Abstract

The emergence of web 2.0 and the widespread adoption of interactive internet usage have spurred numerous exciting developments in the recent years. These new developments facilitate information sharing, opinion and bias representation and knowledge acquisition among other things, like they never had done before. The social impact of web 2.0 adoption has been significant. Entire communities of contributors have grown around topics of interests, and ways people collaborate have changed dramatically in the World Wide Web. Blogs, Wikis, Micro Blogging, Online Bookmarking, Social Networks, Review and Media Sharing websites have all had profound effects on online content creation. In addition various web 2.0 tools, such as Tag Clouds, and a range of XHTML related techniques had a meaningful influence on how we can now consume and interact with World Wide Web information. It comes as no surprise then that these recent developments have received considerable academic attention, mainly from the computer and information science fields. However in this paper we take a more interdisciplinary focus and we review some of these web 2.0 systems, point out their common traits and highlight previous work and case studies in a number of disciplines. We also point out that although web 2.0 adoption is now widespread, the systems available are still used in rather basic and, or common ways. We present how the so called “collaborative intelligence” of web 2.0 can be harnessed and used in a number of interesting domains, e.g. medicine and police work. There is a lot of potential to these applications as we show on a number of examples with novel data. Finally some concrete improvements to previous methodologies are suggested thorough the paper.