Clase 22. de febrero

The first part of the class by Juan Quemada was on the subject of Web 2.0. As an introduction, a brief overview on the evolution of the use of internet was presented including some history, basic technologies of web, governement and topology. After the introduction Juan presented the consept of the Scale free network and the idea of the Long tail and how it applies, not only to social networks but also to the WWW and various other examples.

We continued to the determination of Web 2.0 and analysing its nature as not only a technological platform for new types of services but also as a manifestation of social networking and the significance of information. This led to everybody's favourite subject and biggest potential conserning the Web 2.0 - the collective intelligence or "Wisdom of Crowds" (the book by James Surowiecki, 2005).

The weblogs or Blogosphere was represented as an important part of the Web 2.0 after which we returned to the subject of the long tail. The long tail is a very essential consept conserning the services delivered in the world of web 2.0 and is based on the power of the so called long tail, the low-demand needs of the users. One could ask himself what the point is with the neverending streams of junkmail in the world. Does anyone really need this much "potential"?, Who buys this stuff?". Even if only one in ten thousand consumers really would buy viagra from a shadowy web distributor, it's enough to make the seller rich. The power lies in the extremely easy, although annoying distribution of the junkmail. Nowadays you can really find pretty much anything from the internet. Most of the services may not have but a handfull of users, but together they make up the very long and potent long tail.

Finally Wikis were introduced as an extremely interesting phenomenon and an occurrence of the aforementioned collective intelligence - User generated content.

The second part of the lecture by Joaquín Salvachúa continued on the subject of web 2.0 and focusing on its architecural. The basic technological elements were presented briefly alongside the client-server consept.

An important point in the architecture of today's web 2.0 in its random nature. As a whole it seems to be a hectic bazar of different technologies, tools and particularly services. Still it succeeds in offering a functional composite of services capable of satisfying virtually any sort of a need that a user might have. Salvachúa presents the comparison of an architecturally built cathedral as opposed to an organic corall reef where new elements are randomly born and sometimes grow to cover older parts. This is a remarkably similar charasteristic to the development of the web 2.0 environment where newer more developed services sometimes succeed to eat away the clients of older services that might have been relatively popular at their time. To maintain success as a popular web-service or application, the service has to grow and upgrade its content, sometimes even delivering change only to keep up the interest of the clients.

An other interesting notion is that a charasteristic trait of the new web 2.0 services is its absence of traditional client-server based architecture as specifically in collaborative services some of the clients take on different roles including that of content provider.