The transformation of web : How Emerging Communities Shape the information we consume:
To date, one of the main aims of the World Wide Web has been to provide users with information. In addition to private homepages, large professional information providers, including news services, companies, and other organisations have set up web-sites. With the development and advance of recent technologies such as wikis, blogs, podcasting and file sharing this model is challenged and community-driven services are gaining influence rapidly. These new paradigms obliterate the clear distinction between information providers and consumers. The lines between producers and consumers are blurred even more by services such as Wikipedia, where every reader can become an author, instantly. This article presents an overview of a broad selection of current technologies and services: blogs, wikis including Wikipedia and Wikinews, social networks such as Friendster,facebook and Orkut as well as related social services like del.icio.us, file sharing tools such as Flickr,share it and podcasting. These services enable user participation on the Web and manage to recruit a large number of users as authors of new content. It is argued that the transformations the Web is subject to are not driven by new technologies but by a fundamental mind shift that encourages individuals to take part in developing new structures and content. The evolving services and technologies encourage ordinary users to make their knowledge explicit and help a collective intelligence to develop.
The World Wide Web has grown into a truly world-wide computer-based media network. Previously, most information was, by and large, offered by professional information providers such as companies advertising their products and services, organisations or news services. In addition, private users on the web had the option of establishing personal homepages as well. However, technological obstacles— complicated tools, lack of infrastructure and technical background knowledge— prevented many users from producing web-pages .The infrastructure of successful corporate web-sites often relies on content management systems. These environments take their organisational structures from traditional media such as newspapers or television channels, where authors, editors, an editor-in-chief, etc. are in charge. Hence it can be argued that, to date, the Web has mapped structures from the physical world to the hypertext domain. It has not been able to deliver other qualities than traditional media; the World Wide Web has been far from being interactive, and users rarely had a chance to participate. Recently, however, the Web has undergone changes. Although it has gone partly unnoticed, these transformations are profound as they give ordinary users ability to get more involved in the content creation process. As a result, community-driven initiatives such as blogs, wikis and podcasts have emerged. In future this may be replaced by ar-vr capable real time information sharing technologies.
Special thanks to josef kolbitsch and Hermann a Maurer for the transformation of web an article in the journal of Universal Computer science 2006.