How to cope with Web 2.0

The web is changing. No longer merely 'interactive', Web 2.0 is both thoroughly involving and enormously useful. The trick is to take advantage of the new potential without being swallowed whole.

I spend an awful lot of time at the computer. My job and my hobby seem to have merged into one seamless whole, and my professional and personal interest in online music sees me spending quite a lot of the time online (usually with a pair of headphones).

I watch very little television. The Daily Show gets a look in, but I tend to only enjoy the Jon Stewart bits. That Rob Corddry guy annoys me. And you know what? You can actually get the good bits of that show online.

But we Dubbers sit and watch it each night after dinner because it's the one show the three of us can really enjoy together.

I've abandoned Six Feet Under and The West Wing - at least for now - and I don't know any of the contestants' names in The X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing IV: The Nightmare Continues.

My work days are spent researching and writing about whatever's going on in the internet right now, and how that might relate to the music industry (specifically small-medium music businesses). And everything potentially relates to the music industry - new ways of communicating, organising, connecting, distributing - it's all relevant.

My evenings are often spent doing much the same thing. Don't get me wrong - I spend time with my family. We joke and talk and eat together - but my evening screentime is not television-based. I have the web junkie's need to be current. My concern is less with the information about the world - and more with the information about the information.

And yet - it's all I can do to keep up with the online developments collectively referred to as 'Web 2.0'. At the moment, just being informed could easily be a full time job.

In essence, Web 2.0 is just like the other, older world wide web (let's call it 1.0). The difference is that you get to engage with it. Not interact - engage. You don't read a 2.0 site, you use it. You don't visit it, you make something out of it.

Now, as a discernible phenomenon, Web 2.0 is about a year old. Podcasting could be its older brother. But it's been an evolutionary development rather than a switch from one kind of computing interaction to another. Blogging was probably the phenomenological moment at which the lizard started to sprout wings.

Web 2.0 is a social phenomenon. Taxonomies become 'folksonomies' as people begin to share their own natural language categorisation and filing systems for content ('tagging' is at the heart of sites such as social bookmarking tool del.icio.us and photo sharing site Flickr.com as well as Technorati and the new Flock browser).

RSS delivers web content to you, without you having to go seek it out. You can get headlines from the BBC, CNN, The Independent, The Guardian, Radio New Zealand (yay) and Wired magazine straight to your desktop without having to go to their individual websites. Those headlines are now on your browser the moment you start it up - if you want.

Bookmarks are shared (like in my sidebar to your right) and incorporated into subscribed feeds - or aggregations of subscribed feeds ('Frankenfeeds' as one site calls them).

The new Google homepage is a good example of a 2.0 application. Sign up, customise it with different feeds from your favourite news sites, blogs, other people's del.icio.us bookmarks and so on. Essentially you're making a website out of other people's websites.

Collaborative tools such as the brilliant Backpack start to become commonplace (looking for an opensource version of that, if anyone can point to one).

Webpages become computer applications in themselves, rather than simply static brochures with shopping carts attached.

In short, we grab, make, name, share, move, cut, paste and reconfigure the web to suit our needs. Web 2.0 can be shaped in our own image, tremendously increase the knowledge-to-time ratio, and both manage and apply this knowledge more effectively. These truly are tools for thought.

Trouble is - all this choice and engagement and empowerment requires an understanding of the parameters (or lack thereof) and the time to cope with it all. Not only that, but the psychological obstacle of 'all this new stuff' is immense.

To quite a number of people I've spoken to (and these were real in-the-flesh humans, not virtual people... mostly), making the web sounds like a lot of hard work. Can't we just leave that to the geeks? Choice is fine and all that, but I don't know the names of most of the ingredients or how to read the recipe. Can't I just do the online equivalent of having my mother just put a plate of food in front of me and tell me to eat it?

Well, yes and no. Some of this stuff will genuinely make your life better, and there's no point passing that up if the opportunity's there. And on the other hand, lots of it is entirely experimental, additional or - for most people - superfluous.

Start with the basics - and either stay right there, or build if you get the confidence and the inclination.

You really must do the dynamic homepage thing. Just change your homepage to either Start.com or this page at Google.com.

Sign yourself up and spend a little bit of time customising. Half an hour on the setup will reap rich rewards. There's also some default dynamic content. A good start.

If you need (or would like) to stay on top of a subject (say, for work), you can subscribe to that tag's bookmark in your customised start page. Go to del.icio.us and find a tag that matches the topic - then put the feed from that topic (the RSS Feed button on that tag's page) into the Add Content section of your new homepage.

And voila - anytime anybody finds a page on the internet that's a) about your topic and b) worth a look - you find out and can go straight there.

While you're over at del.icio.us, you should sign up - and go to the About page for a bit of a look.

If you start using del.icio.us bookmarks instead of your browser's favourites menu - you can call yourself a 'Citizen of the 2.0 Age' with minimum fuss.

There are other social bookmarking systems, but del.icio.us seems to be the dominant one.

Book yourself an hour or so early next week - Yahoo! Calendar could help here - especially now it syncs so well with Outlook (I'm now running four identical copies) - and just do these things:

1) Make your homepage one of the dynamic rss-enabled sort described above
2) Add content
3) Start using social bookmarks

Once you've had a bit of a muck around, it won't take much to get into the habit. Give it time, and notice how you start to just know things - headlines that appeared on your front page that might not have caught your eye had you relied on remembering to visit all those news sites individually.

You'll wonder how you coped... and there's no earthly reason you can't do these things AND watch The West Wing.

If businesses started training their employees in the art of Web 2.0 use - and actually encouraged non-task oriented online time for trained 2.0 types - they'd see a measurable increase in productivity, efficiency, and stronger knowledge base.

But for me right now, just staying on top of it as it unfolds is demanding and brain-stretching work and leisure. Naturally, this makes me happy.