Tech Lunch

“Web 2.0 and Beyond explains Web 2.0 and its wider context in an accessible and engaging style, helping readers, especially beginners, understand every aspect of Web 2.0 without difficulty.”

Yijun Gao, First Monday, Volume 17, September 2012

Web 2.0 and Beyond explains what social media is and why we built it that way. Understanding some of the detail of these two key questions helps us to understand humans and technology better and gives us a framework for speculating on future developments. The book has been constructed so that it can be used with undergraduate, post-graduate, and continuing professional development students from a wide variety of backgrounds, and for those about to start a course of study in the emerging area of Web Science.

Millions of us use Web 2.0 services everyday. They blur the boundaries between technology and human and have become so embedded in everyday life that it is difficult to be clear about their true nature or to articulate informed opinions and analysis of their impact. Partly, this is a translation problem. If you are a computer scientist who wants to understand the sociological implications of the technology, or if you’re from, say, a psychology or an economics background and want someone to explain how technology developments have influenced the way the modern Web has been engineered, where do you start?

Web 2.0 and Beyond is a single, authoritative source that takes the key research and insights from a wide range of disciplines that have shaped our understanding of Web 2.0. It interprets them for readers from a variety of backgrounds and brings it together as a story about technology that happens in the real world. It tells you what you need to know when you need to know it, and puts specialist information in dedicated chapters and reading lists. It combines a rigorous computer science approach with research from areas as diverse as business studies and information science, law and media studies, in order to illustrate both the wider implications of computing and show how other areas interpret what computer science is doing.

Key to understanding how the book works is the Iceberg Model of Web 2.0. At the top is the visible bit that we’re all familiar with: sites and services such as Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia. Underneath the waterline are the Six Big Ideas that have influenced how these services have developed, and underneath them is the technology itself: the nuts and bolts of the World Wide Web.

To find out more, have a look at the book’s Facebook page. There’s the table of contents and some sample material, and other material will be added from time to time.

You can also read further details on the publisher’s website: http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781439828670

Book Reviews: First Monday, Internet journal, Vol. 7, No 9.

If there’s something you’re particularly interested in or a question you’d like to ask about the book please send me a message or tweet the book at @web2andbeyond.

The official launch of ‘Web 2.0 and Beyond’ in Nottingham, June 2012