web 2.0 and me

i've been on the net for ages (a few months over 8 years, to be precise). i've read a lot on the net too. over the last few years, i've noticed a definite shift from purely one-way informational/entertainment sites to web 2.0 style user submitted content. prime example: blogs.

web 2.0, and especially blogs seem to have changed the way i use the internet. way back in '99, when i happened to get my hands on a html e-book, i had decided to make my own site. i wonder if it was my tender young age of 15 (ok, not-so-tender :P), lack of confidence in my ability to make a point, lack of things to say, or something else (but definitely not lack of disposable time or expended effort), but that site never saw the light of day. 5 years later, i did succeed in making my personal website, this time much more polished, and still half worth sticking the url in when i want to mention my achievements.

a couple of years later, the enthusiasm died down. i guess my site was a little too high maintenance (since it was all ASP with an Access 2000 database, and i was too lazy to put up secure forms for online updates, posting new stuff was a royal pain of access 2k + zipping + uploading an ever growing database). besides, i didn't have time to put in cool new stuff like rss, and 1asphost's free hosting was barely worth any kind of serious effort. besides, the stuff that was updated regularly was super boring. you had to be clinically insane to read my old blog in it's almost obsessive-compulsive detail. i think i realised it too. also, i then discovered social networking (a.k.a orkut), and an online presence was no longer a privilege, but a right. and a real commonplace one at that.

in the meantime, orkut and gCalendar together took the pain out of remembering friends' and relatives' birthdays/anniversaries. picasa, hi5, facebook, and now orkut, have eliminated the need for a troublesome photo gallery with manually resized photos and database updates and all.

to top it all, things like twitter and google reader are now my biggest sources/outlets of net-buzz. stumbleUpon would have made it too, if it wasn't for my dependence on my handicapped mobile phone browser and crippled-by-design browsers at work/my bro's pc.

web 1.0 has almost disappeared. if it disappeared one fine day without warning, it'd probably be a while before i noticed. the only 1.0 sites i use regularly are those that give me access to web 2.0 (i.e. user-generated) content - email, readers, search (not in that order, of course).

so i guess, for me, web 2.0 makes up about 95% of my online life.

on a not-so-very-related-note, 80% of that 95% is owned by google. i guess i deserve the fanboy label :D