By Ibrahim Abdulsalam
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| Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay |
Yeah, welcome to this week's episode on familiarizing yourself
with the digital world to empower and uplift your community.
Last week, we were able to look into the phases of social
media from when Facebook is considered the only social media, down to how
other social media come to challenge the monopoly of Facebook and tend to give
more features than what Facebook offers. However, in recent times, Facebook has
also come to secure its reputation by upgrading to the wants of its users.
Hence, this week, we will be looking at the relationship
between social media and web 2.0.
To understand social media, it is important to understand
its origins. A key to that is visiting the concept of web 2.0, particularly the World Wide Web in general.
Initially, websites were informational, static (you can’t
make changes to them), and comprised little more than a collection of linked pages
usually containing text and images. Later, video and digital assets such as
flash animation were added to the mix. The website became more sophisticated and
could be hosted on one or more web servers. These servers were often tied to
database management systems and application servers and were accessible
through internet addresses known as Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). The
collection of the whole of public websites became known as the World Wide Web.
Without digressing, Web 2.0 is a term coined during O’Reilly
Media web 2.0 conferences in late 2004 used to describe applications that allow
people to participate in information creation, digital resources sharing,
webpage design, and collaboration on the World wide web.
Now, you will see that examples of Web 2.0 applications
overlap heavily with social media which include, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn,
Flickr, WordPress, Wikipedia, and Blogs. Simply put, Web 2.0 sites allow users
to collaborate with each other in social settings. It has been called the read/write Web. Users can create and
share content with virtual communication set up by software developers according
to the purpose of the site.
Since Web 2.0 does not refer to updates to technical
specifications but rather it is how people use the Web. This term has been
publicly challenged by the World Wide Web inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. He feels
the web is operating in the way he had envisioned. He called the Web a collaborative medium, a place where we
all meet and read and write.
No matter if we call it Web 2.0 or not, World Wide Web has changed dramatically. New materials are being created and posted by people
from all across the globe. Not too long ago, websites are created by
specialists from universities or business organizations and could be viewed by
other people but not used to communicate. In the same way that traditional
radio and television were set up as one broadcaster reaching many people, so
was the World Wide Web.
You are also participating in recreating the Web by posting on
Facebook, your photos on Flickr, your videos on YouTube, your blogs on Tumblr,
your tweets on Twitter, and your sense
of what news is important on Digg, Reddit, and even mainstream media sites.
The web has become an extension of our daily lives and that
is important to business and the way people will interact in the future. The
web is a many-to-many communication channel. And this is the essence of web
2.0.
Having discussed how Web 2.0 or should I say social
media came to being, next week we will be looking at how different social media
applications work and things you don’t know about the apps you are making use
of every day.
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