In order to fully engage with my project and understand social networking sites, I must first understand Web 2.0 and it’s emergening practices and concepts. For a full, indepth summary of Bryan Alexanders article Web 2.0: A New Wave of Innovation for Teaching and Learning? see my Readings and Comments section.
This reading looks at Web 2.0, not as a brand new phenomenon, but rather a gradual evolving from more traditional web pratices and concepts. He looks at:
social software–e.g sites that allow the sharing of thoughts and information such as blogs, wiki’s and Myspace
microcontent–e.g the move away from the ‘book/page’ structure of the web, such as blogs, podcasts, rss
openess–e.g the 2-way flow of information found in collaborative projects such as Wikipedia and P-2-P file sharing and RSS
folksonomy–e.g photo tagging, for example the type used in Flickr
All of these concepts, which i have discussed in more detail in my reading summary, are concepts which have emerged and developed through original Web practices, but, unlike more traditional webpages, encourage the 2-way sharing, editing and consuming of information.