Participation Literacy

In order to contribute to a more substantial understanding of the concept and practice of Web 2.0, I need to go into particularities. The detailed presentations below must not be interpreted as manuals but as empirical presentations for the purpose just mentioned. The software and Web services I write about here are selected on behalf of my own experience. My goal has been to describe and to a certain degree analyse a wide array of systems attributing somehow the term Web 2.0 software. In most cases the systems I have selected for my empirical work are not the only ones in its field. I do not say these software examples are in any way better than corresponding software.

You might think this section is banal, and it is, but the choice of services is based on a selection of several hundreds of similar services. Every feature I describe is in its turn selected from the rich set of features these services contain. These features are the best ones to describe Web 2.0 in praxis. This analysis – the selection of services and features - can of course be criticized.

Every chapter starts with a screen shot from an essential, or fundamental, part of the Web site and a likewise essential part of its text, usually the site’s about text. An about text is, most often, a short text explaining the essence of the site. The about text or about page is one of the many unspoken conventions created on WWW. Someone sometime came up with the idea to put their most essential text in a wrapper called about page. Some Web designers were influenced, intentionally or unintentionally, by the word and called their own most essential text an about page. The phenomenon spread and the word became a concept.

This is a highly empirical part of the text and some of you might think it is boring. Especially if you do not have the same passion for technology and music as I have. This part has an essential role in the text though, because it is impossible to construct Web 2.0 knowledge if you do not understand its practices. These texts are also discussions of Web 2.0 practicalities. The analysis, which leads to the choice of these services and the discussed details, are by no means neutral but partial translations (ref. Haraway). All of these texts have important points to add to the big discussion, and in the construction of the concept Web 2.0.