About every ten years, there is a “new and emerging” trend in the technology industry. The 1970’s brought us the acceptance of mainframes; the 1980’s brought the client server market; the 1990’s gave us the Internet; the 2000’s are bringing us “Web 2.0.” Each new trend does not mean the demise of the previous trend. We still have mainframes, PCs, servers, software, and Internet browsers.
However, new trends layer on top of older established technologies, and enable us to provide new services to a growing user base. In the 1980’s the technologies made it easier to mass market. The 1990’s Internet explosion allowed us to mass customize. Today’s trends let us mass personalize. Specifically, mass personalization allows users with specific (niche) needs to access products, services, or like-minded people.
Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty of MediaLive have dubbed the latest trends in technology “Web 2.0.” In this article, I will explore the trends and technologies they include in Web 2.0, and discuss how these trends and technologies apply to the e-Learning marketplace.
The big trends
In the first 2000’s decade, we have a large, diverse base of online users and we have new iterations of technologies that support different applications. Here are the biggest trends dubbed “2.0.”
Application services
Web 2.0 focuses on services rather than software. Unlike the types of technologies that were introduced in the 1990’s, application services don’t require the end users to load software onto their computers. Services reside on the Web. When the end users want to participate or use a service, they go to a Web site. Most Web services were not available five to 10 years ago. Remember when you needed to look up driving directions from a map? Remember when you wanted to buy a new house, you had to get listings from your real estate agent who found all the homes in your area, and then you had to drive past each home? Applications such as online driving directions and MLS listings are examples of application services.
Focus on “the long tail”
This refers to the portions of the population/market bell curve that reflect smaller markets. The tail can be very long — there are many potential users who are not being serviced by the organizations that service the core consumers. Mass marketing organizations focus on the center of the bell — that’s where the majority of the people are. With so many people on the Internet it has become much easier to market to people in the tails of the curve. Specifically, there can be many geographically dispersed people with a like interest who are not interested in what the majority wants. These people’s interests fall into niches for which it was not economical to have service providers except in the largest population centers.
Netflix is an example of a company that has become successful by marketing to the tail of the curve. Users can request old, “indie,” or foreign films not easily obtainable from local retail stores. Because of limited shelf space, the local video rental stores have to cater to the general popular culture market, so they cannot stock all the obscure, non-mainstream films.
Mashups
Mashups involve taking multiple technologies or services and providing new added value services. A site like Zillow.com lets you view an online map and see the price of houses in a specific neighborhood. Zillow.com accesses two different databases of information — maps and county assessment records, combining them into a new added value service.
Enlisting end users to add value
End-user comments, blogs, and critiques may add value to generic information. Amazon was one of the first to stumble onto this. By allowing everyone to provide book reviews, they added value to their service as a bookseller, made it difficult for competitors to replicate, and increased the value of their service. Wikis are a new form of this phenomenon. By providing the infrastructure and focus, a Wiki harnesses end users to add value to a Web site.
“Intel Inside” (branding of core capabilities)
“Intel Inside” refers to branding of core capabilities that the end user does not directly purchase. With the Web, the Intel Inside strategy means providing the underlying value that is being used by others. In the Web services space, Google has been licensing their search engine so that it can be locally hosted for intranet (local internal Web site) searches. This further extends the branding for their services.
Providing services above the level of a single device
This is about the ability to provide Web services that run smoothly on any configuration of PC or portable device. Installed software is usually designed for a single operating system (e.g. MS Windows, Macintosh, or Linux). By providing software services through a Web browser interface, operating system dependence is eliminated. This means the same service is accessible from a PC, a Mac, or a PDA.
Web 2.0 applications
In addition to trends, new technologies enable Web 2.0 applications. These technologies are used and combined to create new services.
RSS
RSS turns Weblogs from a re-active technology into a pro-active technology. RSS is an automatic notifier for Weblogs. It provides an end user with a notification that a new posting has been added to a blog they are interested in. This turns blogs and newsgroups from posting repositories into a form of interactive communication.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a delivery mechanism to store audio/video on a portable player. Organizations can produce and provide audio and video (infotainment) broadcasts that can be downloaded and played on their portable player (“iPod”).
Scripting
The latest generation of
scripting and programming languages such as
XML
Although the common understanding of XML is quite different, XML is really infrastructure that allows pre-programmed definitions to be passed between Web pages. This is probably the most over-marketed and misunderstood technology on the Web. It seems like any vendor that is having a problem providing an advanced application will say they support this functionality via XML.
In reality, XML is to the Web what Roman characters are to writing English. The invention of Roman characters provided an easy infrastructure to communicate via writing. Roman characters alone do not provide communication. What you need on top of Roman characters is an agreement on language e.g. Spanish, French, English, or Italian. Likewise for XML, the ability to pass XML strings does not provide you with any services unless a specified data format has been agreed on. One of the most successful XML data formats is Rosettastone, a data format used by manufacturers.
A note to anyone purchasing a system where the vendor touts XML: Ask the next question — what data format are you using? If the vendor says they are using their own data format you will know they used the term XML to make a proprietary solution sound open. The “X” in “XML” stands for “eXtensible.” This means that one of the main features of the language is that it can be extended. But unless all parties using the particular document understand the details of vendor-provided extensions to the language, the communication will fail.
