Participation Literacy

The first time the tag “Web 2.0” was used at Delicious was in February 2004. As of “October 31, 2005 there have been over 230,000 separate bookmarks and over 7,000 unique tags associated with the term “Web 2.0” by del.icio.us users”. It is stated that 230,000 Web pages have been bookmarked as dealing with Web 2.0. To describe these 230,000 pages people have used 7,000 unique tags, besides the “Web 2.0” tag.

Sometimes only one tag is used to describe a bookmark; most often however, the description will be more effective if you use more than one tag. The following bookmarks are the ones mostly used together with “Web 2.0” (ibid):

ajax (9.9%), blog (6.1%), social (4.2%), tools (4.1%), software (3.3%), tagging (3.3%), javascript (2.8%), internet (2.6%) programming (2.5%), rss (2.5%), rubyonrails (1.8%), del.icio.us (1.6%), folksonomy (1.4%), community (1.1%), wiki (0.9%), flickr (0.8%), free (0.7%), trends (0.6%), flock (0.4%), googlemaps (0.3%).

This array of terms might be seen as a kind of definition in praxis. These are the terms tagged together with the term “Web 2.0” and might therefore be viewed as the conceptual definition of Web 2.0 by the Delicious community. You can compare these figures with my conceptual analysis above. Of my four main concepts in the discussion of Web 2.0 only two appear in the listing above. The concept I named as the least important of the four - Ajax - is the most important here. Folksonomy is on place thirteen, although tagging in itself is a synonym for folksonomy. The Web as Platform and Collective Intelligence are not in this list. One probable reason is that all the words in the list are without spaces and Delicious uses spaces to separate between tags. Thus if someone would tag a bookmark in Delicious with The Web as Platform, there will actually be four tags. Another explanation could be that I as an expert have a more rational behaviour when I tag than most people. The list above is as good a representation of the Web 2.0 concept as mine; it is only different in a contextual sense.