In the latest edition of Newsweek (April 3, 2006), there is a story titled “The New Wisdom of The Web” by Steven Levy and Brad Stone. In this story, a number of new startups are discussed, and how they are changing the way the web impacts our lives. New online services like MySpace (Rupert Murdoch paid $580 million last year for this), Flickr (Yahoo recently aquired this for $35 million), Dabble, del.icio.us (Yahoo owns this too now), among others were highlighted to explain how the web is becoming a more dynamic, or living, environment. One of the points of the article explains that many have termed this new phenomena, Web 2.0 – however, suggests that a more appropriate name would be the Living Web.
Some outstanding claims made in this article include the figure paid for MySpace by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, that recently MySpace signed up 270,000 new members in one day (a Monday), the more interesting fact that Flickr started as a Canadian company, AND had the first photosof the September 2004 Australian Embassy bombing in Jakarta; before any news wire.
Trailing this article is a listing of new innovations that are already (or soon-to-be) launched on the web. These include Digg (a techie news site), Plum (a online collection/organization tool), and Jajah (a telephone service that uses landlines). There are others, and I’d recommend reviewing the article.