2.5	THE SERVICES AND TECHNOLOGIES OF WEB 2.0
It is to some extent self-defeating to attempt to analyse the impact of emerging technologies on public discourse by cataloguing emerging technologies, as undoubtedly these will be over-taken by newer technologies. Analysing the effect without having a sense of what these technologies are or how they are being used is, on the other hand impossible. This leaves the researcher with the need to catalogue what is being used currently, and to transpose this to a new theory of emerging technologies as a new platform for the public sphere (Benkler, 2006). 
A United Nations report (2011, p. 6) contends that the emergence of the participatory and collaborative Web 2.0, which facilitates the creation of content, means that people are no longer “passive recipients, but also active publishers of information.” While the services identified in this study do not represent a complete list of Web 2.0 sites and services, as a collection of Web 2.0 services they embody all of the underlying principles of Web 2.0. The terms Web 2.0 and social media will be used interchangeably to describe the overall concept of Web 2.0 as an evolutionary step in the development of the World Wide Web. The terms social media services and social media technologies are synonymous and represent the actual umbrella of services that define Web 2.0.  
There are numerous open-standards websites and technologies (also referred to as services) that encapsulate the Web 2.0 concept. O'Reilly (2007) directly compares Web 1.0  and Web 2.0 applications and websites in an effort to draw a distinction: content management systems versus Wiki’s; directories versus Tagging; and screen scraping versus  Web services. The Pew Internet Research Center (Pew Research Center, 2011b) describes Web 2.0 as “an umbrella term that is used to refer to a new era of Web-enabled applications that are built around user-generated or user-manipulated content, such as wikis, blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites.” 
The services which are most often cited as embodying the principles of Web 2.0, including social networking sites, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, multi-media sharing and data mashups (Anderson, 2007;  Rigby, 2008; Murugesan, 2010;  O'Reilly, 2007) will be discussed in greater detail in the following sections.
2.5.1	Social Networking
Social networking sites have fundamentally changed the nature of both professional and private communication by allowing for profiles to be created and changed. boyd  (2006) writes about social networking sites: 
“Even when there's no prescribed activity, people are doing things on these sites. They're hanging out. They're dancing in front of digital mirrors. They're patting their friends on their digital backs. They're increasing the strength of their relationships through sharing. They're consuming and producing cultural artifacts that position them within society. They're laughing, exploring and being entertained.”
Facebook is the second most popular Internet site, after Google.  It is the biggest social network with a membership of over eight hundred million and availabale in over seventy languages (Socialbakers, 2011). If it were a country, it would be the third biggest in the world after China and India. With 1.5 million business pages and over fifty-five million updates every day, the Facebook community shares more than fourteen billion pieces of content every month (Facebook, 2011). The organisation further claims that more than fifty percent of active users (approximately eight hundred million) log on to Facebook everyday, with an average user having one hundred and thirty friends. More than two hundred and fifty million photos are uploaded every day, and there are over nine hundred million objects (groups, events and community pages) that users interact with. Schroeder (2010) estimates that users of social networking sites spend approximately five and half hours per month online, with Facebook accounting for the majority of that time 
While Facebook may be the social networking site with the largest user base, it is by no means the only social networking site. Other niche sites focus on specific issues like music and entertainment  (MySpace) and professional networking (LinkedIn), while others still are popular in specific countries, for example Orkut in India and Brazil, Skyrock in France, VKontakte in Russia and Cyworld in South Korea (Rigby, 2008). 
It took LinkedIn sixteen months to sign up the first million members and eleven days to sign up the most recent million (Economist, 2010), which is also an excellent example of the Network Effect. The interactive nature of the social media services are dependent on the Network Effect which has become their raison d'être i.e. people join sites to connect with others who have similar interests.
Currently, there are just over four and a half million Facebook users in the South Africa, which makes it number thirty in the ranking of all Facebook statistics by country (World Wide Worx, 2011). This equates to a 9.19% penetration rate of the entire population and an 85.12% penetration rate of the online population. Globally, sixty-one percent of users are aged between eighteen and thirty-four (Socialbakers, 2011). 
2.5.2	Wiki’s 
The name wiki comes from the Hawaiian word for quick and in this context refers to an online encyclopaedia service. Wikis provide information on specific topics, which can be edited by any user who has access to that webpage and in essence they are online encyclopaedias built through ad-hoc collaboration. Wikis unlike blogs lets users look at previous versions and definitions and also have the ability to ‘rollback’ to a previous version.
Wikipedia, probably the best know example of a wiki, was started by Jimmy Wales - described as an ‘options-trader-turned-Internet-entrepreneur’ – who launched a free online encyclopaedia called Nupedia in 2000 (Brafman & Beckstrom, 2007). The problem with Nupedia was that the process to get anything published proved to be onerous but was soon improved through the use of the wiki technology and Wikipedia was born. With Wikipedia, any person based anywhere in the world can collaborate and contribute to topics in which they have an interest, with no single authority having the power to identify subjects and approve content. Wikipedia employs the collaborative functionality of wiki’s to present collectively verified authoritative content, on a platform that uses hyperlinks between subjects to facilitate fast cross-referencing of facts (Governor et al., 2009).  
Wikipedia’s fifteen million plus registered users have added 3 832 264 content pages, over eight hundred thousand uploaded files, and over half a billion page edits since it was started with an average of nineteen edits per page (Wikipedia, 2011b). As is to be expected with any open access system, Wikipedia has been subjected to false reports and inaccurate editing. One example was the false reporting of the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, which was termed “death by Wikipedia” by the Washington Post (Pershing, 2009).
But while it has been attacked for factual accuracy, Nature magazine (Giles, 2005) undertook an evaluation of Wikipedia and the online encyclopaedia Britannica in terms of accuracy of science articles, which showed that Wikipedia came close to Britannica in terms of the accuracy of its scientific entries. Brafman & Beckstrom (2007) are of the opinion that the quality of articles on Wikipedia is high and contend that people in an open system like Wikipedia will automatically want to contribute, which is illustrative of the concept of crowdsourcing i.e. how an unconnected group of people can work together to produce information on the Internet. The challenging question of accuracy regarding Wikipedia content becomes more problematic with contentious topics such as politics, religion or historical views.
2.5.3	Blogs and Blogging
A web-log, commonly known as a blog, is a webpage that requires no HTML knowledge but which allows users to update the site using plain text. Blogs are date and time specific and posts are reflected in chronological order. The interactive nature of blogs ensures that it is easy for anybody to reply to a post. Blogs are generally used as personal opinion or diary sites. The nature of the blog also allows users to easily find the geographical location of the blog (Bansal & Koudas, 2007). With regards to the architectural patterns, introduced in section 2.3.2.3(e), blogs are an example of declarative living and tag gardening. 
The ability of blogs to report on current events in almost real-time makes them strong competition to commercial mass media.  Benkler (2006) writes of the ‘weighted conversation,’ which refers to the exchange of views resulting from the posting of comments. This interactive nature has grown because of software development which enables users to easily set up discussion forums, post comments, link to other blogs (blog roll) and tag content. Blogs are evolving from being purely text and graphics-based to mobile blogs (moblogs), video blogs and even group-based blogs. The community of weblogs is known as the blogosphere, an entity that grew by two orders of magnitude between 2003 and 2006, and was estimated to be doubling every two hundred days (Bansal & Koudas, 2007). 
In the beginning of the 1990s Beppe Grillo, an Italian activist, directed his satire at the ruling Socialist Party and as a consequence was banned from television (Pepe & di Gennaro, 2009). Unable to access the public broadcaster, Grillo began to blog about events affecting the country including politics, the environment, corruption and activism.  His blog grew in popularity and was eventually listed as one of the top ten most influential blogs in the world. Grillo’s blog is a good demonstration of how powerful forums offering a platform for uncensored information, where differing political opinions are traded freely, can be. 
In China much of the dissident protest against the government has been fanned by an estimated seventy million bloggers and the blogosphere has been labelled as nationalist-leaning and has according to Friedman (2010) become the de facto voice of the people. 
2.5.4	Microblogging and Twitter
A variation of blogging is microblogging, the most popular example being Twitter. Users of Twitter are allowed to send short messages of no more than one hundred and forty characters, which are known as tweets. The heart of Twitter is the ability to share information in real-time especially if it is being used on a mobile phone (Rigby, 2008). Senders can restrict delivery to a closed group or by default allow open access. Twitter works by using hashtags which are words or phrases prefixed by the hash sign (#) e.g. #Greenpeace. This enables tweets on a specific topic to be found simply by searching for the hashtag. 
During a December 2011 broadcast of an anime film, Japanese users recorded the highest number of tweets per second. At the film's climax the two main characters chant the magical word "Balse" - and it had become popular for the audience to join in - and during this particular broadcast the Twitter space saw the word being tweeted at the rate of 25,088 times per second (Akimoto, 2011). Twitter has become much favoured amongst celebrities with many vying to get the largest numbers of followers. Of the top ten people with the largest number of Twitter followers President Obama features at number seven (with just over eleven million followers), while the number one position was filled by a pop star with over seventeen million followers  (Socialbakers, 2011). With regards to the architectural patterns discussed in section 2.3.2.3(e), Twitter is an example of declarative living where people make declarations about themselves, which others can access. 
2.5.5	Social Bookmarking, Folksonomies & the Taxonomy of Web 2.0
Social bookmarking is a tool that allows users to either remotely or centrally save their favourite sites either to be accessed at a later date or to be shared with others. Often these sites are described by keywords known as tags. Tagging is also used in other applications including Flickr, YouTube and Odeo, which allows for tagging of podcasts, videos and photographs.
Social bookmarking is also known as collaborative tagging, social indexing and social tagging. While tagging promotes flexibility of definitions, this flexibility is also the source of problems that plague tagging: including typographical errors, tags on different levels of abstraction, and the use of synonyms to tag the same object (Zacharias, Braun & Schmidt, 2010). The incentive for bookmarking includes the ability to retrieve information in the future, the contribution and sharing of information and opinions, the need for attention and also for online gaming and competitions (Yanbe, Jatowt, Nakamura & Tanaka, 2010). 
Tagging is sometimes called ‘folksonomy’ and refers to the classification of knowledge (Cannata, 2009). Folksonomy is a portmanteau word derived from blending the words ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy.’ The word folk is used because it is created by people rather than by experts and taxonomy represents a conceptual indexing system for categorising data (Derham & Mills, 2010). Folksonomies exhibit key characteristics of Web 2.0 such as openness and collaboration. 
2.5.6	Multimedia Sharing and Podcasting
Multimedia sharing allows users to actively produce and use Web content. Anderson (2007) talks of the writeable Web, which is a space where users create, store and share content with YouTube being the fastest growing example of this phenomenon. YouTube (2011a) sees forty-eight hours of video being uploaded every minute, resulting in nearly eight years of content uploaded every day or the equivalent of two hundred and forty thousand full-length films every week. YouTube is localised in twenty-five countries across forty-three languages with over three billion videos being viewed a day. The age group of the majority of its users is between eighteen and fifty-four years old.
As a tool of protest YouTube has made possible the large-scale dissemination of videos showing many acts of atrocity. It has also been responsible for advocacy campaigns going viral in cyberspace . Two cases are illustrative of this with the first one being the Greenpeace Kit Kat campaign targeted at Nestlé, which saw its spoof video being viewed by over one million people worldwide (Greenpeace, 2010b). In the video an orangutan’s finger replaced a piece of Kit Kat chocolate and upon being bitten gushes blood. It was intended to highlight the use of palm oil in the making of Nestle products and the accompanying destruction of Indonesian forests.