Month: Mai 2006

Home / 2006 / Mai

Web 2.0: Hype or Reality?

Investment banking firm Arma Partners has an excellent white paper:

“The Internet is currently in a “Back to the future” phase. Occasionally we have to pinch ourselves to make sure we ´re not reliving a dream from 1999. Today, Internet companies are cropping up again by the thousands; numerous companies are being bought out by high-flyers and bricks-and-mortar companies. Even the VCs are muscling back into the risk game. (…)

This paper looks at:

  • the current state of the Internet
  • some of the driving forces behind it, including technology, socio-cultural forces and economic changes
  • the implications of technology standards, such as RSS/Atom, AJAX and SOAP
  • the long-term potential of these technologies on content creation, distribution and aggregation
  • the global geographies, which represent dramatically different penetration and adoption rates, income levels and demographics.”

It Feels Like 1998 All Over Again

Justin Hibbard and Heather Green from BusinessWeekonline wonders whether the Web 2.0 VC/startup mania is similar to 1998:

“Although no one agrees on the precise meaning of Web 2.0, its ideology holds that a second generation of Internet companies will improve on the groundwork laid by the first generation. Like the New Economy and other theories that accompanied past bubbles, Web 2.0 maintains that we have entered a new era in which the rules are different: Net startups no longer require lots of capital, they can build cheaply on Net infrastructure that didn’t exist 10 years ago, and a critical mass of consumers is now online. “

Social Media Attract Greater Attention

Carol Krol from BtoBOnline on blogs and other forms of social media are attracting more notice among business marketers:

“Novell said it currently has three strategic blogs: PR Blog, CTO Blog and CMO Blog, in addition to numerous employee blogs. The blogs enable Novell to converse with the external world, and that means both positive and negative feedback comes through (…)”

Web 2.0 for Designers

The article “Web 2.0 for Designers” from Richard MacManus & Joshua Porter has six main themes covering design in the Web 2.0 world:

  • Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
  • Providing Web services (moving away from place)
  • Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
  • Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
  • Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
  • Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)