Web 2.0 Technologies

In recent years, the offspring of new, organizational based concepts and services was introduced on the Internet. In 2005, Tim O'Reilly coined the term "Web 2.0" which includes web for participation, technology for significant change in web usage and design guidelines for loosely coupled services. The aim of this article is to give a review on how some of the concept of the Web 2.0 has influenced organization in there daily practice. O' Reilly (2005) notes six core competencies of the web 2.0 environment:

• service, not packaged software
• an architecture of participation,
• cost-effective scalability
• re-mixable data source and data transformations
• software above the level of a single device and
• harnessing collective intelligence.

The real impact of web 2.0 technologies is in the transformation of the organizational business model. This technology encourages user participation and derivers its greatest value when large communities contribute to the content. The the user generated metadata, information and designs enable a much richer environment where the value is generated by the volume of users. Web 2.0 emphasizes interaction, community and openness(Millard & Ross, 2006). O'Reilly (2005) defines Web 2.0 as a platform, spanning all connected devices as stated in the six core competencies above. The Web 2.0 has include the following concept of weblogs, wikis, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) , social tagging, mashups and user define content.

Weblog
Blogs are a form of web pages that contain articles similar to newsgroup postings in a reverse chronological order. Blogs are usually produced by single author or a small group of teams and can not be edited by the public. The biggest advancement made with weblogs is the permanence of the content to be posted and along with the comment to define a permanent record of information. In having a collaborative record that can be indexed by search engines will increase the utility and spread the information to other members in the organization.With the services of companies like blogger.com, the weblog is fast becoming a communication medium of the new web.

Wikis
A wiki is a web site that promotes the collaborative, web-based authoring environment, where anyone on the internet can edit existing content and add new pages any tme they wish. Wikis are currently in high demand in a large varity of fields due to simplicity and flexibility nature. Therefore, documentation,reporting, project management, online glossaries and dictionaries, discussion groups, or a general information applications are just a few examples of where the end user can provide value (Renihold, 2006). The major difference between the wiki and the blog is that the wiki user can alter the original content while the blog user can only add infornation in the form of comment. Wiki create an environment open to sharing information and knowledge to a large group users in organizations.

RSS
this was developed by Netscape, RSS was intended to publish news type information based upon a subscription framework (Lerner, 2004). RSS shares the metadata about the content without actually delivering the entire information source. With the aid of RSS an aggregator application, end users are not required to visit each site in order to obtain information and also RSS technologies changes the communication method from a search and discover to notification model. This help user to locate content that is pertinent to their job and organization which crate much faster stream.

Podcasting
Podcasting means blogging audio content. Listeners subscribing to a podcast have access to the full list of audio files made available by the producer and are notified about newly published content. Podcasting can be seen as a type of "audio on demand" (Biever, 2005). Podcasting are available on a wide range of topics, also have been identified as a technology for enhancing e-leaning. Conference presentations are disseminated as podcast on Internet which can re-used by organization for knowledge sharing.


Tagging

Tagging describes the collaboration activit of making shared online contecnt with keywords or tags as a way to organize content for future navigation, filtering or search (Gibson, Teasley, and Yew, 2006).TThe information architecture are placed in order to place inforamtion into specific pre-defined bucket or category.Tagging offers a number of benefits to the end user community and enble individual to bookmark the informationin a way that is easier fro them to recall at a later date.An example of social tagging is Flickr which allows user to upload images and tag themwith appropriate metadata keywords.

In conclusion, this concepts of of Web 2.0 technologies has helped organization in gaining compitive advantage in the market, a typical example is the research on wine industry in the United States when the big eight wine industries consolidated. This was creating a problem for the small wineries to break into the market, but the small wineries resolved application of internent as alternative in selling directly to the consumer.This downward price pressure, increased competition and the bargaining power of the distribution channel has created a challenging business enviroment for everyone(Kim & Mauborgne, 2005).


Reference

• Biever, C. (2005) Podcasters' deliver radio-on-demand, New Scientist,185,2486
• Kim, W.C., Mauborgne, R. (2005) "Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant", Harvard Business School Press, March 2005.
• O'Reill, T.( 2005) What Is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Model for the Next Generation of Software
• Yew, J., Gibson, F., & Teasley, S. (2006) " Learning by tagging: group knowledge formation in a self-organizing learning community" In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences,( Bloomington: International Society of the Learning sciences). pp. 1010-1