The New Edition

And that doesn’t just mean the ability to post to message boards devoted to common interests, he says. “You can get video of someone putting together a kitchen project you’ve been wanting to do,” he says. “It gives the consumer control and interactivity. And for businesses, it’s how you go from being a mouthpiece to providing the ability for consumers to interact with you and with each other.”

The trick for business owners is finding ways to create communities of people who will want the product or service they are offering. Those on the Twin Cities’ front lines of Web innovation are finding that those communities are out there, waiting to be found.

“Besides the enhancements in the look and feel you get from Web 2.0 applications, it’s a lot about creating community with consumers,” says Brian Brown of Minneapolis-based Ideapark, a Web marketing and design company. “It’s enabling consumers to create their own community, and if you’re a business owner, if you know what you’re doing, it makes you part of a community with your customers.”

“It’s on the front burner of every client engagement we do right now,” Eklund says. “The ability of providing an open exchange with your clients is becoming a given, especially in the high-tech business-to-business space.”

How best to create those client communities? There’s more to it than just catering to common interests; part of the bargain might be enabling customers to become part of the business decision-making process, and adapting the model of Wikipedia—in which users are invited to write and edit encyclopedia entries—to a business setting.

“The Internet and the Web in the past has been a collection of individual sites that are mostly islands unto themselves,” says Bob Maclean, Microsoft practice director for Digineer, a Plymouth-based business consulting firm. “Our customers want to share content and information to promote their organization or product. As Web 2.0 has evolved, those islands are creating an ecosystem where you can take what you have, add content data services, and create a platform where people can weave different aspects of these things together into something new and different.”

The Next Bigger Thing

So, it would be reasonable to ask, ‘How is Web 2.0 so much better than Web 1.0, and what will the Web look like in the future?’ Although Web 2.0 sports advanced applications and enhanced user interactivity, there is no defined line between 1.0 and 2.0.

“Web 2.0 is already in the process of passing us by,” says Jonathan Anderstrom, director of business development for Minneapolis-based Web design firm Tenth Floor.