The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. … In fewer than 4000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population. … What we all failed to see was how much of this new world would be manufactured by users, not corporate interests.”
This statement by the founding editor of Wired reflects interrelated phenomena of the Internet: the rapidity of its growth and the amount of information produced by users for free. It is the latter fact, that is at the heart of the second generation of Web services: Web 2.0. These services fuel an individual’s desire to connect with others and communicate their views, and allow online collaboration and sharing of content. Web 2.0 applications have grown dramatically in number, size, popularity and influence to include sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, political blogs such as Daily-Kos and HuffingtonPost and the social networking sites MySpace and Facebook.