Examples of Web 2.0 Websites

Technoroti is a collaborative search site for blogs. There are so many blogs. As of May 30, 2006, Technorati contained listings for 41.8 million blogs. The rise of the blogosphere and its affect on traditional journalism is often in the news these days. But there are so many blogs. Many are simply personal thoughts one might enter into a diary - but made public for all to read. Others are sophisticated forms of journalism by experts and authorities in their fields. So how can we find helpful and trustworthy blogs among so many personal blogs? It's not going to come from the evaluation of human editors - there are just too many of blogs and thousands of more are created every day. Web 2.0 principles of collaborative tagging, linking, and social categorization are used in Technorati to make it easier to sort through 41 million blogs and find just the ones we want.

Similar sites to Technorati: Feedster.com, Bloglines.com, Google Blog Search


Digg is another collaborative popularity site for technology related news. The Digg home page always lists the most popular articles. But anyone can submit a page as a potential Digg article. All articles submitted remain in the queue until enough registered users "Digg it" by clicking a "Digg this" link. As the community reads and responds to postings the home page displays the most "dug" stories. Digg has become popular as a technology news source, and it's even views as an authority on the subject even though no human editor determines which stories show up on the "front page" - the readers decide.

Similar site to Digg: Newsvine, NewsBump


So far we've looked at Web 2.0 tools that help us find websites. But such collaborative long tail systems can help us find other things besides websites. Flickr is a Web 2.0 photo sharing site. As with most of these collaborative sites, they can be used for personal online storage and sharing with specified contacts. But many people publicly post their photography in Flickr, so the collaborative viewing and tagging habits of the community raise the best photography to the top. I subscribe to the Flickr photo of the day RSS feed and I'm always impressed by the quality of the shots I see.

Similar sites to Flickr: Zooomr, BubbleShare


Web 2.0 for videos. YouTube is an interesting idea, but since it's primarily for personal video upload it has a lot of amateurish clips. For a better online video site I would recommend Google video, but since Google video lacks much of the collaborative features of Web 2.0, it doesn't quite fit as an example. Also, if you have kids keep them away from YouTube since the ability to upload personal videos leads to many clips that one might expect under the category of amateur video.

Similar sites to YouTube: Google Video


The Wikipedia is perhaps to best example of how the broad knowledge of the community can be harnessed using collaborative Web 2.0 technologies. A wiki is a collaborative site that allows groups to collaborate on the content itself. Groups can be limited to internal employees or opened to the world, like Wikipedia. If this newsletter were a wiki, any reader could click and edit, add to, or change the content. There is an obvious potential for abuse, but normally every wiki has an administrator and every state of a wiki is saved so administrators can roll back or correct the site if they find incorrect or inappropriate contributions. However, the vastness of the community itself helps to keep the content clean and correct. If the Wikipedia were monitored and edited professionally it could never keep up with all the content. But since each posting has a following among those who are truly interested in and knowledgeable about their respective subjects, all of its contents actually have many knowledgeable and concerned editors. This protects the content and ensures the accuracy of its information. And because it's open to the world, its subject range is awesome.

Similar sites to Wikipedia: Open Site


I've been using Rhapsody for a couple months and I love it. Rhapsody and the other main online music services like iTunes, Napster, and Virgin Digital are not perfect examples of Web 2.0 but they are great examples of long tail access to content. They also have sharing and discovery features that are "Web 2.0ish." I just love listening to anything and everything I want to as I work. Because copyright law has not been able to keep pace with technology most music sites will cost money, but nevertheless they do make huge amounts of music accessible. Rhapsody costs me about $10 per month but I can listen to anything in library of over 1.6 million songs.

Last.fm is a newcomer to the list of online music services, and it is very Web 2.0. It has all the tagging features, link clouds and such. Additionally - as I've been using Web 2.0 site to research this newsletter - I discovered "Pandora" in a link clouds. It's another music service and it is free (if you accept their advertising). You tell Pandora what artists or songs you like and it builds "radio stations" of other music based on the Music Genome Project. I think I'm going to use it for awhile. Isn't Web 2.0 great?

Similar sites to Rhapsody: iTunes, Napster, Virgin Digital, Last.fm, Pandora


Okay, I've covered Web 2.0 and the long tail of websites, news, blogs, photos, videos, knowledge, and music. While there are many other examples of Web 2.0 sites I'll end on the long tail of people. MySpace is a phenomenon. It is almost entirely the domain of teenagers as a quick visit will reveal. Yet as a Web 2.0 social network phenomenon it does open up all sorts of possibilities in terms of how we relate to one another, network and interact. A new site called fo.rtuito.us takes social networking to another level. It pairs up individuals anonymously and allows a period of time for the two to decide whether to add the suggested person to their friends list. Hmmm, long tail of friendships?

Similar sites to MySpace: Friendster, fo.rtuito.us


This is really a very short list of Web 2.0 sites. If you would like to stay on top of new sites as they are announced I would suggest visiting TechCrunch and subscribing to Michael Arrington's RSS feed. He posts almost daily on new Web 2.0 sites and tools. Who knows what you might discover. There's a little of everything and something for everyone in the long tail - and that can be a very good thing.