Published: July 30, 2007 Last Updated: February 09, 2022

Web 2.0 What The.....??

If you have anything to do with the internet, you have probably heard of Web 2.0. If you haven't, don't be so hard on yourself - I only heard about it 2 months ago. However, I believe that if you are in business you probably should start to become aware of it and look at ways to use it in your own business.

Web 2.0 is simply the second stage of the internet after Web 1.0. There are numerous definitions out there, but from my research I have clarified it into the following.

Web 1.0 was all about information. People used the Web to research topics or to find businesses etc. As such, business websites only needed to display the products and services they sold and they satisfied most web users.

Web 2.0 is all about connecting people. People now use the web to find other people that they can relate to. As such, Business websites now need more than just their products and services. People want to find out more about the people behind the business before they make a decision to use them. As we use the Web more and more, we need to find people we can trust. So as Business Owners we need to find ways to help these people to trust us.

Web 2.0 includes things such as Blogs, Forums, Youtube, Flickr and Wikipedia to name a few. Even the politicians are starting to use Youtube to try and reach the younger demographic.

So why bother? I would like to leave you with this last little statistic. NEO's accounted for just 24% of the population in 2005, but 54% of the spending. So what is a NEO? That's a topic for another Blog, but what you need to know is that NEO's are a part of the marketplace that loves technology. They use the web daily and they are continually growing in importance to all businesses. So as I said at the beginning, if you are in business you need to start to look at the web for any opportunity.

Click here for a groovy little podcast on Youtube which further explains Web 2.0.