Information management: some changes after the Web 2.0 shift

The shift from the so-called Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been studied and analized in the best way possible by Tim O’Reilly in his famous pages on “What is Web 2.0” and there is probably very little left to say.

However, one can start from there and see how (and if, or to what extent), more in details, that shift is changing the approach to old issues in information science, like how exactly information flows and how to improve actual accessibility to information. In this perspective, the social aspects that are usually the core of every discussion on Web 2.0 are taken for granted and as a starting point, while the focus is on the concepts there are more relevant to “information management” when it comes to building effective integrated information systems.

RESTful web services and information sharing

For years web services have been identified with SOAP and XML-RPC and creating and using web services has been considered a task for advanced programmers, a situation that has limited the large-scale adoption of this technology.

Over the last few years, many big actors (1) in the Internet have started offering remote APIs through RESTful (2) web services.

Web 2.0 and the proliferation of communities

Reply to a message from Don Osborn on the Web2forDev DGroup raising the issue of reduced participation in Web 2.0 tools due to registration/login screen.

I think the point raised by Don Osborn is a real issue when it comes to participation in Web 2.0 tools.

This is part of a more general aspect of Web 2.0: the proliferation of communities.

With Web 2.0, services are typically built for / by a community. Communities very often overlap but remain separate and this sometimes discourages participation in new communities and makes participation in similar but separate communities a repetitive and fatiguing task.

I think something that should be looked into are existing efforts towards “universal user accounts”, or more technically “decentralized single sign-on systems”, like the Open ID initiative. At least in the agricultural / development community, ways should be explored to access different communities with as few as possible accounts, hopefully one.

And something can be done to make participation in several similar/related communities easier, like providing cross-posting tools and some forms of cross-display (like displaying RSS from related forums/wikis).

This is something that is already happening in some communities but not in all.

It would be interesting to hear of successful experiences in this.