Further evidence that the World Wide Web has changed the lifestyle of the entire world is the recent announcement that “Web 2.0” is now being recognized as the one millionth word in the English Language. The US-based language research firm Global Language Monitor ceremonially tagged the word Web 2.0 as the millionth word after it has been mentioned in both print and the New Media for a whopping 25,000 times.
Not many agree with this recognition but the debate it has sparked is crucial to determining how much the interactivity of the World Wide Web has found its way in the workings of everyday casual and business life. Web 2.0 was tagged as a phenomenon describing the new wave of Internet applications which prioritizes interactivity as its main virtue. Commercial and free virtual worlds are part of this new breed of software options, along with social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube (specifically for video) and the giant search engines such as Yahoo! and of course Google.
If there is a Web 2.0 then when was the logical Web 1.0? Well it was the early days of the World Wide Web technology which culminated in the great dot – com crash of the new millennium. Prior to the year 2000, many people were scared about the threats of the Millennium or Y2K bug but it didn’t push through. Instead ithe bug came in the form of a great economic bubble featuring companies who wanted to get ahead of the competition by integrating the Internet. It was a virtual gold rush so to speak. Companies were investing most of their assets in order to secure a website and attach the prefix “e-“ to anything that can carry it. The result was a catastrophe because there were no solid business plans and it all came to a crash.
Today, Internet marketers and researchers in the realm of the World Wide Web are much more careful in online ventures. Business plans revolving around the Internet took a radical shift when Google (powered by the simplicity of its interface and the powerful algorithm of its search engine) dominated the search engine industry. Many companies are equating high search engine rankings with commercial success – and with good reason. Search engines have thousands and thousands of viewers and possible customers and clients in their stead.
Because the simplicity of Google was such a success, many other platforms emerged which put interactivity at the forefront of their customer virtues. This was the start of the term Web 2.0 as many World Wide Web researchers are describing it.
Many established critics were blasting the choice of Web 2.0 as the millionth English word – but most of the criticisms are pointed towards the methodologies of research in finding the number placement of the word. But there was no denying the impact of the word in today’s setting. Because of the interactivity offered by the Web 2.0 phenomenon, virtual communities emerged with the purpose of simulating the interactions of human beings with each other even without actual physical or geographical presence.
So how was Web 2.0 first used in the context as it is known today? Research points to the year 1999, ironically before the dot com crash, when Darcy DiNucci introduced the term in the article entitled Fragmented Future:
“ The Web we know now, which loads into a browser window in essentially static screenfuls, is only an embryo of the Web to come. The first glimmerings of Web 2.0 are beginning to appear, and we are just starting to see how that embryo might develop. … The Web will be understood not as screenfuls of text and graphics but as a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens. It will [...] appear on your computer screen, [...] on your TV set [...] your car dashboard [...] your cell phone [...] hand-held game machines [...] and maybe even your microwave.”
Ten years after, this piece of text seemed quite prophetic.
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