I keep hearing this term around the Internet titled Web 2.0. What does this mean? It doesn’t make any sense because the web has evolved over the last 20 years and the Internet has evolved with it. I would have thought that Web Version 2.0 would be referring to when web pages came into fashion as opposed to the older bulletin boards.

So I did some research into what Web 2.0 is, mainly to find out how it can help us in our day to day computing. From the little snippits I have read so far, it does not seem like Web 2.0 is anything new.

This article will hopefully clear up what Web 2.0 is. A lot of Internet sites are making a lot of money out of it, and I want to know what all the fuss is about. Currently it feels like I am going to be let down by something that has been around for years. Let’s have a look into it.

I have had a long search around the web to investigate this strange term. Luckily it does not really refer to a new version of the Internet, but rather an advancement of something we have been using for the last few years.

The web used to be a place where we would look for certain information within a search engine. We would easily find pretty much any information we wanted, on a page which we could read, print and think about.

Web 2.0 makes use of new technology by allowing us to interact with each other through the Internet. Web 2.0 refers to the interaction with sites, and other users of the site, that was not possible in the past. It also refers to programs making use of the Internet which allows us to communicate with each other and not the website directly.

One of the first programs to allow for this type of communication was Napster. When we searched for music to download (if we did? naughty), it was not directly from the Napster website, but rather from other Napster users computers. We were able to interact with each other and share the goods.

Many websites are now allowing us to have this same huge input. It is no longer down to the web designer themselves what goes on the site, but instead, sites readers and visitors contribute their own material.

Sites such as Youtube.com and flickr allow you to put your own movies and pictures online for everyone to see. Myspace allows everybody to have their own piece of the web and technorati sucks out every blog post from every blog and puts them into a huge database (no idea how they manage that!). All of this happens in the background with visitors input. Wikipedia is another fine example where the majority of the content is contributed by visitors. None of this was possible 10 years ago.

Skype uses the Internet to let us communicate in another way, using technology to let us communicate verbally for free anywhere in the world. I could keep using examples all day, but I am sure you get the drift.

We now have a great deal of freedom as to how we receive our information from websites. We can receive RSS feeds, podcasts and vodcasts, all of which are fairly new, in a program of our choice for viewing when it is convenient for us. Vodcasts would not have worked a few years back with so many people using dial up connections. It is only possible now with data speeds exponentially increasing.

Web 2.0 also refers to how sites can be navigated. Tags are a fairly new phenomenon allowing bloggers to categorise articles and make them searchable. This one creeped in and was not noticeable to many as a new feature. Thinking back, I don’t know how the web ever worked without such features. An individual folder for each category was the method in the past, which was really painful for designers. I know that Inspect My Gadget would be incredibly hard to navigate if I was using the same web design methods I did 5 years ago.

So I guess after investigating all this, I can confirm that Inspect My Gadget is Web 2.0 compliant. Visitors are able to comment on articles and share their tips. If I write something that someone disagrees with, they have the freedom to inform other visitors and me what they have found, and collectively we can work through the problem to get it right together. Visitors can even offer how-to’s and the like if they want. I feel a forum coming on.p>