Collaboration & the Web, v2.0

The internet has always been something special; it has always had the potential to change the world. It took its first small step with email and revolutionized communication for us. And now it's taking its next small step. The web is becoming more dynamic, more interactive. This is the new Internet, the new web, version 2.0. And the essence of the web2.0 is collaboration, collaboration between few people, between thousands, between millions of people.

Dear friends, today I would like to tell you about this new version of the web and how it can help you collaborate with thousands of people instantly.

As always, it all started with an idea. Ward Cunningham created something called a wiki. In the past, websites were static and you could only read what the website had to say. The wiki however is a website that anyone can change and put in content, easily.
Two people Jimmy Wales & Larry Sanger had this idea. They thought of using a wiki to get content for an encyclopaedia they were managing, from their users. They created a wiki meant to be an encyclopaedia, called it Wikipedia and made it freely editable by anyone. What they created is now the single biggest source of information on the internet and has more than 6 million users collaborating and creating content for this encyclopaedia.
What Ward Cunningham created was a collaboration platform and Jimmy Wales used this platform to collaborate with millions of people across the world. We created a small wiki in my company which we use to manage the user manual of a software, and this manual is maintained also by the users of the software.

And then someone had another idea. Kevin Rose and his friends were unhappy with the news they found on the internet. They felt they could find better stories. They created a news site where the news editors are the users of this website. They are also the ones who submit stories to this website. They called it Digg. On Digg users "Digg" or vote for stories they like and the stories with the most votes come to the front of the website. Digg is a website that is dynamic, it changes based on the inputs of millions of people collaborating together to bring you the best news stories from the internet.

And speaking of collaboration, one of the most useful collaboration tools we use are spreadsheets also sometimes known as Excel. What web2.0 is doing is helping you to create spreadsheets online, share them and collaborate on them with hundreds of people at the same time. In my group of 20 people, we used an online spreadsheet to manage the trips we were planning to take in Europe. Here we listed out our trips and then everyone put in their names into the trips they wished to go on. And we all did this at the same time. In the end, everyone could see which people were going on which trips and hence coordinate these trips better. Google documents is a free tool that you can use to create and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations online.

In the end, web2.0 is all about sharing information. And to summarize the goal of such technologies, I would like to quote Jimmy Wales explaining his motivations about Wikipedia... "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."