The real change between the old web and the newly chritened web 2.0 is in user perception. Internet users now see a large portion of the net as one ‘thing’ rather than allot of small sites with links to one another.
Specifically they see two large areas of the web — 1.,those individual sites that are engaged in ecommerce or selling stuff and 2.,what has become known as the blogosphere. Some users of course are aware of the technologies powering blogs and blogging software. While they understand that these things are powered by discrete servers and databases they behave as if it is one big single web applications. This behviour is translated into a general impatience with anything that has to do with re identifying themselves to individual sites.
This behavior is of course the grand design behind the blogosphere a testament to its success. People are frustrated by having to login to each site and inputting their credit card information to make a small purchase.
Note too that RSS is the enabling technology here. We who work in the boiler room are focusing on the cogs and gears when in point of fact they have outlived their usefulness.
I noticed that most of the users do not enter or leave from the front page. I’ve no way of knowing if they ever see the front page but assume so. I know for a fact however that some do not ever see the front page and actually make comments on the blog item nodes that are long and bloglike but they don’t much care or actually know they’re commenting on a blog item that is a feed from another blog physically hosted somewhere else. The reason this is important is that it is not isolated random but a trend toward the aware AND unbundled web.
It’s something that many astute bloggers have been noticing as well. The users — who are often bloggers too — do not see websites anymore. Or more aptly put they are beginning not to see websites any more.
Where many of the Slashdot users have left in favor of Digg this is a transition to no site at all. One blogger was noting how Digg is almost just a search site that shows how many users liked the items .ect. you get the idea.. Digg is not as much a website as Slashdot which is content picked by editors and conscious decisions are made.
So optimizing and categorizing are not just features in a way it is the UI or the guts of the new web itself.
— pontiff
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