Someone recently asked me to define the term Web 2.0.
For starters, I really like Tim O'Reilly's definition of the term. Wikipedia's page is also good. Both note how Web 2.0 is less about something new and more about the fuller realization of the web's true potential. This realization, contents O'Reilly, gravitates around several core themes: Specifically:
1. The Web as platform.
2. Harnessing collective intelligence
3. Data is the next Intel Inside
4. End of the Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
I should write a post on how Yepic is, in each of these respects, a Web 2.0 company. But in this post I want to focus on what O'Reilly calls "data" and what we call "digital content." To better illustrate, let me quote O'Reilly's article:
"Contrast, however, the position of Amazon.com. Like competitors such as Barnesandnoble.com, its original database came from ISBN registry provider R.R. Bowker. But unlike MapQuest, Amazon relentlessly enhanced the data, adding publisher-supplied data such as cover images, table of contents, index, and sample material. Even more importantly, they harnessed their users to annotate the data, such that after ten years, Amazon, not Bowker, is the primary source for bibliographic data on books, a reference source for scholars and librarians as well as consumers. Amazon also introduced their own proprietary identifier, the ASIN, which corresponds to the ISBN where one is present, and creates an equivalent namespace for products without one. Effectively, Amazon "embraced and extended" their data suppliers."
O'Reilly's primary argument here is that no company can create sustainable competitive advantage out of commoditized data. MapQuest became irrelevant because they leased and resold data that other businesses (Google Maps, for example) could also lease and resell. Amazon, on the other hand, has become an unquestioned authority in publishing because they took the ubiquitous ISBN registry and extended it with tons of user-contributed data.
O'Reilly's argument focuses on businesses that operate individual web-sites, but I think there's a parallel line of thought here that applies to individual purveyors of digital content (like people who compose and sell their own copyrighted content), as well. In Web 1.0 days, the content you created was fundamentally limited in terms of openness, richness, and accessibility. In terms of openness, it was very difficult to collaborate with others, and this meant your content couldn't benefit from the collective intelligence that's become a hallmark of Web 2.0. In terms of richness, you could have text and grapics, or video and audio, but it was difficult to easily incorporate all of those into one piece of content. In terms of accessibility, Web 1.0 content was anything but. You had to download, install additional software, email, burn to CD, or print, and then you had to deal with all the version issues that came with those distribution and consumption models. If the author made a change to the content, it was very difficult to get it to all the consumers.
Web 2.0 content has improved dramatically in each of these regards:
Openness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally closed, Web 2.0 information is fundamentally open . . . to collaboration, contribution, review, updates, etc.
Richness: Whereas Web 1.0 content was fundamentally flat and lacked integration across different types of media, Web 2.0 content is fundamentally rich and seamlessly integrates text, graphics, images, video, audio, widgits, etc.
Accessibility: Whereas Web 1.0 content was difficult to access, particularly in update scenarios, Web 2.0 content is always current and just one click away.
In the same way that business models that rely on commoditized data find themselves under enormous competitive pressure that pushes them into a state of irrelevance, content entrepreneurs that fail to embrace these new content characteristics will also find themselves, and their content, fading into oblivion. Closed, flat, inaccessible content is a dying breed.
With that in mind, we created Yepic not just a platform for for-profit self-publication, but as a platform for for-profit self-publication of true Web 2.0 content.
