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Web 2.0 is a buzzword introduced in 2003-04 which is commonly used to encompass various novel phenomena on the World Wide Web. Although largely a marketing term, some of the key attributes associated with Web 2.0 include the growth of social networks, bi-directional communication, various 'glue' technologies, and significant diversity in content types. We are not aware of a technical comparison between Web 1.0 and 2.0. While most of Web 2.0 runs on the same substrate as 1.0, there are some key differences. We capture those differences and their implications for technical work in this paper. Our goal is to identify the primary differences leading to the properties of interest in 2.0 to be characterized. We identify novel challenges due to the different structures of Web 2.0 sites, richer methods of user interaction, new technologies, and fundamentally different philosophy. Although a significant amount of past work can be reapplied, some critical thinking is needed for the networking community to analyze the challenges of this new and rapidly evolving environment.

In April 25, 2008 China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) issued the Research Report of China Youth Internet Behaviors. Data shows that till the end of 2007, the number of young web users (under the age of 25) has reached 107 million, which is about half of the overall size of Chinese Internet users.

"Social is the new black," Joe Kraus, Google's director of product management, said at a talk on the company's social-computing efforts at the Supernova conference here. Kraus' view, which can be fairly said to represent Google's, is that these are the three big trends in the social Web:

Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor in Northwestern University's sociology department, has discovered that students aren't nearly as Web-savvy as they, or their elders, assume.

Numerous authors/bloggers have advocated using a PageRank-like index for quantifying the importance of papers or journals.

A paper at WWW 2008, "Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries" (PDF), by Lars Backstrom, Jon Kleinberg, Ravi Kumar, and Jasmine Novak offered many clever examples of using where people are when they do a web search both to determine when interest in a topic is geographically isolated and to estimate the physical location of objects.

2collab, the research collaboration platform from Elsevier, the world's leading publisher of science, technology and medical (STM) information, announced today the results of a survey, asking researchers about the role of social media in their professional lives. The survey, which yielded over 1,800 responses, revealed that scientists are using blogs, wikis, and social networking and bookmarking applications primarily for professional reasons. Results show that these social media applications have provided scientists and researchers with additional resources to help them collaborate, connect, share and discover information.