E-Gov.com: Outsourcing government

Nowadays the public sector is facing two developments that are increasingly being interwoven with each other, namely societal technological developments and the evolution of a new virtual world. Web 2.0 technologies and services coined by Tim O´Reilly in 2004 have spread around the world at an amazing pace and are used by billions of people every day. Web 2.0 is in the use of the web technology and design that aims to facilitate creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. This computer industry revolution was caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the success on that new paradigm. Unlike the basic publication, access, and content delivery model of Web 1.0, Web 2.0 promises to be more interactive, participatory, content rich, seamless, scalable, and service oriented. With the growing interest in Web 2.0 trends, more evidences shows that Web 2.0 helps public service organizations deliver high performance in terms of their ability to generate positive social outcomes, to serve the common good, to engage the public as co-producers of public value and to improve accountability and transparency. Blogs, wikis, chat rooms, podcasts, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and other mashup applications are all part of this process being adopted by some e-Government sites. Consequently, we can conclude that Web 2.0 applications gain in importance in today´s society and this development cannot be ignored by the public sector. In this paper we explore the implications of Web 2.0 applications on the further development of e-Government; nevertheless, the interweaving of the physical and virtual world brings news risks and challenges, it should to take into account the potential negative issues like isolation, exclusion, violation of privacy and misuse of information of Web 2.0 avatar as well.