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Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0

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These days, if you have a hammer, everything looks like Hammer 2.0.  The hype around Web 2.0 inspired this naming convention, and I've now seen CRM 2.0, Health 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

Web 2.0 is the second-generation of web companies, the rebirth after the dot-com crash.  What is, and what is not, Web 2.0 is subject to debate, but here's a quick comparison to Web 1.0:

While Tim Berners-Lee always intended for the World Wide Web to be a two-way communication medium for reading and writing, most early sites were for one-way communication, with a company describing itself in brochureware.  Web 2.0 sites build interaction and community and shared content.

Too often Web 1.0 was authoritarian and top-down-"this is the way it is".  Web 2.0 is democratic and bottom-up.  Instead of the New York Times 1.0 site telling you what the important stories of the day were, Digg.com and Buzz.Yahoo.com shows the stories users have voted the most important.

Web 1.0 sites were simply to be read passively.  Web 2.0 sites invite participation:  voting content up or down, rating it, commenting on it, submitting new posts.  By 2000, Amazon.com was letting you review books, but these days you can participate in many more ways:  create lists of products (top 10 lists, lists of classics by certain authors, etc.), write product guides and edit wiki articles (Amapedia).  In 2000, Amazon was using its sites to sell products it stocked;  in the Web 2.0 world, Amazon now lets you list and sell your own new and used books and products through their site as well.

Web 1.0 sites were static and rarely changed (except for news sites), where Web 2.0 sites are dynamic and change hourly or more often, reflecting all of those user contributions.

Web 1.0 sites were closed, but Web 2.0 sites are collaborative.  Where CNN.com quickly became the leading Web 1.0 news web site, CNN.com now has a sister site, iReport.com, where videos are submitted by users.  CNN then mines this content and fact-checks some videos for inclusion on CNN.com.

So that's a quick overview of Web 2.0.  What does it mean for marketing?  Join Brian Koma, myself and Sid Banerjee (CEO and founder of Clarabridge) next Wednesday for an AMA webinar, "Marketing in a Web 2.0 World", where we talk about the Seven Wonders of the Web 2.0 World and give examples of harnessing Web 2.0 for continuous feedback and innovation.

Update (1/28/2009): You can view an archive of the "Marketing in a Web 2.0 World" webcast. Thanks to a comment from Andres of Choice Media Group, I ended up redoing my "Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0" slide to reflect his elegant dichotomy:

The development of this slide itself turns out to be a great illustration of Web 2.0 in action!