What is Web 2.0?

The term Web 2.0 is used a lot now. Almost every discussion on new ways to generate traffic to a website includes some mention of web 2.0. Talk of new marketing strategies for online businesses is more and more regarding web 2.0 as a necessary component. But what exactly is web 2.0?

Web 2.0 was coined as a phrase in conjunction with a publishing companies media conference on changes in the internet that was held in 2004. The term has only been widely used over the past one or two years. If you looked at web 2.0 like a software upgrade you might get the impression that it describes a new and improved version of the technology that runs the internet. That is not the case.

Web 2.0 is not about technology, although advances in technology may have lead to the evolution of web 2.0. Rather web 2.0 refers to a new utilization of the internet in which the user defines and has direct input on content. It refers to the change in the internet from largely a read only system to an interactive community.

To clarify this more, think about the internet a few years ago. Almost all websites were one way sites. By that I mean that all the sites you visited were sites that you could read or buy something from but there were not many sites that you could actually add your comments and thoughts to.

The beginning of the evolution to web 2.0 were forums and newsgroups. There you could submit comments to other users and allow others to respond. But forums required you to join and you had no control over the forum itself. You could merely respond or start a discussion in the defined areas.

Then people started blogging. All of a sudden users could put up their own blog and create content about anything they wanted. The one special feature of blogs is that any user that reads the blog can post their comments to that blog. All of a sudden the users of the internet were creating the information on the internet themselves.

Myspace took the blog idea even further. It allowed users to set up complete multimedia sites about anything they desired. It allowed users to create friends lists which in essence were user created networks. Each of the friends on the lists created their own networks and the connected networks of users became gigantic.

How does this web 2.0 concept fit into internet marketing? Web 2.0 is important to anyone who wants to make a living online because the social networks that have been created are enormous. If you substitute the word consumer for the word user, you have millions of consumers networked together. Not only is the number of consumers participating in these social networks huge, but they rely on information they receive while interacting in these networks to form opinions and make decisions.

Since this massive group of consumers spends so much time in their social networks and because these networks create powerful influencing forces for these consumers, it becomes a huge market to be targeted.

There is an old saying in business, fish where the fish are. The fish are in these new social networks. If you want to catch these fish and market your product to them then you need to be where they are. This is why web 2.0 is important to you as an internet marketer.

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