Forget about SOA (service-oriented architectures) and SaaS (software as a service), pretty web browser interfaces and Facebook, EDI and B2B, CIM and collaborative product development. Web 2.0 is all about people and tapping into what they know and want to know. It's all about people working collaboratively and sharing knowledge. It's all about making such collaborations easy and the information being shared relevant and easier to access. Web 2.0 is the entirety of technologies, products, and websites that promote two-way communication and information sharing. Web 2.0 replaces the passive surf-shop-click interaction in the "old" web with the interactivity that comes with people creating web content about all sorts of topics for all sorts of other people to surf, click, and add more content. Differences between User 1.0 and User 2.0

Business has a unique interest in Web 2.0. First, organizations are themselves networks, consisting of people and machine-based data sources. Second, organizations both produce and consume enormous amounts of information so finding the information that's needed is a continuing problem. That's why the push to scorecards, speedometers, traffic lights, and other simple, readable graphics and reporting tools in business applications.

An incomplete guide to Web 2.0

Business-grade Web 2.0 technologies are basically just sophisticated versions of their home- and personal-use counterparts. However, they typically need more IT support, partly for security considerations (e.g., user access, privacy, and firewall protection) and partly to integrate to applications that are not readily integratable. Here are some of Web 2.0 technologies.

Blogging is just another form of publishing. It keeps a running sequence of comments, descriptions, and other content, whether text, images, or video, available for all to see. The content is usually pithy; the postings from multiple participants fast-paced. Social networking, a form of blogging, centers on online communities and special interest groups, such as Digg (special interest: news), Facebook, Flickr (photography), Linkedln (business), My Space, and YouTube (video). (Twitter merges constrained text-based IM with blogging.)

Two factors make social networking attractive in the corporate setting. First, there's the whole collaboration thing. Second, there's erowd-soureing-Uie ability to extract the "wisdom of crowds." The theory is: People know things, and people often turn to people they trust for recommendations. Crowd-sourcing compiles reviews by anonymous (and not-so-anonymous) people regarding anything: restaurants, car rentals, consumer electronics, dentists, plumbers, cars, and so on.