peace on the web, too

*Intro*

Following all the “web 2.0″ discussions on the web (see memeorandum.com for the latest), a thing struck me: people always talk about how the “web 2.0″ sites (aka web applications) will _work_ and _integrate_ with each other. Almost no one knows or even talks about how the simple, everyday websites will evolve, how they will be affected.

*Today’s websites*

* Portals (including search engines)
* Content sites (5-10 pages, static), perhaps with a CMS as a backoffice
* Dynamic websites and/or CMS-driven websites
* Dynamic web applications (webshops, B2B/B2C, enterprise tools)
* Media sites - like music, video, photo etc. Difficult to put them in any of the other categories, they just seem to form a type of their own.

*The website, version 2.0*

We can start our look at the “new web order” by observing that the portals and the search engines become more and more _services_. They provide _functionality_ for a browser “consumation” or are integrated in mashups to provide new services that provide new functionalities to be consumed … etc. [1]

The content very often doesn’t belong to these services, it is provided/bought/added by the users of the service (tags e.g. flickr’s, comments e.g. amazon user comments etc.).

Anyway, what I want to talk about is the “web 2.0″ company website. The “web 2.0″ blog. The “web 2.0″ CMS, shopping site, community site etc. How these “normal” websites will be affected in a “web 2.0″ world. Will we be considering those “web 1.0″ websites as “normal” in the “web 2.0″ world?

(OK, we don’t know yet what “web 2.0″ is, nor its world etc. But I think it is more important to try to foresee or understand how the “mr everybody’s” website will evolve in the future, rather than trying to define the environment first. We’ll only take for granted that in the “web 2.0″ world, the _web is a platform_.)

*Structured content*

To start with, it seems clear that _every_ content available on the web today can become a part of a web 2.0 site content. People are only beginning to understand this. It could explain the hordes of CommonCreative-like licenses we see on a lot of sites (blogs) these days. This kind of use will produce some changes on the rules of the game. At some extreme, we can even see Google paying for each search result a small fee to the target site’s owner it seems extreme though.

But _structured content_ could be the next big thing. A lot of sites are already structuring their content because of using CMS-es or other backoffice solutions. So the new aggregators should be able to “see” what a small website has to offer merely by scanning it and understanding it’s content structure.

Imagine you have a small webshop, no shopping cart, perhaps even no CMS, but your designer/developer has put the effort to repeat the same structure whenever he updated your news or products pages. This is big. This means any site can offer links to all your content categorized in news, products etc., exactly as it is on your website, by merely parsing your site.

Now imagine that when searching with a search engine (for example) or when browsing an aggregator site, a user could see a shopping cart “injected” on top of the content coming from his search. Beacause he/she searched a product, the search engine presented the top 10 hits for the search and

And that the user could just add to the cart links found with google representing some products from your website. And that google could allow this user to send his “shopping cart” to you by email. Google could find your email from your contact page (which is structured, right? )

In this area a lot has been said and done, but only recently the semantic web and microformats memes had become visible on the web related discussions. The idea is that you already have a structure describing the date on your website. This structure is composed by the CSS classes you use in your XHTML and by the names of a page’s design elements. I think it is really a _disruptive_ idea.

Perhaps not everybody will agree on the same structure for the same content, but at least we can think of XHTML as of a structured, repetitive, content representation. And this is only the beginning.

*The Web’s Long Tail*

The new web will look more and more like the thing the web creators dreamed about. Information running free form site to site, presented in different forms on different devices. It’s like we have built only the web’s scaffold till now. Now the pipes connect to each other, phones are installed in the building and internet arrives

There will be no more websites. Only services. No domains, only subdomains. No centralized point for a content. My tags everywhere, my ideas everywhere. In fact I will not _have_ anything personal or private unless licensed or protected as such. Mean people, go attack everybody’s content …

All the websites waiting out there to be linked-in, searched, served and mashed-up are forming the web’s Long Tail.

*Who wrote this thing?*

One of the biggest problems will be to determine to whom a specific information _belongs to_. Or who must be paid for providing it. This is where the succesfull web 2.0 companies will prove their web 2.0 model. Who will be able to identify the “network”?

For example, I write this post. It gets published on my blog. In my feed. On any online reader of my feed. And then it becomes available to anybody in the world through a rather big number of sources, caches, searches etc. How can I find out who reads it? How can I make somebody pay for reading it? When this will be clear, we will leave in the web 2.0 world

*Web 1.1 sites*

For now, we can use some web sites and services that test this web 2.0 thing. We can use google maps mashups, flickr or msn ones. We can tag things in delicious, read blogs through feeds etc. It is not really the web 2.0. Is the web 1.1. The stuff begins to be structured, the pipes unpacked, the trucks bring materials and everybody thinks how to grasp this thing.

*Conclusion*
This is the image I have right now about the web now and fo the near future, unclear and open as it stands. Maybe I am just realizing the possibilities out there, maybe I am cured after the last bubble, maybe I’m just enthusiastic. Whatever. Just go out and have fun and learn. The web will help you.

*Further readings:*
[1] “zephoria.org: remix is active consumption not production (when media becomes culture, part 2)”:http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2005/10/08/remix_is_active.html
[2] “O’Reilly: What Is Web 2.0″:http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html
[3] “Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet”:http://blogs.zdnet.com/web2explorer/
[4] “Read/Write Web”:http://www.readwriteweb.com/
[5] “Adaptive Path essays | Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0″:http://www.adaptivepath.com/publications/essays/archives/000547.php
[6] all the sites listed on “web20workgroup.com”:http://www.web20workgroup.com/

As a romanian expat I already use all the modern way of comunication when talking to my friends or relatives back in Romania or from abroad. When IM begun, I used Yahoo messenger and MSN from the beginnings. When Skype arrived I used it very soon too. And so was my wife. And so is her family back in Romania. Etc.

What I mean here (and tiying up these readings) is that developing countries (you can say poorer too) like Romania is too are full of early adopters of modern comunication tools. They all use y!m, msn, skype etc. From the first day. Recently (at least in the most developed countries of those cited) there is an explosion of debit and credit cards. I guess this comes with the development. But almost anybody uses them on the web. There is fear but also statistics that block people doing e-commerce.

But what if some already using skype had access to ebay? If she uses SkypeIn too, there is a way of certifying her identity. So ebay customers could trust more a person if they could check its existence (call her, check her credit card existence etc.). So the long tail of e-commerce users (romanians, indians, russians etc) could come to light. They could use e-commerce because the combination of a market (ebay) and personal comunication (skype voice and SkypeIn) could be trustfull.

Recent online photo albums startups (like flickr.com, buzznet.com and Ojos (via TechCrunch) seem to go slowly into giving access to all those photos just lying on our hard drives. Ojos seems very interesting, it kind of automatically tag photos based on facial recognition algorithms. You name a person once and all your photos featuring this person will be recognized and tagged with this person’s name. How about weird ideas, huh?