Abstract

Web 2.0 has recently been one of the most discussed topics in Information Systems science and practice. However, little consensus is found on what its components and characteristics actually are and what a comprehensive conceptualization might look like. This paper tries to shed light on these questions by systemizing the phenomenon’s characteristics in a hierarchical framework. In a first step, we apply content and cluster analysis on contributions of the field and inductively identify 103 raw categories which are then clustered into ten subcategories and two main categories. Namely these identified main categories of Web 2.0 are: ‘Technological Characteristics’ and ‘Socioeconomic Characteristics’. In a second step, we pretest and optimize the constructs for applicability and ambiguities and finally apply them to evaluate on the importance and weighting of the discovered subcategories. The resulting framework is found to comply with common quality measures for content analysis and classification schemes. It can be used to analyze and explore economic or social phenomena associated with Web 2.0 in a systematic manner.

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