Participation Literacy

Definitions are means to end discourses; someone in power is telling those with less power that the discussion is over. Since language always changes, there is no way to stop a concept in time and space, from changing, from developing. All definitions are therefore situated to the context belonging to the person or the organization standing behind the definition. As long as we do not take definitions too seriously, they can be valuable as building blocks in one’s own idea of a concept. With these words in mind you might get something out of these short definitions of the concept Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is a series of best practice oriented to assist people create dynamic websites, which allow them to easily connect with various communication, services, social and web tools. That is the foundation of what web 2.0 is.(Mann, 2006)

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.(O’Reilly, 2005b)

If we picked out the keywords (or tags) from these definitions we would get a starting point for a wider discussion about the concept.

Figure 1: Brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International (O’Reilly, 2005)

The concept of Web 2.0 was coined at a conference brainstorming session between O’Reilly and MediaLive International 2004 (Figure 1) (O’Reilly, 2005). The background was a discussion about the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001; in what way it was a turning point for the Web. They noted that far from having “crashed”, the Web was more important and had more users and more exciting applications than ever. The companies surviving the dot-com collapse seemed to have certain parameters in common, which led to the thought that the dot-com collapse could have marked some kind of turning point for the Web, and the new things rising from the ash of the phoenix, could be grouped and called Web 2.0 as a contrast to companies before; which then would be called Web 1.0. The agreement among them led to the Web 2.0 conference. Since then the concept has grown enormously. Searching Google on the phrase “Web 2.0” 2006-01-28 gave 33 500 000 hits in the languages English, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.

The chart in Figure 1 is not a dichotomy. The boundary between them is loose and some of the phenomena depicted in the left column have one or more characteristics in common with those on the right hand side. In some sense, it reminds me of the many charts of the border between modernism and postmodernism. The similarity is not only because both of them are boundary descriptions between some phenomena, which can be thought of as the old way and the new way, but because some of these phenomena coalesce. There is for example a basic thought of decentralisation in both Web 2.0 and postmodernism in relation to their counterparts. Loosely one could say Web 2.0 is the postmodernity of the Internet – though that relation has to be taken with a pinch of salt.

DoubleClick is one of the main players in Internet marketing. They harness the power of software as a service and were developing Web services long before the concept got its name. But according to Tim O’Reilly they are ultimately limited by their business model. DoubleClick’s business model “bought into the ’90s notion that the Web was about publishing, not participation; that advertisers, not consumers, ought to call the shots; that size mattered, and that the Internet was increasingly being dominated by the top websites as measured by MediaMetrix and other Web ad scoring companies” (O’Reilly, 2005). Their website contains a proud announcement of having over 2000 successful implementations (see screenshot above ); by contrast Google AdSense has, according to O’Reilly, hundreds of thousands. Google themselves mention the number 150 000.

DoubleClick’s word “implementations” and O’Reilly’s and Google’s information about Google AdSense might not be completely comparable. Companies like DoubleClick stands for the intrusive ads jumping upon the Internetians (people inhabiting the Internet), in the shape of banners and pop-up windows while Google AdSense stands for the context relative text ads sneaking upon you practically everywhere on the Internet. There is a way to compare these two in an evaluating way, perhaps besides the implementation statistics above. For me as an Internetian they are both, perhaps, necessary but still annoying obstacles in my quest of knowledge. Banners and pop-up ads disturb my attention, but they are at least honest. Google’s strategy is more devious. Often it is hard to separate the information on a page from spam – advertising is of course a form of spam. Still, I do not believe in an entirely non-commercial Internet. The commercial and open source movements have to coexist and the best commercial services are even able to make these concepts coexist within their own business models, such as Amazon.com with their layer of user participation.

Ofoto is a photo gallery (since 2001 Kodak Gallery) according to the streamlined model: “upload your photos and share with your friends!” The whole idea with Kodak Ofoto is to sell prints – and in a wider sense marketing. They have not really invited their users to participate in the same way as, for example, Amazon.com, and their service is encapsulated besides the most obvious functions such as viewing pictures other people want you see. Flickr, now a Yahoo company, is mainly about participation. One could view Flickr as a photo sharing community. With tagging, comments, blogging-possibilities, community building tools, RSS and other connecting technologies Flickr is one of the best examples of Web 2.0.

As a single example Britannica Online vs. Wikipedia is striking. Britannica online represents the formal expert’s absolute power over the masses, and absolute control over the information they distribute. Britannica online has inherited the soul from Diderot and the other French encyclopaedists at the peak of the enlightenment; the perfect hierarchy with the knowing experts at the top of the human pyramid and the rest of the people as ignorants. In the eighteenth century this was quite true, and nowadays and forever, I suppose, there is some truth in it. The difference now, however, is that information and knowledge is distributing itself in non-traditional ways. Perhaps it is not appropriate to give knowledge the role of a self organizing entity, but the fact is that the distribution of knowledge is more “distributed” now in the information era than ever before (Nowotny, 1993). There are people out there with astonishing knowledge in areas earlier generations would ascribe none but academics - just because I have a bachelor’s degree in Literature history this does not mean that I know more of the works of James Joyce than the person who vacuums my office. It is not even possible to talk about autodidacts any more, due to the shifting views in both pedagogy and accessibility of information. These shifting views give non academics and non experts, (formally), the same information as experts have, and possibilities to connect to academic networks without being an academic.

Wikipedia is the ultimate image of trust. On the other hand it is important to understand there is more to it. Wikipedia has a sophisticated version of management system. As soon as someone posts something disagreeing with the collective intelligence guarding the interest of the Wikipedia knowledge community, it is placed in a kind of knowledge limbo. If it is a clear piece of abuse, or likewise, it is simply erased, sending the former state of the article to the front. Wikipedia has many problems, and probably more to come, but it is one of the best examples of participation, harnessing the collective intelligence, and thus one of the most significant examples of Web 2.0.

One of the most buzzed words on World Wide Web is blogging. O’Reilly (2005) places blogging as the Web 2.0 contrast to the personal home page. Many of us who remember the first years of World Wide Web, recall the hits we got searching AltaVista or Lycos. I remember stumbling on fearsome examples of personal home pages with disgusting “undesigns” of people’s first steps with the creation of a home page for the family, or the counterparts by small companies. It was a time when design and content often seemed to choke under its own weight. Blogging is both a reaction against that and in some sense a reinforcement of it. In general thought, it might be seen as a pure communication and knowledge gaining tool, leaving the design to experts. Home pages have always been a kind of bulletin board with information shaped by short but effective traditions on the World Wide Web, such as an “about page”, a “link page” etc. Gradually it became more and more disgraceful, or even shameful, to have a personal home page of the kind we saw in the beginning of the World Wide Web – i.e. private homepages with pictures of your kids, the dog and the Volvo and so on.

And then everything seemed to be reversed. Suddenly we saw the private sphere taking its place in media, and many Internetians started their own diary trying to put the private sphere forward to public. Reality TV built some kind of bridge between the stars and “ordinary” people, showing stars just like you and I, and that you and I could be a star, without having some kind of expertise or being born into the right context. We seem to leave the diary age, when it comes to blogs anyway, establishing ourselves as knowledge fighting people striving for the right to our own voice in the knowledge society. Most of the diary bloggers in early 2006 are journalists in “show business” trying to find their own voice in this sea of extremely relevant voices. The blogging community starts to gain relevancy in both journalism (this is quite known) and in academic circles (this in not so quite known). The academic community will probably change a lot the coming years because the boundary between the more intuitive blogging and the regulated academic contexts is going to be blurred. My own behaviour when it comes to reading blogs, does not follow any bloggers as persons. I have several applications helping me to harvest the more interesting parts of the academic blogging community. It stands to reason that most academics could not create showers of daily deep-thoughts. Because the blogging communities demand almost daily activity, it also stands to reason that only a part of their postings are up to normal academic standards. And still I constantly stumble over blog articles which could easily be taken as academic with a little more attention to the reference management.

The most striking phenomena in O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 illustration is, perhaps participation. Participation in various communities, and in various ways, all over the world, is certainly some kind of road to the future. With participation I mean communication within some of the many communities on the Internet. It might be a person blogging current topics or commenting books on Amazon.com, or it might be a person searching in a price comparing community to save some euros on a certain product. Participation is becoming the soul of the Internet. Perhaps you could say that an Internetian is valued by their degree of participation, instead of their wealth, clothes etc.

The last phenomena I am commenting in O’Reilly’s chart are stickiness and syndication. Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. Syndication usually means the possibility to subscribe to the information flow of a website via RSS feeds. Syndication started in the blogging community but is now spread to most big Web sites and practically every CMS (Content Management System) has implemented RSS syndication. One way to use syndication is to read the information flow from several websites in applications called RSS aggregators or RSS readers. RSS feeds can also be used to build applications based on the information from the feeds.

Stickiness is a Web marketing term used to measure the amount of time spent at a site over a given time period. A website with stickiness as point of departure is like a spider Web, where the whole point is to catch the prey. It does not have to be a conflict between stickiness and syndication, but now in the beginning of the Web 2.0 era it seems difficult for commercial companies to balance their information flow. Amazon.com has a form of syndication where it is possible to use their album covers in other applications. Practically all commercial news papers have syndication services for their articles, which makes it possible to read small parts of each article in RSS readers. RSS services are still to find their place in the commercial part of the Internet.

A website often mentioned as some kind of symbol for Web 2.0 is Delicious (http://del.icio.us) – often together with Flickr. Delicious offer syndication to practically all information on their site, which has led to a large amount of applications and services, built on top of that information. Delicious’ context (users, links etc) is becoming enormous due to their generous syndication policy. In the middle of December of 2005 Delicious was acquired by Yahoo who earlier that year also had acquired Flickr. Both of these acquisitions are interesting phenomena since Yahoo themselves had services in the same branches as Flickr and Delicious. At this time Yahoo has owned Flickr about ten months and I cannot see any negative consequences. Yahoo’s actions with Delicious and Flickr will have large effects on the future of the Web. For example, will Yahoo let Delicious and Flickr remain as stand alone services or will Yahoo try to integrate them more in the Yahoo family of services. You can see it as a commercial actor buying two of the largest open source communities. How will they integrate these two actors into their business model? Flickr and Delicious have survived by being bought by Yahoo, but if they do not generate any money, what is their base of existence for a commercial actor?

Looking a bit closer at Delicious and their Yahoo counterpart (Yahoo Bookmarks), the differences are mostly about Yahoo’s reluctance to let the information out of their sight. Yahoo had a Web bookmark service, according to the Web 1.0 model for some years, called Yahoo Bookmarks. But in the middle of 2005 they decided to surf the wave of the Web 2.0 concept and launched an application called “Yahoo Web 2.0 Beta”. This is not a bad application and some of its functions surpass the functions in Delicious. The most fundamental difference between Delicious and Yahoo’s Web 2.0 Beta is that the former views the Web as a platform for cooperation, community building and openness, while the latter still remains in the Web 1.0 container thinking: the Yahoo family container of applications and services. Yahoo Web 2.0 Beta has no export functions (January 2006). It is easy to import your bookmarks to Yahoo but it is more difficult to let them out of their container. They are not willing to take the risk of you switching bookmark application and importing your Yahoo bookmarks into the new application. This view means they have misunderstood, or more likely, misused the concept of Web 2.0. They have tried to copy the concept when it comes to the ajaxian user interface (more of that later), but missed the soul of the Web 2.0 concept. It will be interesting to follow their strategy with their two real Web 2.0 applications. Will they try to containerize these applications or will Delicious and Flickr influence Yahoo to create a balance between stickiness and syndication, a business model where user participation is a valuable layer in their information strategy, and not only a target for marketing.

The line of argument above calls for some reflections:

• Yahoo is not the only Web 2.0 application remaining in some sort of container thinking. Many companies fall in this trap.
• Perhaps you cannot blame them for trying to keep their customers. Containing your customers is a standard way of keeping your customers according to some business models. An example is Mobile phone operators. They are giving away phones for free if you sign an agreement of 12 or 24 months, and you often have to pay to unlock your phone for other operators.
• We do not know if the Web 2.0 business model works yet. Only time can tell.

Web 2.0 cannot really be defined. It stands for a kind of paradigm shift on the Web. In this case we are talking about a paradigm light, because this is not a new set of thoughts replacing the old ones, as in Tomas Kuhn’s sense of the concept (Kuhn, 1996). I will use the term mindset, instead of paradigm light, to denote the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

The figure shows a “meme map” loosely created after an illustration in O’Reilly’s article What is Web 2.0 (2005). It shows core parts of the Web 2.0 mindset. I will return to many of these phenomena.

Tags: academic, adsense, blogging, bookmarks, brittanica, business model, cms, delicious, flickr, marketing, mindeset, paradigm, participation, pictures, rss, stickiness, web 2.0, wikipedia, yahoo