Your Web, Your Way

By Jeff Howe

If the Web's first coming was all about grafting old businesses onto a new medium (pet food! on the Internet!), Web 2.0 is all about empowering individual consumers. It's not enough just to find that obscure old movie; now you can make your own film, distribute it worldwide and find out what people think almost instantly. Big businesses are embracing this new world as well, not just through advertising but also by tapping the expertise of everyone out there to enhance their products. Here's how to decode the buzzwords and blaze your own trail through the tangle of websites. You Make It Web 2.0 is fueled by an outpouring of creativity from the people formerly known as consumers. From YouTube auteurs to bloggers to amateur photographers competing with the paparazzi, USERGENERATED CONTENT is revolutionizing the media landscape You Name It The sheer mass of information online -- 20 billion Web pages and counting -- should defy organization. Collective intelligence has risen to the challenge. With users tagging images, text and other forms of content, an organic sort of taxonomy has blossomed, appropriately called FOLKSONOMY You Work on It Why pay a professional when an amateur would do it for dramatically less money? In fields ranging from photography to the sciences, companies are taking jobs once performed by staff and CROWDSOURCING them to the enthusiastic, increasingly adept masses You Find It Wal-Mart can't afford to stock anything that won't sell in volume. But websites like MySpace or Netflix offer an endless array of obscure products, allowing users to forage successfully for Japanese ceramics or old-time bluegrass as easily as they might find the latest John Grisham book. This business model is known as the LONG TAIL THE ENTERTAINERS The song remains the same, but the way we listen to it is changing. The movie, music, book and video-game industries have all embraced the Internet o BitTorrent This efficient way of transmitting large files can make anyone a movie distributor o Revver By attaching ads to Web videos, Revver gave stupid pet tricks their first business model o Second Life An imaginary world built by users spending real money, it has become a nation of nearly 2 million o YouTube The site that leveled the entertainment playing field. Ask a Ninja outdraws The Daily Show o Last FM Beyond radio, it's a way to tap into the musical tastes of the crowd and add yours as well o Netflix With more than 70,000 DVDs available, proof that Keanu and Kurosawa can coexist o iTunes With a catalog of 3.5 million songs, Apple makes money off the misses as well as the hits o amazon.com With customer reviews and recommendations, book buying is now a communal experience THE TOOLMAKERS The crowd isn't just expressing itself more; it's also gathering and filtering all those blog posts and photographs and finding an audience for them On the new Web, users are increasingly building their own tools. The result is greater customization and convenience, from maps that can be easily programmed to ads that change with every new blog post o craigslist The classified-ad service has 23 employees but receives more traffic than all but seven other sites o Linkedin Social networking for suits. It brings together an elite clientele of global executives o ebay At the auction site, the users are the police: customer ratings weed out the bad eggs o myspace.com With 120 million users, it's a whole new society, with features that maximize individuality o Google Maps Users can add their own points of interest to create mashups like www.beerhunter.ca o Google AdSense Provides free ads relevant to your website, then pays you if people click on them o Google The search empire built itself around a social function: counting links between websites THE GATHERERS The crowd isn't just expressing itself more; it's also gathering and filtering all those blog posts and photographs and finding an audience for them o iStockphoto This photo store taps an army of amateurs, who can sell their shots for as little as $1 o flickr The photo-scrapbook site helped popularize tagging as a way to organize information o Blogger The popular bloggingsoftware service makes every would-be pundit a publisher o Bloglines Lets users subscribe to various sites then receive updates from each one on a single page o Technorati Its search and ranking functions reveal the topics that are burning up the blogosphere o del.icio.us Allows users to share their Web-browser bookmarks, all organized by tags users provide o digg The crowd as news editor: readers "digg" stories they like and "bury" ones they don't Jeff Howe is a contributing editor at Wired. He writes about emerging trends at crowdsourcing.com and is currently working on a book about the crowdsourcing phenomenon