Okay, so what is it?
I like the phrase "the read/write web". It has a great ring to it. It
sounds very self-explanatory. But when it gets touted as something new, we sort
of have to scratch our heads and wonder - is what's happening here any different
from the basic HTML pages that people have been posting for a decade?
The
post on the librarians discussion forum is concise and to the point:
1. The Read Web is the Web where people look up and read about
information put up by other people (i.e., people who know html).
2. The Read/Write Web is a Web in which new tools (e.g., wikipedia,
blogs, flickr) allow people to add content to the Web as easily as
typing a Microsoft Word document and saving it. This makes the Web as
much a Write Web as a Read Web, hence the Read/Write Web.
But "other people" isn't a definition that gets more clearly defined
by telling us that these are "people who know html". Simple web-page
generating tools have been around for ages, such that knowing HTML isn't now,
nor has hardly ever been, a prerequisite for putting information on the web. What's
more, many information-dispensing web sites, sites that were run by professional
web people, sites that were design-intensive and hard to copy (not the sort of
sites a grandmother might create) have for years offered readers the opportunity
to react to what's posted by taking part in forums.
It seems to me that what makes a particular part of the internet a part of "the
read/write web" is a particular intent - the people who post to this "part"
of the web (and they are often bloggers) don't want readers to see their postings
as separate, apart. They consciously read other sites (other blogs) and borrow
from them, and expect their readers to do the same. It's not a question of the
ease of posting (though that certainly doesn't hurt). Instead, it's a case of
having a sense of belonging, of wanting to be a part of something, of not sanctifying
our own writing as above, as separate from, that of others. It's a question of
not seeing your own web site as a private entity, but instead of seeing it as
part of a greater whole.
Go to: Learning to count via the web?, or
Go to: ... though not always kept, or
Go to: Not a new promise, or
Go to: How many prosumers can fit on the head of cyberspace?