I thought both these are going to change how we work:

1. Free version of Photoshop will be available online
2. IBM gets Google gadgets

I am sure other companies (MS, Yahoo, etc. etc.) will follow suit…

I was on alexa.com a couple of days ago and again today. Today digg.com is ranked #77 in terms of traffic (on a related note, since digg.com is advertisement driven I wonder how much advertisement dollars that means for them!). NYTimes.com is ranked 119. So digg.com is many many spots ahead of nytimes.com. Interesting.

Does that mean more people go to digg.com than to New York Times’ website to get news & information?

Earlier this month Tim O’Reilly was part of a panel of speakers that talked about Web 2.0 and other related topics. Jawspeak has a very summary of the event here: http://www.jawspeak.com/2007/02/18/thoughts-from-thomas-friedmans-talk/

The topic of Web 2.0 came up at work the other day . Luke and Jen, a couple of fine folks I work with, wondered what it really meant. They are really smart folks, are very tech-savvy and I respect them a lot; they are not developers. I explained them Web 2.0 by contrasting it with Web 1.0:

With Web 1.0, everyone published content on the web. With Web 2.0 everyone collaborates on the content, and more importantly, decides which content is good and which should be buried.

It’s great that Web 2.0 is all around us and is used by millions of consumers on the Internet. (Note - I said consumers and not users since I believe that we are now really consumers in this huge marketing channel called the World Wide Web; more on that in a future post). But how does Web 2.0 impact the business world? How do business take advantage of Web 2.0; or the question even before that is how does Web 2.0 apply to the business world?

I found a very good post about this on WebDiva’s blog. In it she talks about how business can adopt Web 2.0. In particular she uses a term “community-based buisness”.

I believe that is the biggest change that Web 2.0 brings about for businesses. Customers, vendors, suppliers are no longer outside entities for a business. Businesses have to accept the paradigm shift that everyone now expects direct and frequent communication with the responsible person at the business for the specific issue or item they have. For example, customers expect to talk to Product Managers directly without having to deal with an Account Manager as the go-between. Suppliers will want to talk to the engineer for his/her specific technical requirements without dealing with a procurement department. Prospective employees want to hear from current employees directly and not the HR dog-n-pony show.

All of this is happening because Web 2.0 is essentially the democratization of the Internet. To adopt Web 2.0, businesses should consider doing the following:

1. Allow a technical writer to write the first draft of the product manual. But make the manual a wiki. Then allow Customer Support and customers themselves to edit and update the product manual; as users they know the product better than anyone else. The tech writer simply becomes an administrator of the manual at that point, validating the changes made to the manual and making sure the manual is well formatted and accurate.

2. My experience has been that a bad hire is far worse than an open position. Allow employees to blog openly. Yes, some of them may say things that Marketing or Management don’t want said. But put control and compliance in place for that. Prospective employees will read the blogs and have real insight in to their prospective employer and their prospective job.

3. Provide APIs for your product. Your product will be extended in ways you never imagined. Suddenly your product will have “features” it never had before; you will be able to reach new customers and drive revenue.

4. Let the voice of many dictate your product roadmap. Allow for Digg style voting of ideas, product features, or even company picnic locations! You will be able to build what a majority of your customers want, not just what the highest paying customer of the month wants.

I just saw this excellent YouTube video describing Web 2.0. It fits in very well with my definition of Web 2.0 that I posted earlier - Web 2.0 is connecting people. Take a look:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE].

The video is just over 3 mins long and is very well done.

As I look at the definition of Web 2.0 on Wikipedia, one thing that stands out most to me is the “social” element. All the technologies - blogs, social bookmarking, wikis, podcasts, RSS feeds, APIs, etc. - at the very essence bring about a “connecting of people”. For example -

• Blogs help people post their thoughts and lives openly to others;
• Social bookmarking helps one share what they found on the Internet with others;
• Wikis let people document collaboratively.

Now, I will go one step further and say that these very Web 2.0 technologies allow a recipient of the information to quickly turn around and comment, reply or influence that original piece of information.

• I can post my comments openly about any blog posts I read; this allows me to either agree, disgaree or present a different perspective than the one presented by the author. My comments are literally physically tied to the original blog post and literally physically very close to the original blog post
• I can approve a social bookmark or bury it; my response is literally physically tied to the original bookmark and close to it
• In a wiki, I am one of the many authors; or I can post comments and influence readers of the original content

To me that is what Web 2.0 is all about - democratization of the Internet. It’s a step beyond what happened when web sites first came about. With web sites, everyone was posting content and was able to say things to a wide audience easily. Now, this next step in the evolution of the web is this: all the world wide users of the web decide which content is good and which content should be buried.

So, what is Web 2.0? The term “web 2.0″ is attributed to Tim O’Reilly. There is a fair amount of discussion and explanation in Wikipedia. I suggest you read this first. However, Tim O’Reilly recently posted an updated definition on his blog. I strongly suggest taking a quick read through that too. There are some interesting comments around that post, but I really like what Mr. O’Reilly has said in his post.

Oh, and in case you were wondering who is Tim O’Reily, he is the O’Reilly behind a famous line of technical books and technical conferences. You can read all about him at good old wikipedia!

Needless to say, I am not all new to Web 2.0. Being a regular Internet user (surfer) I have regularly visited and used many of the sites that “qualify” as Web 2.0. So, what would be some sites that qualify as Web 2.0 (in my mind)?

There are the perennial favorites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia. But I personally qualify even sites like Amazon, Y! Answers and Salesforce.com’s AppExchange as Web 2.0. Why? Because they do what to me Web 2.0 is all about: Democratization of the Internet. No offense to O’Reilly Media and the great minds of the Internet world; it may seem like I am disagreeing from their definition when in fact I am only building on their definition. But more on that in a future post.

Visit the sites above and familiarize yourself. You can navigate around and just browse the content. It’s like going to a new city and learning to live like the locals - you will stare at the big skyscrapers in Chicago for only so long before you just stop noticing them. The next time you are on the sites get yourself a login and post something. The best part about these sites is that some of them even give you an introduction to the people behind the sites.