Introduction to Web 2.0 /Social Networking Technologies

From Web2forDev

What is web 2.0: Kevin Painting

What's so special about it and why should we have a conference about it?

For those of us working in development what does it mean for the way we work?

Web 2 is an attitiude, not a technology - a shift from products to services, it's the web coming of age. No one single degfinition. It's the web finally getting it together after the initial incubation period, it's becoming user friendly, something for everyone, no longer the domain of techies.

Free or low cost web tools that can enhance the way that we create and publish information or collaborate and share resources.

Web2 - a copernican revolution. i.e. the earth is no longer at the centre of the universe - shifted the focus. web2 has shifted focus from a provider centred model to a user centred one.

No more to-down, 'let's have a web site and wait for people to come and visit us'

Users are no longer passive recipients - they are active participants. Users create their own window on the world - myyahoo, googlei etc...

What made web2 possible? Falling prices of hardware and software, technological advances, community of developers using common standdards (very important!), improved connectivity, plug and play (instead of plug and pray) - i.e. easier to use computers, so the focus is on what you're doing, and not how you're doing it. i.e. focus is not on setting up the blog but on having something to say.

What are web2 concepts:

• social software
• folksonomies
• micro content

Social software - not new - i.e. listserves and news groups go back to the early 90s. Popularity has taken off more recently through blogs and wikis.

ref International Rescue COmmittee's 'Voices from the field' - a public space for practioners to share experiences.

Microcontent - we're breaking with the idea that web pages are single static objects. They can now be composed of many different objects 'mashed up' together - decentralised headlines, banners and maps coming from a range of places, all dished up in the same

Folksonomies - general public defining standards, drives the purists mad, but has emerged as a very useful development - users create tags. It is working (contrary to academic predictions). allows people to work together and share - e.g. social bookmarking.

Wikis have an old pedigree - goes back to Mac hypercard stacks.

Blogging - a mini website that people can work on together (see cabbie blog).

RSS is very important! Ubiquitous throughout web2 - perfect for information junkies. Rss is like a bookmark in your browser that also includes meta data (descriptive content about the content), and the content itself. Allows you to keep tabs on the content that organisations are updating their sites with. A great way for monitoring emerging content. If you're serious about content, you'll be using RSS.

See the CTA RSS aggregator - http://rss4dev.cta.int 520 sources of feeds divided into categories. As a user you can come and set up your own news areas with a personalised selection of feeds.

Blogging - Christian Kreutz Christian's presentation: http://docs.google.com/TeamPresent?docid=dgsdwwwb_132csk5f3 Blogging is a two-way conversation - makes a discussion a horizontal conversation, not a top-down dialogue. The technology behind blogs is not wild - it's just a simple self-publishing system. A user-friendly way to get your discussion online. Unlike forums which create a multi-layered presentation of data, the content is not hidden in a blog. Enter you headline, date, text and tags. That's it. Blogging is about becoming part of a network because I link to other blogs. I am indexed by technorati - that places me in the blogosphere.

Dragback - once you write a blog post that links to another blog, that other blog gets notified. That draws that blogger back to your blog.

YOu can subscribe to a blog using RSS, allowing you to deliver your blog to people.

Blogs have many uses - Personal documentation project - Community of practice disussion - locates you in the network Internal blog for a group - makes employees into readers and writers, and gives people the feeling of being part of a single office in spite of distributed location. Can reduce mail-load. Blog quickly becomes self-driven, doesn't take much of a push to get going. People want to be able to express themselves.

Questions and comments'

What about the ability to email to a blog for poor connectivity situations?

You can now email and use a mobile phone to post to a blog

Risks and dangers of blogging?

It's important to consider access issues when you blog. Once it's posted you can't remove it.