Diego Giol Internet and many other things

Lately we are listening quite often about Web 2.0, but what is web 2.0?

I personally don’t think that the AJAX technology is revolutionary enough to be considered “the new internet”. For those who have not heard about AJAX it is basically a technology that makes sites interactive without “re-loading” pages.

But if AJAX is not Web 2.0, then what is it?

I believe that the real revolution is coming from the large broadband connections that we are seeing here in Europe and in many places on the planet + Wi Fi internet + community development.

Some of the examples I have to mention are:

• Apple and its super successful iTunes software/store: they have sold millions of mp3s and videos and have become the biggest on-line digital media retailers.
• Flickr (bought by Yahoo) not only offers no-limits disk space for pictures but it also has a fantastic structure based on communities and has made this site one of the big winners in 2005.
• Yahoo! added video and music search capabilities to its search engine and it already had Yahoo! Launch (streaming video and music).

Finally, two websites that in my opinion are indicating the path in which the media and the internet are going:

• Google Video has a mix of free upload-it-yourself videos and TV produced videos for which you pay a reasonable fee.
• YouTube.com has created (thanks to its community) one of the biggest video database. Not only that, the site is so popular that some people are becoming famous after putting their videos there.

A very clear example of this is the video made by German group of teenagers who created the Grup Tekkan and had such a success within a week that they ended up in one of the top German TV shows: Live presentation

For me, even though that the big media groups are going to stay in the business as radio stayed when the first TV stations appeared. Are we are seeing the democratization of content production but also the creation of a worldwide oligopoly on media distribution channels?