I like the web, I do. I like Web 2.0 things, I do. But I began to think about the behaviors associated with the Webs today, and wanted to make a distinction.

In the educational world, we talk about natives vs. immigrants. Then exclusive of these titles, we have the techie educators. The geeks who write blogs, and ponder the importance of so-called 21st century skills. We each have Thomas Friedman’s book on our shelves, and we listen to Wikinomics while driving in our cars.

But is it enough to say we use “Web 2.0″ tools? Is there a distinction between last year’s Web 2.0 behaviors and this month’s?

Here’s my “case in point.”

We’ve got a guy at work who sends us e-mails. Cool and interesting stuff he reads. He’ll send it in an e-mail like this:

Good read… then list the URL.

He’s social, but he’s using e-mail. For the lack of better terms, let’s call this: Internet 1.0.

So, then there’s the big Web 2.0 revolution, and the Read/Write Web, and for convenience, I’ll call this Internet 2.0. He’d change his behavior for version 2.0:

He’d post this link on his blog, with some commentary. He might e-mail us about his linking to this, or else we’d find it via RSS.

So, then there’s even an evolution to this. He might “friend” it to use via del.icio.us. When I log-in to del.icio.us, there it is, a bookmark from a friend.

Peter has bookmarked this for you: URL.

What’s that? Internet 2.1?

Then, there’s microblogging. Come on, taking up a full blog post is so yesterday. Today, we have a new way to share links. It’s called a microblog, say, like our Twitter feed, or a page on Tumblr.

That’s so clearly Internet 2.5.

Likely, for Internet 3.0, we’ll wear garments that blink our favorite URLs on them for people to see… and maybe in 3.5, the webpages will actually be displayed on our garments instead of the pesky URLs. We can always dream, right?

In a semi-related vein, Jeffery Zeldman pontificates upon some of these levels I see between using the Web today.

What Internet version are you running?

Technorati Tags: technology, education, read/write, hendron, twitter, turmblr, microblogging

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 pm and is filed under Reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.