It does exists a multi-faceted phenomenon that is driving the evolution to "a whole new Web" known as Web 2.0 or Next Generation Web if you want to accept this analogy with the Next Generation Internet motto generally associated with the IPv6 deployment.

This phenomenon is the socialization of the Web, and it's within the basis of a real sharing economy. Within that phenomenon, we can encounter a series of technologies and services that are been built through a growing number of user innovation processes. We are talking about a certain kind of user, the superuser or digerati - kinda "digital literati" capable of leading the way in the prosecution of a new technological frontier.

Blogs are just the tip of Next Generation Web "iceberg". They are accompanied by the WikiWikiWeb-like pages (a.k.a. wikis), syndication standards and aggregation services, tagging services (folksonomies) or the socialware and social software services like Orkut, Linked or eConozco for the Hispanic community.

In a wide sense, we could refer all that technologies as Social Software (as it was defined by Stowe Boyd in "Are You Ready for Social Software?", published in Darwin Magazine by May, 2003). It can be considered as a supporting layer for the growing amount of services that are emerging just right now in the Web, paving the Web2.0 way. An evolutionary path realizing an actual Digital Universal Network (as it is presented by Professor Sáez Vacas in his article "Beyond The Internet: The Digital Universal Network", available in the April 2005 issue of UPGRADE Journal).

The blogosphere itself could be understood as a "communication sub-space", where the conversational nature of human transactions is amplified by the network effects that emerge in the "World Live Web", that is being built from the current World Wide Web. The key points of the blog phenomenon are far beyond the blog as a web publishing format with its characteristic updating frequency, hypertext density or its inverse chronological order.

In its process of socialization, the Web (its content and its dynamics) is acquiring "human" significance. We can create, edit, publish, share... content (every kind of content) by collaborating through the Internet in a social manner i.e. giving our actions a social significance. Just to mention the most well-known services, you have different blogging services like Blogger, TypePad or WordPress; we can share our photos in flickr, defining our different social circles (friends, family, colleagues); we can define, manage and extend our social (personal or even professional) networking (contact networks) with Linked, eConozco or Orkut services; we may also collaborate on line with project management tools like BaseCamp or wiki services like SocialText or eApuntes; if you want to, you can publish your videos or audio clips in OurMedia, or broadcast your podcasts through Odeo; You can access to encyclopedia-like articles with an outstanding update frequency in Wikipedia... the list grows to the infinite.

It's time for the real productive consumers - beyond the DIYers-like prosumers of the third wave announced by Alvin Toeffler - to lead the way. Anybody can contribute to a global categorization effort, the collaborative semantic tagging process that is taking place all over the world through folksonomies services like Blogmarks, del.icio.us, de.lirio.us, Wists ... The kind of project not viable for any centralized computing resources you could ever imagine before.

We can try to visualize the Web 2.0 conceptualization a a layered scheme, where the Web itself appears as the technology platform supporting a growing and emergent amount of new applications and services we can consider as belonging to a unique and wide sense social software concept. Upon this social software layer, we can realize the existence of a processes layer where takes place the emergence of new human-technology interactions in the form of new habits, rutines and information 'prosumtion' patterns. Finally, we find the social networks and the usual interactions the people build, but with a key point that is they are building that networks we can observe within a new (cyber)social environment that resemble some kind of "real virtuality", bridging the current gap people usually see between their lifes in the real world and their different "avatars" within the Internet.

If we open up each of these layers we're talking about, we'll find a growing amount of different components; a series of elements, each of them with its own domain, but conributing - as a whole - to the new "platform" that is been built upon the New Generation Internet. In the technology layer, we can identify microformats like xhtml, FOAF... that colud be generalized as semantic web technologies (with small letters, to be different from Semantic Web efforts from W3C) or Web Services acronyms (UDDI, WSDL, XML, SOAP, XSLT... are the more common among them), SOA as THE architectural paradigm, AJAX as a new technology combo aiming the developing of a new generation of rich user interfaces...

The majority of them appears in the detailed figure below, but you can miss some acronyms. Don't worry about it; it's the same with the upper layers: in the social software one, you have blogs (all kinds of weblogs), wikis, folksonomies... and the you can encounter processes like blogging, tagging, sharing... and the corresponding actions in the social layer but, at the end of the day, the key driver to have such a kind of layered architecture "up and running" must be innovation, USER INNOVATION, and its representation at every level in the scheme. That is the actual engine of this conceptualization, the only one that can support the conversational dynamic and emergent nature of this Next Generation Web.


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