (a standardsbased

-

CSS

-

(DOM) (a way of

dynamically controlling the

document)

Document Object Model

-

manipulation)

XML (data interchange and

-

manipulation)

XSLT (data interchange and

-

(asynchronous data retrieval

from the server)

XMLHttpRequest31

-

A detailed overview of Ajax and its application in Web 2.0 services is provided by the Open

Ajax group:

Javascript (or ECMA script)http://www.openajax.org/whitepaper.html [last accessed 14/02/07].

4.2 Alternatives to Ajax

There are alternatives to Ajax, the most important of which make use of Flash—the

ubiquitous graphics plug-in from Macromedia (now Adobe) that first appeared in the 1990s.

It allowed sophisticated, but quick-to-download, vector graphics and animation to be

displayed in the browser window. Flash requires a browser plug-in to work, although within

only a few years of its launch 99% of computers had the necessary addition to support it.

Flash is still being used to deliver compelling content within the browser (in fact the Flash

video player is beginning to take off because YouTube have adopted it). It has been used as

29

A mark-up language for user interface graphics. See: http://www.xulplanet.com/

30

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms752059.aspx [last accessed 14/02/07].

31

interface that allows data to be transferred from the client to the server and vice versa, while the user

continues to interact with the webpage. See:

1017-ajax.html?page=2

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

XMLHttpRequest object is implemented in most popular Web browsers and presents a simplehttp://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-10-2005/jw-[last accessed 14/02/07].

29

the basis of other RIA development tools, including Adobe’s Flex and OpenLaszlo.

Developers in HE/FE might be particularly keen on OpenLaszlo as it uses an open source

model: OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and then transparently

compiled to both Flash and non-proprietary Dynamic HTML.

As well as these Flash-based systems there are several emerging technologies which focus on

displaying rich graphics within the browser window. These include Microsoft’s WPF/E

XBAP, and the related XAML

Mozilla’s XUL; and Ethan Nicholas’s proposed, minimalist Java Browser Edition

(Hinchcliffe, 2006).

The introduction of these alternative RIA technologies is not without controversy and debate

amongst developers. Some of these solutions require the addition of a plug-in to the browsers

and make use of core technology that is proprietary. There is also some concern that the

approach taken by these products is ‘breaking the model of the web’ (Hinchcliffe, 2006 p. 1).

32,33 (all of which feature heavily in the Vista operating system);

4.3 SOAP vs REST: A Web architecture debate

‘At the heart of REST is the idea that the web works precisely because it uses a small number

of verbs applied to a large number of nouns.’

McGrath, 2006.

A further strand in the development of Web technology is the use of what are called

lightweight

coupled

viewed in contrast to the production of more robust Web Services which use what are seen as

the ‘heavyweight’ and rather formal techniques of SOAP and WS-*. This debate is focused as

much on issues of genre and style of programming practice and development techniques as it

is on the mandating of any particular technology, although the use of scripting languages such

as Perl, Python, PHP and Ruby, along with technologies such as RSS, Atom and JSON

one of the favourite ways of (lightweight) working.

Without going into this in too much depth, readers should be aware that these discussions

about style within the Web development community are crystallising around two main

approaches: REST and SOAP. This can be seen in a wider context of a generalised, on-going

debate within technology circles over simplicity vs. sophistication. REST stands for

Representational State Transfer, an

Roy Fielding (Costello, 2005). It is not a standard, but describes an approach for a

client/server, stateless architecture whose most obvious manifestation is the Web and which

provides a simple communications interface using XML and HTTP. Every resource is

identified by a URI and the use of HTTP lets you communicate your intentions through GET,

POST, PUT, and DELETE command requests. SOAP and WS-*, on the other hand, are more

formal and use messaging, complex protocols and Web Services Description Language

(WSDL).

One way of visualising the ensuing debate is provided by Sean McGrath. He describes the

Web as an enormous information space, littered with nouns (that can be located with URIs)

and a small number of verbs (GET, POST etc). Where SOAP is more of a Verb Noun system,

or simplified programming models, which facilitate the creation of loosely34 systems. This flexibility is a source of debate since, the lightweight ‘ideal’ is often35 isarchitectural idea and set of principles first introduced by

32

Windows Presentation Foundation is the graphical subsystem feature of .NET Framework 3.0

33

Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML: pronounced "Zammel")

34

communications techniques that allow for flexibility and for one end to change without affecting the

other.

loosely coupled entities make few assumptions about each other, limit dependencies and employ

35

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

JavaScript Object Notation, see Johnson (2005) for details

30

he argues that SOAP/WSDL allows the creation of too many (irregular) verbs (McGrath,

2006). There is considerable debate between communities of developers over these issues.

4.4 Microformats

Microformats are widely used by Web developers to embed semi-structured semantic

information (i.e. some level of ‘meaning’) within an XHTML webpage (Khare, 2006).

Information based on open data formats (a microformat) is buried within certain XHTML

tags (such as ‘class’ or ‘div’) or attributes (such as ‘rel’ or ‘rev’). The information is not used

by the browser for display or layout purposes but it can be picked up by applications such as

search engines

An example of a microformat is the hCard format which allows personal or organisational

contact information based on the vCard standard to be embedded in a webpage

argue that microformats will have significant benefits for the development of the Web

because they will allow bloggers or website owners to embed information that services and

applications can make use of without the need to go and visit the application’s website and

add the data.

Of course, to a certain extent, Web search engines already do this when they crawl a website

or blog and index the content for other people to locate. Microformats provide additional

information for these kinds of services. As an example, provision of information in the

hListing microformat (which is for small ads) on a blog would allow a small ads service (such

as Craigslist) to automatically find your listing. Future versions of the Firefox browser

(possibly version 3) are likely to incorporate functionality that makes use of microformats in

order to automatically move such data into one’s chosen applications or online services (for

example moving any contact information buried in a webpage into Gmail contacts list)–a

process described as being more ‘information broker’ than browsing (Wagner, 2007). An

illustration from Mozilla shows clearly how this vision fits with the Web as Platform idea

The use of microformats is not without its detractors and debates around this subject tend to

be centred around whether they a) help or hinder the process of moving Web content towards

36.37. Proponents38:

36

See: http://microformats.org/about/ [last accessed 14/02/07].

37

hCard in a webpage, see the tutorial at:

last accessed 14/02/07].

See: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard. For those interested in the detail of an implementation of ahttp://usabletype.com/weblog/2005/usable-microformats/ [both

38

fundamentalTypes/informationBroker.jpg_large.jpg

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

http://people.mozilla.com/~faaborg/files/20061213-[last accessed 14/02/07].

31

the Semantic Web vision (they are sometimes referred to as the ‘lowercase semantic web’

(Khare and Celik, 2006) and b) have bearing on the on-going and wide-ranging discussions

over the merits or otherwise of the use of lightweight (REST etc.) or heavyweight (SOA etc.)

approaches and solutions.

39)

4.5 Open APIs.

“When I hear the word open used for services and APIs, I cringe, Just because something's

available on the Internet, is it 'open'?”

Brian Behlendorf

An Application Programming Interface (API) provides a mechanism for programmers to

make use of the functionality of a set of modules without having access to the source code.

An API that doesn’t require the programmer to license or pay royalties is often described as

40, in: Prodromou, 2006, p. 4.

open.

the creation of mash-ups of data from various sources.

One way of finding out what APIs are available is to look at the Programmable Web website

(

are doing with them (it recently registered over three hundred). One of the key examples is

the Google Maps API, which allows Web developers to embed maps within their own sites

(

use Google Maps. Amazon has also started to allow access to its database through

Amazon Web Services (AWS

However, there has been considerable debate over what constitutes ‘openness’. Increasingly

the discussions have moved beyond the parameters of open source software

discussing what open means in the context of a Web-based service like Google (O’Reilly,

2006b). Some argue that for a service it is the data rather than the software that needs to be

open and there are those that hold that to be truly open the user’s data should be able to be

moved or taken back by the user at will. Tim Bray, an inventor of XML, argues that a service

claiming to be open must agree that: ‘Any data that you give us, we’ll let you take away

again, without withholding anything, or encoding it in a proprietary format, or claiming any

intellectual-property [

Such ‘open’ APIs have helped Web 2.0 services develop rapidly and have facilitatedhttp://programmableweb.com/), which keeps track of the number of APIs and what peoplehttp://www.google.com/apis/maps/). Programmable Web claims that over 50% of data mashups41) API.per se and intosic] rights whatsoever.’ 42

39

accessed 14/02/07].

For more on this debate see Brian Kelly: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue44/web-focus/#8 [last

40

Foundation.

One of the founding members of the Apache Group, which became the Apache Software

41

9188051?ie=UTF8&node=3435361&no=3435361&me=A36L942TSJ2AJA

http://www.amazon.com/AWS-home-page-Money/b/ref=sc_fe_l_1_3435361_1/002-3264884-[last accessed 14/02/07].

42

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/28/Open-Data [last accessed 14/02/07].

32

5. Educational and Institutional Issues

There is significant debate over the alleged advantages and disadvantages of incorporating

social software into mainstream education. This is compounded by the fact that there is very

little reliable, original pedagogic research and evaluation evidence and that to date, much of

the actual experimentation using social software within higher education has focused on

particular specialist subject areas or research domains (Fountain, 2005). Indeed, JISC recently

announced an open call to investigate the ways that this technology is being used by staff and

students and identify opportunities for integration with existing institutional IT systems

this section we review some examples of preliminary activity in four areas: learning and

teaching, scholarly research, academic publishing, and libraries.

43. In

5.1 Teaching and learning

One of the most in-depth reviews undertaken in the UK of the potential impact of social

software on education has been carried out by the Nesta-funded FutureLab. Their recent

report,

and discusses them in the context of parallel, developing trends in education. These trends

tend towards more open, personalised approaches in which the formal nature of human

knowledge is under debate and where, within schools and colleges, there is a greater emphasis

on lifelong learning and supporting the development of young people’s skills in creativity and

innovation.

Within higher education, wikis have been used at the University of Arizona's Learning

Technologies Centre to help students on an information studies course who were enrolled

remotely from across the USA. These students worked together to build a wiki-based glossary

of technical terms they learned while on the course (Glogoff, 2006). At the State University

of New York, the Geneseo Collaborative Writing Project deploys wikis for students to work

together to interpret texts, author articles and essays, share ideas, and improve their research

and communication skills collectively

students to reflect and comment on either their work or others. Wiki-style technology has also

been used in a tool developed at Oxford University to support teachers with ‘design for

learning’

Bryan Alexander (2006) describes social bookmarking experiments in some American

educational research establishments and cites Harvard’s H2O as an exemplar project

Alexander also believes that wikis can be useful writing tools that aid composition practice,

and that blogs are particularly useful for allowing students to follow stories over a period of

time and reviewing the changing nature of how they are commented on by various voices. In

these scenarios, education is more like a conversation and learning content is something you

perform some kind of operation on rather than ‘just’ reading it.

In the UK, Warwick University has provided easy to use blogging facilities to allow staff and

students to create their own personal pages. The intention is that the system will have a

Social Software and Learning (Owen et al., 2006), reviews the emerging technologies44. Using wikis in this way provides the opportunity for45.46.

43

14/02/07].

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities/funding_calls/2007/01/web_2_use.aspx [last accessed

44

14/02/07].

http://node51.cit.geneseo.edu/WIKKI_TEST/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page [last accessed

45

http://phoebe-app.conted.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/WikiStart [last accessed 14/02/07].

46

content), which can be tagged and subscribed to as RSS feeds. Playlists can be compiled by anyone and

are published under the Creative Commons. See:

14/01/07].

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

H20 provides for shared playlists (shared lists of readings, blog postings, podcasts and otherhttp://h2o.law.harvard.edu/index.jsp [last accessed

33

variety of education-related uses such as developing essay plans, creating photo galleries and

recording personal development

But these developments are not without debate. Apart from concerns around learner attention

(in an ‘always-on’ environment), identity, the emerging digital divide between those with

access to the necessary equipment and skills and those who do not, there are other, specific,

tensions. While some experts focus on the idea of ‘self production’ to argue that learners find

the process of learning more compelling when they are producers as much as consumers

others argue that the majority of learners are not interested in accessing, manipulating and

broadcasting material. Indeed, there is serious concern that ‘techno-centric’ assumptions will

obscure the fact that many young people are so lacking in motivation to engage with

education that once these new technologies are integrated into the education environment,

they will lose their initial attraction.

It is beyond the limited scope of a TechWatch report to do real justice to the wide-ranging

debate over of the pedagogical issues but it is perhaps important to point out some of the

implications that these issues will have for education in the same way as other sectors:

47.48,

•

‘social dimension’ of social software. In particular, more work is required in order to

understand the social dimension and this will require us to really ‘get inside the heads

of people who are using these new environments for social interaction’ (Kukulska-

Hulme, 2006, 16:50).

there is a lack of understanding of students’ different learning modes as well as the

•

questions. If students arrive at colleges and universities steeped in a more socially

networked Web, perhaps firmly entrenched in their own peer and mentoring

communities through systems like MySpace, how will education handle challenges to

established ideas about hierarchy and the production and authentication of

knowledge?

Web 2.0 both provides tools to solve technical problems and presents issues that raise

•

and provide institutional tools to do so? How will it handle issues such as privacy and

plagiarism when students are developing new social ways of interacting and

working? How will it deal with debates over shared authorship and assessment, the

need to always forge some kind of online consensus, and issues around students'

skills in this kind of shared and often non-linear manner of working, especially

amongst science/engineering students (Fountain, 2005).

One area where this is already having an impact is the development of Virtual Learning

Environments (VLEs). Proponents of institutional VLEs argue that they have the advantage

of any corporate system in that they reflect the organisational reality. In the educational

environment this means that the VLE connects the user to university resources, regulations,

help, and individual, specific content such as modules and assessment. The argument is that

as the system holds this kind of data there is the potential to tailor the interface and the

learning environment (such as type of learning resources, complexity of material etc.) to the

individual, particularly where e-learning is taking place, although so far relatively little use

has been made of, for example, usage statistics of VLEs or tailored content to substantiate

these claims.

However, others now question whether the idea of a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)

even makes sense in the Web 2.0 world. One Humanities lecturer is reported as having said:

“I found out all my students were looking at the material in the VLE but going straight to

How will this affect education’s own efforts to work in a more collaborative fashion

47

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/its/elab/services/webtools/blogs/about/

48

that social software technologies help to develop this kind of collaborative production.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

Cych (2006) cites the work of Steven Heppel and his ideas on symmetry and participation to argue

34

Facebook

might as well join them and ask them questions in their preferred space.”

49 to use the discussion tools and discuss the material and the lectures. I thought I50

Partly in response to these concerns, there has been research and discussion devoted to the

development of a more personalised version of the VLE concept – PLEs – to make use of the

technologies being developed in order to bring in social software and e-portfolios (Wilson,

2006).

5.2 Scholarly Research

Tim Berners-Lee’s original work to develop the Web was in the context of creating a

collaborative environment for his fellow scientists at CERN and in an age when interdisciplinary

research, cutting across institutional and geographical boundaries, is of increasing

relevance, simple Web tools that provide collaborative working environments are starting to

be used. The open nature of Web 2.0, its easy-to-use support for collaboration and

communities of practice, its ability to handle metadata in a lightweight manner and the nonlinear

nature of some of the technology (what Ted Nelson once called

attractive in the research environment (Rzepa, 2006) and there are four specific technology

areas which have seen uptake and development:

Firstly, folksonomies are starting to be used in scientific research environments. One example

is the CombeChem work at Southampton University which involved the development of a

formal ontology for laboratory work which was derived from a folksonomy based on

established working practices within the laboratory

some debate about the role and applicability of folksonomies within formal knowledge

management environments, not least because of the lack of semantic distinction between the

use of tags. A recent JISC report

reviewed some of the characteristics of ‘social tagging’ systems and the report notes that

‘Few evaluative, systematic studies from professional circles in knowledge organisations,

information science or semantic web communities have appeared to date’ (p. 39). Issues

raised by the JISC report include the obvious lack of any control over the vocabulary at even

the most basic level (for example, word forms – plural or singular – and use of numbers and

transliteration) and goes on to highlight shortcomings related to the absence of rules in the

tagging process, for example, on the granularity or specificity of tags. The main

recommendation of the report is that social tagging should not replace indexing and other

knowledge organisation efforts within HE/FE. There are also specific recommendations (see

pages 40–43) which are beyond the scope of this report.

Some researchers are, however, beginning to investigate whether it could be fruitful to

combine socially created tags with existing, formal ontologies (Al-Khalifa and Davis, 2006).

Tagging does provide for the marking up of objects in environments where controlled

indexing is not taking place, and as the tagging process is strongly 'user-centric', such tagging

can reflect topicality and change very quickly. We are also now starting to see folksonomies

being developed alongside expert vocabularies as a way of enabling comparative study e.g. of

the meaning-making process around artworks

solutions known as

shared vocabulary with help of classification specialists.

intertwingled51) are all52. However, there is, to put it mildly,Terminology services and technology (Tudhope et al., 2006)53. We are also beginning to see compromisecollabulary in which a group of domain users and experts collaborate on a

49

http://www.facebook.com/ A popular social networking site

50

Lawrie Phipps at JISC ALT-C stand.

Comment by attendee at ALT-C, 2006 (anonymous). Taken with thanks from private notes made by

51

to express the deep inter-connectedness and complexity of knowledge.

52

see: http://www.combechem.org/tour.php?tourpage=onto.html [last accessed 14/01/07].

53

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

see the Steve museum project: http://www.steve.museum/ [last accessed 12/01/07].

35

Secondly, although evidence is only anecdotal, blogging seems to be becoming more popular

with researchers of all disciplines in order to engage in peer debate, share early results or seek

help on experimental issues (Skipper, 2006). However, it has had no serious review of its use

in higher education (Placing, 2005). Butler (2005) argues that blogging tends to be used by

younger researchers and that many of these make use of anonymous names to avoid being

tracked back to their institutions. Some disciplines are so fast-moving, or of sufficient public

interest, that this kind of quick publishing is required (Butler cites climate change as one

example).

There has also been a trend towards collective blogs (Varmazis, 2006) such as ScienceBlogs

54

and RealClimate

as well as blog-like, peer-reviewed sites such as Nature Protocols

considerable scope to widen the audience for scientific papers and to assist in the process of

public understanding of science and research (Amsen, 2006). Indeed, Alison Ashlin and

Richard Ladle (2006), argue that scientists need to get involved in the debates that are

generated across the blogosphere where science discussions take place. These tools also have

the potential to facilitate communication between researchers and practitioners who have left

the university environment.

Thirdly, social tagging and bookmarking have also found a role in science (Lund, 2006). An

example of this approach is CiteULike

organise the academic papers they are reading.

Finally, there have also been developments in scientific data mash-ups and the use of Web

Services to link together different collections of experimental data (Swan, 2006). Examples

include AntBase

species, and the USA-based water and environmental observatories project (Liu

This corresponds to moves in recent years to open up experimental data and provide it to

other researchers as part of the process of publication (Frey, 2006) and the Murray-Rust

Research Group is particularly well known for this

integrating research experiment datasets into digital libraries

However, opinion is divided over the extent to which social software tools are being used by

the research community. Declan Butler, for a recent article in Nature (2005), conducted

interviews with researchers working across science disciplines and concluded that social

software applications are not being used as widely as they should in research, and that too

many researchers see the formal publication of journal and other papers as the main means of

communication with each other.

55, in which working scientists communicate with each other and the public,56. These tools provide57 a free service to help academics share, store, and58 and AntWeb, which use Web Services to bring together data on 12,000 antet al., 2007).59. The E-bank project is also looking at60.

5.3 Academic publishing

Speed of communication in fast-moving disciplines is also a benefit offered to academic

publishing, where social software technologies increasingly ‘form a part of the spectrum of

legitimate, accepted and trusted communication mechanisms’ (Swan, 2006, p. 10). Indeed, in

the long run, the Web may become the first stage to publish work, with only the best and most

durable material being published in paper books and journals, and some of this may introduce

a beneficial informality to research (Swan, 2006).

54

http://www.scienceblogs.com/channel/about.php [last accessed 14/01/07].

55

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2004/12/about/ [last accessed 14/01/07].

56

http://www.nature.com/nprot/prelaunch/index.html [last accessed 14/01/07].

57

http://www.citeulike.org/

58

http://www.antbase.org/

59

See: http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/wikis/wwmm/index.php/Main_Page [last accessed 14/02/07].

60

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/ebank-uk/ [last accessed 14/02/07].

36

Such developments are obviously closely tied up with the Open Access debate and the need

to free data in order to provide other researchers with access to that data: these datasets will

need to be open access before they can be mashed. Those involved in the more formal

publishing of research information are actively working on projects that make use of Web 2.0

technologies and ideas. For example, Nature is working on two developments: Open Text

Mining Interface (OTMI) and Connotea, a system which helps researchers organize and share

their references

Some publishers are also experimenting with new methods of a more open peer reviewing

process (Rogers, 2006). Once again, Nature is devoting resources to a system where authors

can choose a 'pre-print' option that posts a paper on the site for anyone to comment on, whilst

in the meantime the usual peer-reviewing processes are going on behind the scenes. Another

website, arXiv

on. In addition, the SPIRE project

dissemination.

61.62, has also been providing pre-publication papers for colleagues to comment63 provides a peer-to-peer system for research

5.4 Libraries, repositories and archiving

As with other aspects of university life the library has not escaped considerable discussion

about the potential change afforded by the introduction of Web 2.0 and social media (Stanley,

2006). Berube (2007) provides a very readable summary of some of the implications for

libraries and there have been debates about how these technologies may change the library, a

process sometimes referred to as ‘Library 2.0’ a term coined by Mike Casey (Miller, 2006).

Proponents argue that new technologies will allow libraries to serve their users in better ways,

emphasise user participation and creativity, and allow them to reach out to new audiences and

to make more efficient use of existing resources. Perhaps the library can also become a place

for the production of knowledge, allowing users to produce as well as consume? Others worry

that the label is a diversion from the age-old task of librarianship.

However, what is interesting about many of these debates is that they are very broad,

sometimes contradictory, and much of the discussion can often be seen in the context of the

wider public debate concerning the operation of public services in a modern, technology-rich

environment in which user expectations have rapidly changed (Crawford, 2006), rather than

Web 2.0

mechanisms and the inter-library loans process (Dempsey, 2006). People worry that library

users expect the level of customer service for inter-library loans to be comparable to

Amazon's, and while this is obviously an important aspect of what Amazon provides, it is not

one of its Web 2.0 features.

This is not to say that there is no genuinely Web 2.0-style thinking going on within the

Library 2.0 debate (for example, in the USA, the Ann Arbor public library online catalogue

utilises borrowers’ data to produce an Amazon-style, ‘readers who borrowed this book, also

borrowed’ display feature

mash-ups to provide a personalised Google homepage with library data streams showing

per se. For example, comparison has been made between Amazon’s book delivery64 and John Blyberg’s Go Go Google Gadget65, which uses data

61

accessed 14/02/07].

See: http://blogs.nature.com/wp/nascent/2006/04/web_20_in_science.html for further details [last

62

http://arxiv.org/

63

http://spire.conted.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/trac.cgi [last accessed 28/01/07].

64

scroll to the bottom of the page). See also LibraryThing:

28/01/07].

available at: http://www.aadl.org/cat/seek/record=1028781 [last accessed 28/01/07] (you will need tohttp://www.librarything.com/ [last accessed

65

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

available at: http://www.blyberg.net/2006/08/18/go-go-google-gadget/ [last accessed 28/01/07].

37

popular lendings, items you have checked out, etc.), only that it might be helpful for

librarians, in terms of thinking about the future of libraries, to separate out the Web 2.0 ideas,

services and applications from the technology and more general concerns about ‘user-centred

change’. How, for example, might libraries take part of the ethos of the long tail (everything

has a value that goes beyond how many times it is requested) and not only learn from the way

Amazon has applied it, but perhaps even better it?

This idea is not without precedent, especially in areas where traditional library skills and

processes can be mapped to the development of Web 2.0-style applications and services, and

information retrieval (IR) is an interesting case in point. Mark Hepworth (2007) argues that

tagging is a form of indexing, blog trackbacking is similar to citation analysis, blog-rolling

echoes chaining and RSS syndication feeds can be considered a form of ‘alerting’—all

recognised concepts within discussions of IR. This is not to say that they are necessarily the

same: whereas traditional IR normally works with an index based on a closed collection of

documents, Web searching involves a different type of problem with an enormous scale of

documents/pages, a dynamic document base, huge variety of subject domains and other

factors (Levene, 2006). However, we can say that the thinking and discussion that has taken

place within IR both in traditional systems and more recently in the context of the Web in

general (Gudiva, 1997) will have some bearing on an understanding of Web 2.0 services and

applications. It may even be the case that Web 2.0 ideas and applications can contribute

solutions to some of the recognised existing problems within IR with regard to user behaviour

and usability issues (Hepworth, 2007), and even that the newer Web technologies such as

RIA may be harnessed to help the user or learner to organise and view data or information

more effectively.

Another reason why it may be important to think about the ideas behind Web 2.0 is in the

issue of the archiving and preservation of content generated by Web 2.0-style applications

and services.

5.4.1 Collecting and preserving the Web

‘The goal of a digital preservation system is that the information it contains remains

accessible to users over a long period of time.’

Rosenthal, 2005, section 2.

‘The most threatened documents in modern archives are usually not the oldest, but the

newest.’

Brown and Duguid, 2000 p. 200

The Web is an increasingly important part of our cultural space and for this reason the

archiving of material and the provision of a ‘cultural memory’ is seen as a fundamental

component of library work (Tuck, 2007), and there has been considerable discussion, debate

and research work undertaken in this area (Tuck, 2005a; Lyman, 2002). At the British Library

it is the policy that ‘the longer term aim is to consider web-sites [

collect within an overall collection development policy’ (Tuck, 2005a). However, there are

many issues to consider with regard to the archiving and preservation of digital information

and artefacts in general, and there are also issues which are particularly pertinent to the

archiving and preservation of the Web (Mesanès, 2006). Currently, the only large-scale

preservation effort for the open Web is the Internet Archive

small-scale initiatives that focus on particular areas of content (e.g. the UK Web Archive

sic] as just another format to66, although there are a number of

66

http://www.archive.org/index.php

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

38

Consortium, which focuses on medical, Welsh, cultural and political materials of

significance

Within the UK, the UK Web Archiving Consortium (UKWAC) is engaging with the

technical, standards and IPR related issues for collection and archiving of large scale parts of

the UK Web infrastructure (Tuck, 2005b). This work has included the initial use of archiving

software developed in Australia (Pandas), the development of a Web harvesting management

system (Web Curator Tool) and investigation work into the longer-term adoption new

standards, such as the emerging WARC storage format for Web archiving (Beresford, 2007).

There have also been a number of reports considering the issue of preservation of the Web. In

2003, for example, JISC and the Wellcome Trust prepared a report on general technical and

legal issues (Day, 2003) and UKOLN recently developed a general roadmap for the

development of digital repositories, which should be considered when reviewing the

difficulties of preserving newer Web material (Heery, 2006).

The Day report (2003) outlined two phases to the process of preserving Web content:

collection and archiving. Collection encompasses automatic harvesting (using crawler

technologies); selective preservation, which uses mirror-sites to replicate complete websites

periodically; and asking content owners to deposit their material on a regular basis. Secondly,

there is the process of archiving where a respected institution creates a record of the material

collected and provides access for future users.

However, part of the problem for the process of preservation is that the Web has a number of

issues associated with it which make it a non-trivial problem to develop archiving solutions

(Masanès, 2006; Day, 2003; Lyman, 2002; Kelly 2002). For example:

5.4.1.1 The Web is transient.

The Web is growing very rapidly, is highly distributed but also tightly interconnected (by

hyperlinks) and on a global scale. This makes the overall topology of the Web transient and it

becomes extremely difficult to know what’s ‘out there’—its true scope. In addition, the

average life span of webpages is short: 44 days in Lyman (2002, p. 38) and 75 days in Day

(2006, p. 177). Dealing with this ephemerality is difficult, especially when combined with the

fact that the Web can be considered an active publishing system (Masanès, 2006) in that

content changes frequently and can be combined and aggregated with content from other

information systems.

5.4.1.2 Web technologies are not always conducive to traditional archiving practices.

Problems with archiving the Web are inherently caught up with technology issues. At a very

basic level, as with all digital content, Web content is deeply entangled with or dependent on

technology, protocols and formats. For example, the average page contains links to five

sourced objects such as embedded images or sound files with various formats: GIF, JPEG,

PNG, MPEG etc. (Lyman, 2002). These protocols and formats evolve rapidly and content that

doesn't migrate will quickly become obsolete. In addition, information is always presented

within the context of a graphical look and feel which ‘evokes’ a user experience (Lyman,

2002) and content may even be said to exhibit a ‘behaviour’ (Day, 2006). This varies

according, in part, to the particular browser/plug-in versions in use and it is often argued that

preservation should attempt to retain this context. It is the difference between what Clay

67).

67

http://info.webarchive.org.uk/index.html

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

A consortium of Wellcome, British Library and National Library of Wales

39

Shirky calls ‘preserving the bits’ and ‘preserving essence’

about migrating not only the data but also the manner in which it was presented?

However, technology issues also go much deeper. Web content's

concept in preservation) is not simple. A webpage’s cardinality might be considered to be

one, as it is served by a single Web server and its location is provided by the unique identifier,

the URL. Masanès (2006) argues this means that, in archiving terms, it is more like a work of

art than a book and is subject to similar vulnerabilities, as the server can be removed or

updated at any time. However, this is further complicated by the fact that a webpage's

cardinality can be considered one and it can be many, at the same time. A large, perhaps

almost unlimited, number of visitors can obtain a ‘copy’ of the page for display within their

browser (an

time

permanently depends on its unique source (i.e. the publisher’s server) to exist.

In addition, they way HTTP works poses problems for archiving as it provides information on

a request-by-request basis, file by file. It cannot, unlike FTP, be asked to provide a list of the

whole set of files on a server or directory. This means that there is an extra layer of effort

involved as the extent of a website has to be uncovered before it can be archived. This

problem can be extrapolated to the whole of the Web.

The main method for gathering this information about the extent of a website, either for

search engine indexing or for archiving, is to follow the paths of links from one page to

another (so-called ‘crawling’) and there are two main issues with this:

68. With this in mind, how do we gocardinality69 (an importantinstantiation) and the actual details of the page that is served may well vary each70. This complex cardinality is an issue for preservation in that it means that a webpage

•

Robots Exclusion Protocol (Levene, 2006). These notices issue instructions about the

manner in which crawling can be carried out and might, for example, restrict which

parts of a site can be visited or impose conditions as to how often a crawl can be

carried out.

Websites can issue ‘politeness’ notices (in robots.txt files on the server) using the

•

pages or even whole websites un-archived. There are two main reasons for this:

Robot crawlers may not actually reach all parts of the Web and this leaves some

o

some websites are never linked to anything else

o

kept behind password-protected front-ends or is buried in databases in what

is known as the ‘deep’, ‘hidden’ or ‘invisible’ Web (Levene, 2006). Levene

estimates that the size of this hidden Web is perhaps 400 to 550 times the

extent of standard webpages.

Content in the 'hidden Web' needs a specific set of user interactions in order to access it and

such access is difficult to automate. Some, limited, headway has been made with this problem

by attempting to replicate these human actions with software agents that can detect HTML

forms and learn how to fill them in, using what are known as hidden Web agents (Masanès,

a large proportion of the Web cannot be reached by crawling as the content is

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See: http://discuss.longnow.org/viewtopic.php?t=39 and

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4000153761832846346&q=longnow.org&pl=true

accessed 28/01/07].

[last

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with. In the traditional case of a book, a number of copies, maybe 2,000 of each edition are published,

printed and distributed (each of which is the same in terms of content). There is no need for an archive

to use a particular one of these copies in order to preserve a representation of that edition. In this

instance, the book's cardinality would be 2,000.

In simple terms the number of instances (or copies) of each work that are available to deal/work

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take a copy of that page then it is unique on the date and at the time shown, but will not be the same on

the next visit.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

A simple example: Many website homepages graphically display the current time and date. If we

40

2006). One alternative requires direct collaboration with a site’s owner, who agrees to expose

the full list of files to an archive process through a protocol such as OAI-MHP

alternative, which saves the site’s owner from setting up a protocol and which is useful for

websites that offer a database gateway which holds metadata about a document collection, is

to extract (

documents, in an open format. In effect, the database has been replaced, at the archive, by an

XML file. This is the approach being facilitated by the deepArc tool that is being developed

by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France as part of the International Internet Preservation

Consortium (IIPC)

5.4.1.3 Legal issues pertaining to preservation and archiving are complex

Day (2003) argues that another major problem that relates to Web archiving is its legal basis.

In particular, there are considerable intellectual property issues involved in preserving

databases (as opposed to documents) which are compounded by general legal issues

surrounding copyright, lack of legal deposit mechanisms, liability issues relating to data

protection, content liability and defamation that pose problems for the collection and

archiving of content.

71. Anotherdeep mine) the metadata directly from the database and archive it, together with the72.

5.4.2 Preserving content produced through Web 2.0 services and applications.

As we have seen, there are considerable issues around the long-term preservation of the Web,

but how do these issues change with the introduction of Web 2.0 ideas and services?

Material produced through Web 2.0 services and applications is clearly dynamic, consisting

of blog postings, data mash-ups, ever-changing wiki pages and personal data that have been

uploaded to social networking sites. Some would argue that much of this content is of limited

value and does not warrant significant preservation efforts. On the other hand, Web 2.0

material is still part of the Web and others argue that since the Web is playing a major role in

academic research, scientific outputs and learning resources there is a strong case for

preserving at least some of it (Day, 2003) and a clear argument is now developing for the

preservation of blogs and wikis (Swan, 2006). Blogs in particular clearly form part of a

conversation that is increasingly part of our culture. From the point of view of education,

increasingly, published academic research will make reference to Web 2.0-type material, for

example, a peer group wiki focused on an experiment.

There are two key questions one can ask of Web 2.0 with regard to preservation. Firstly, to

what extent does Web 2.0 content form part of the hidden Web? Most Web-based archiving

tools make use of crawler technology and the issue here is whether the Web is evolving

towards an information architecture that ‘resists traditional crawling techniques’ (Masanès,

2006, p. 128). Getting at the underlying data that is being used in a wide variety of Web 2.0

applications is a major problem: many Web 2.0 services and mash-ups use layered APIs

which sit on top of very large dynamic databases. Unfortunately, technology to allow the

preservation of data from a dynamic database is only just beginning to be developed

might involve the development of some kind of ‘wayback machine’ that reconstructs a

database’s state at a specific time (Rosenthal, 2006).

In addition, the APIs used by many of the Web 2.0 systems are often described as open, but

they are, in fact, proprietary and subject to change; much of Web 2.0 is in perpetual beta and

73. This

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Open Archive Initiative Metadata Harvesting Protocol

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http://netpreserve.org/about/index.php [last accessed 14/02/07].

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references section for a selection of his work.

JISC Technology and Standards Watch, Feb. 2007 Web 2.0

Peter Buneman at the University of Edinburgh has begun to develop the basic concept. See the

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preservation mechanisms that make use of these interfaces would need to be able handle this

kind of change.

Secondly, how important is it to capture the graphical essence of Web 2.0 content and is this

technically possible? Many Web 2.0 services utilise a strong graphical look and feel in order
See: http://www.podcasting.blog-city.com/tags/?/ukhepodnet [last accessed 10/02/07].