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"It is you who lead the world.¡± That, its evangelists believe, is the message of Web 2.0, where everybody can express themselves freely and share information, an Internet world created by ordinary people. Here, the Chosun Ilbo introduces the trends and companies in the U.S.¡¯ Silicon Valley that are leading the development.
Video-sharing website YouTube, chat network MySpace and photo-sharing site Flicker are hugely popular in the U.S. and elsewhere. What they have in common is that they merely provide the tools and cyberspace where users can create and show their own content. Blogs are an indispensable feature of many people¡¯s lives where they can talk about their life, hobbies and opinions. All of them rely on what is called ¡°user-created content,¡± the keyword of the Web 2.0 era. Last year, the online circulation of video files that showed lawmakers dozing during public hearings or making racist remarks sparked severe criticism in the U.S. and contributed to the involved politicians¡¯ defeat in the mid-term elections.
Viewers not only view content created by others but evaluate by posting comments and grades. Popular content spreads through various websites, which naturally allows participation and sharing. Wikipedia, run by a non-profit organization in the U.S., is an online open encyclopedia with over 4.9 million entries in 200 languages. Yet it has no professional editor, since it runs an open system where anyone can modify or create entries. People voluntarily participate without financial compensation and expand the contents almost infinitely. Such ¡°collective intelligence¡±, where users pool their knowledge to create a mega database, is one of the major characteristics of Web 2.0. The leading science journal Nature reports that the accuracy of Wikipedia is almost up to Britannica¡¯s standards.
Ahn Chul-soo, president of the leading local anti-virus program developer AhnLab, says Web 2.0 is leading a big trend toward anti-authoritarianism and Internet democracy.
¡ß Get out of the box
The Web 2.0 economy is free from all sorts of stereotypes. A case in point is the Pareto's Principle, which claims that 20 percent of customers or employees make up 80 percent of sales. Google proves the principle wrong by growing into the world's largest online company thanks to numerous search ads that earn the company a trivial few hundred won each. Unpopular books unavailable in ordinary bookstores make up one-third of online bookstore Amazon¡¯s sales. That ¡°long tail¡± phenomenon is another feature of Web 2.0 that dramatically cuts costs of online transactions. Even a small flower shop or a neighborhood supermarket can run ads online by paying just a small sum of money. Google also runs ads automatically on the websites of individual users who do not have an established business model and shares the profits. Another growing trend is that companies no longer monopolize a specific technology or service and instead they make them public free of charge. Google and e-Bay give away the application programming interface of their Google Maps and Product Kit services, and this sparked numerous services based on them.
¡ß Don¡¯t expect too much
But a Dow Jones report on venture businesses published recently says a whopping US$500 million were invested in Web 2.0 companies in the U.S. last year, a 2.5 times increase from a year ago. But now that giants like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and News Corp are busy buying popular Web 2.0 websites, pundits warn that Web 2.0, if it is overestimated, could end up as Bubble 2.0, just as reckless investment in dot.coms did a decade earlier. The Silicon Valley venture capital blogger and journalist Matt Marshall says Web 2.0 companies today tend to seek partnerships with large corporations or mergers and takeovers rather than list themselves for ordinary investors, forestalling Bubble 2.0 because the deals are among businesses rather than in open stock trading.
In Korea, Web 2.0 is also a growing trend. Examples include Cyworld's mini-homepages or Naver's knowledge port, iN. Naver and Cyworld are to reorganize each other¡¯s respective websites by using cutting-edge Web 2.0 technology. SK Communications president Yoo Hyun-oh says, "We will see many opportunities to do business in the global market if we can take advantage of our advanced online culture and develop good business models.¡±
¡ß Web 2.0 = a term referring to a new trend in the Internet industry
It has such features as openness, sharing and participation. The term is used to differentiate the phenomenon from the Internet of the dot.com bubble era in 2001 (Web 1.0). Typical Web 2.0 services include user-created content, blogs and open-content online encyclopedias.
(englishnews@chosun.com )
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