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What is Web 2.0? What is a Mash Up?

This is becoming a house-hold word now. It is used everywhere, everyone is talking about it.

What is Web 2.0?

There are many blogs and websites, wikis; O'reilly of course, published lot of content on web 2.0

There is no exact definition, it’s more a reference term, more like guidelines.Like principles that govern the websites of present and coming generation, you can find millions of definitions.

To clear things up, there is nothing like Web 1.0 existed all these days and one fine day you wake up and it’s upgraded to Web 2.0.

"Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform." This definition is given by Tim O'Reilly and it’s all over the internet.

The web is basically taken as a platform.

In simple words, Internet formerly was like a one way process, the publishing of content was done by the experts and the consumers used the content. The publishing process did not involve the users.
In the modern scenario (Web 2.0), the users participate in the publishing of content actively.
This is widely happening in today’s scenario. The Wiki, Blogs, Social networking, file sharing, P2p sharing, video sharing, Syndication feeds, Forums etc like Wikipedia, Flickr, Bittorrent, YouTube, Digg, Zazzle, Facebook, Atom Feed, Delicious etc.

This comes with added Better technologies and better user experiences. Technologies like AJAX, DHTML, XML, Flash etc. The Richer applications and user experiences are evident for example the Twhirl.

Another very interesting feature that has developed along side is the Mash ups

Mash ups are the Web applications that are actually a combination of any two or more different sources. There are a wide range of mash ups prevalent now.

For e.g. : Mapdango - An extensive Google Maps mashup that lets you explore locations with helpful information including weather (WeatherBug), photos (Flickr), facts (Wikipedia), events (Eventful), news (Google News) and more.

There are several Mash up editors like the Google Mash up editor.

Also Read, movie based on Web 2.0 Untraceable