Both Tim O’Reilly’s article on Web 2.0 and Bryan Alexander’s “Web 2.0 Storytelling” were intriguing reading.  O’Reilly begins by laying out some defining principles of Web 2.0.  What caught my eye most were the ideas of harnessing collective intelligence, ease of sharing/publishing, and the participatory nature of services and tools which evolve based largely on popularity/usefulness for users.

And folksonomy.  Can I take a minute to gush over how much I love this term?  We’ll recall from O’Reilly that folksonomy is not classification based on what someone (or many disconnected someones) might believe the proper breakdown and organization of information should be, but a collaborative organization based on what tags make sense and what tags are added by the people using the information.  There is a sense of decentralization and a democratic management of information here (and throughout many other web 2.0 endeavors) which is quite appealing.

Also cool are the comparisons O’Reilly makes with the processes of the brain: tagging as a metaphor for the “overlapping associations that the brain itself uses.”  I’d never thought of it, but the metaphor holds quite well.  Also, in relation to Bryan Alexander’s point that all bloggers are characters, I find it fascinating to see tag usage (when someone really plays with it, as opposed to just labeling the obvious) as another sort of miniature story, which can add secondary layers to the main story presented in whatever is being tagged.

But back to collective intelligence in the web 2.0 world. We also have the synaptic structure of the brain mimicked in the web of connections enabled through hyperlinking.  Where it gets really trippy is that web 2.0 hyperlinking does not just link information anymore, it links people. So are we then all individual nodes, synapses in the global brain of the internet?  And this internet brain informs our lives constantly – it is not a separate sort of intelligence, but very much of the “real” world.  Social networking is becoming a valuable way to organize, informing a new internet activism — Twitter’s role in the Iranian protests comes to mind; also Egypt.

That this kind of internet power allows us to, say, read tweets about and/or from a political or social movement ties back to web 2.0′s decentralization.  Imagine you are studying history: suddenly you have a whole other source of valuable historical information easily accessible.  That source itself is decentralized & offers a wide array of perspectives and voices.  If the standard line for a critique of the making of history is that “history is written by the victorious,” can’t the connectivity and ease of publishing from web 2.0 help undermine this?  Perhaps undermine isn’t even the right word, perhaps I’m looking for expansion — expanding the ways we can communicate with the world and with others in it.

See the comic experiment that goes with this rambling here.