Free Whitepaper Explains Web 2.0 – and City of Bits Recalled

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Dedicated bloggers Trevor Cook and Lee Hopkins have produced a revised edition of their excellent, plain English white paper on Web 2.0. You can download Social Media: How I learned to stop worrying and love communication – an introduction to the power of “Web 2.0″. It’s 1.8 Mb.

This is a straightforward, very readable introduction to Web 2.0. It’s up to date and includes, for example, commentary on the recent and current dramatic growth of Facebook. I would like to have seen a bit more about professional social networking sites, especially LinkedIn and Xing (formerly Open BC): perhaps in the next edition.

But it really is a very good overview and I found it especially helpful to read it just now, as it has given me some thoughts for my “Web 2.0 for dummies” and “Blogging 101″ workshops next week as part of the AMP company’s Innovation and Thought Leadership Festival 2007.

Incidentally, on page 1 of the white paper, the authors say that as far as they are aware the Cluetrain Manifesto was the first website to be turned into a book – i.e. an offline, dead tree book.

In 1996, three years before Cluetrain was published, I had the privilege of being present in the small theatre at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum when expat Australian, MIT’s William J. Mitchell launched his book City of Bits.