I’ve been having trouble getting my brain around Web 2.0. Today, two things happened to clarify it for me. First, this morning I was listening to an EdTechTalk.com podcast. Their guests were Stephen Downes and Will Richardson. As they discussed Web 2.0 I started to get the vision. It made me think about Steve Job’s idea a few years ago of your Mac being “your digital hub”. He was envisioning our Macs connected to the our cameras, our MP3 players, and such. To support that, came the iLife apps such as iPhoto, iMovie and iTunes.
Instead of being a hub for hardware, Web 2.0 is your digital hub for online life, such as your blogs, your feeds, your bookmarks and tags, your to-do lists, your photos. It will be the hub for not just your personal read/write web, but also your social one.
So then after listening to the podcast, what should I find in my e-mail box but notice that Flock is distributing a beta of it’s Web 2.0 browser? They make no stability claims at this point, but take a moment to peruse this list of 13 things you can do with Flock. Amazing! I’m creating this post directly from it without even going to Blogger. It inspired me to finally get a del.iciou.us account. With Flock’s help, I can see myself seamlessly integrating many aspects of my digital life.
Flock probably isn’t stable enough yet to be a student browser, but it will be. I can hardly wait to see where Web 2.0 takes us.