Today I will start what will become a series: Humanities 2.0. I am a vivid follower of what has happened in the internet in the recent years. And more than one time I have stumbled over ideas which I believe could be successfully applied in humanities. For those who have not followed the internet as closely, in my first post I will have to quickly recapitulate what happened.

In the end of the nineties the internet suddenly got massively popular. And of course as most of us will remember, lots of money was invested and burned in internet businesses. All that happened before the crash of the tech stock market NASDAQ in 2000. I was at the time sitting in front of a TV in Syria and could basically calculate in my head, that I had just lost most of my personal savings. Yes, I also was a believer. And I was proved wrong. What had happened? The belief at the time was basically that most of our life, especially any shopping would be transferred to the internet in due time. When this would be achieved a number of companies would be able to make big money, because they would be the dominant service provider in a certain field. Therefore the stock market awarded all companies who were able to attract many users. However companies started to pay a ridiculous prime, just to attract users. Therefore, the more money a company burned, the higher the stock price would go. But sadly one day the stock market figured out, that people were only buying dog food online, because it was sold under price – not because it was more customer friendly. And in consequence stocks plummeted. Companies went bankrupt and the internet boom was over.

It took a couple of years until the stock market and investors regained their confidence in online business models. Google being so successful played a part. The sky rocketing number of people using the net, was relevant as well. And thirdly online infrastructure became more easily accessible to companies. Having a web site and running it became easier and cheaper. Fourthly web advertisement finally became a real business and therefore having a service based on ads became viable. Additionally a number of new technologies to build web sites appeared, but it is debatable, what effect that actually had. But finally a new generation of online services started to emerge.

Again, many of these new services were not that new. Already in the time before 2000 online journals were massively popular. But with the raise of the blogs, a new media phenomenon emerged. Wikipedia became more and more well known. And networks such as YouTube and Facebook appeared. All this taken together was dubbed by Tim O’Reilly as Web 2.0. There has been a lengthy and rather futile debate over the term and its exact meaning. However most industry experts at the time, that is in 2005, tended to agree that there was a new phenomenon, which could be observed. Now it is very difficult to define what exactly is the core of Web 2.0. However certain trends are visible.

1. The Web 2.0 is about network effects and user generated data. A web 2.0 service does not make sense if it has only one user. That one user can do nothing with the service. Only when many people add their data the service makes sense. One example for these network effects is Wikipedia. An example for user generated data could be YouTube.

2. The Web 2.0 is about the long tail. Thanks to relatively cheap infrastructure and unlimited “shelf space”, to use a concept of super markets, the new web can gather for people who have special interests. This is more obvious if I give you an example. If you look at a blog like Earth2Tech which is part of the GigaOm network, you can see that there is a blog which is definitely interesting to a certain subgroup of people. There might be 10′000 people or more who find this topic interesting enough to read every article. However these people are spread all over the world. In a classical media environment, where every newspaper or TV channel has limited “shelf space” it would be impossible to speak to these people. Maybe only 10 of them are reading that specific news paper we are talking about. And a specialised newspaper is unthinkable, because of high printing costs. In the internet however you can create a media channel only for these 10′000 people – and chance is that it is highly profitable, because you can have specialised advertisement serving this subgroup of people.

3. Web 2.0 is about conversations. Because we have user generated data and within the long tail we have mostly specialists of a specific field, this is not a one way channel. It is not an authority speaking to people, but an exchange between the centre, i.e. a blog, and the periphery, i.e. its readers. This is a dialogue in which everyone can participate from specialists to normal people, from NGOs to companies.

4. The etc. The Web 2.0 is mostly about data. It is not usually a store or a classical service, but it only makes sense with the data, i.e. Facebook is based on the information it gathers on your friends. Furthermore the Web 2.0 allows for a certain openness and therefore there is possibilities to connect data from one place with the data somewhere else. For example you can look up the location of an event you find in Facebook with one click on Google Maps. Last but not least the Web 2.0 is controlled by its users, not the companies which provide the service, because they control their data and a service collapses when too many users migrate to another service.

These are some key points. As mentioned there has been extended debate what the Web 2.0 is exactly, however this is not too worrisome for my discussion, because what I plan to do in this series, is a discussion of specific aspects of the Web 2.0 which will be helpful for humanities and enable so to say the Humanities 2.0. In my next post however I will first discuss a couple of central issues which I believe can be solved thanks to these technologies.

PS: If you want to know more about the Web 2.0, are too lazy too use Google and read German, you can go over to “Status Quo – Web 2.007″ by Michael Wallies. The page was designed and realised by the incredible mak, who also designed this blog.

Below you can see a mosaic of some more or less known Web 2.0 logos.