There are several different elements to Web 2.0. I'm not going to try to cover all of them here; instead, I will focus on the ones that I feel are most important to your business on the World Wide Web.
The first is social bookmarking. If you visit Wikipedia, it has this to say about social bookmarking:
“On a social bookmarking system or network, users
store lists of Internet resources that they find
useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by
users of a specific network or website. Other users
with similar interests can view the links by topic,
category, tags, or even randomly.
Other than web page bookmarks, services
specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map
locations, wineries, etc. - can be found. Social bookmarking is also part of social news sites like Reddit.”
Digg http://digg.com
Flickr http://flickr.com
Furl http://www.furl.net
Slashdot http://slashdot.org
Squidoo http://www.squidoo.com
Stumbleupon http://www.stumbleupon.com
Yahoo My web 2.0 Beta http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com
Social bookmarking sites use tags to organize their content. The analysis of tags helps to classify, rank, and share the resources that are available on the net.
A tag can be a keyword or keyphrase that is associated with the information, video, picture, etc. that describes it. You create your own tags on your blog or for the social bookmarking site, so you have total control over the usefulness of the tag to your content.
Let's look at how this works. Say you are using free blogging software, and you choose to add the tag “golf clubs” to your article. Next time someone enters golf clubs into a search engine toolbar, your site will be listed on the results page because of your tag. This is highly targeted, motivated traffic that comes to your page—for free— because of the blog post. It didn't cost you anything to “catch” that client!
The best part about it (well, besides the fact that driving traffic was totally free) is that it can happen in minutes. Look at the following screen shot. In it I searched “Google blogs” for the term “golf clubs.” I refined my search to the Last Hour postings just for the purposes of this illustration; you could have found plenty of very relevant searches by not refining it so much. Anyway, as you can see in the picture the top listing on Google for “golf clubs” came up only eighteen minutes ago! So by using Web 2.0, you're guaranteed almost instant results.
In addition to social bookmarking, tags, and blogs, people are using interactive forums, videos, and podcasts (audio recordings) to create user-friendly sites.
Forums, if you have the time to keep them active, are great for building your repeat customer base. The various sections of the forum can be tailored to fit with your different categories of goods or services. People have a tendency to bookmark forums and return to them over and over.