Contact me
if you need training to get up-to-date on these new Internet
technologies.
The Internet of the future will be a richer source of information and
provide even more opportunites for interaction and collaboration than
the Internet of the past. In the past, world wide web pages were
written and posted on the Internet by experts. Most people could only
receive this information, but not write their own contributions or
respond to the writing of others. The technology is
being simplified so that we don't have to be an Internet expert to post
some information on the Internet anymore. Now it is easier for
everybody to participate in the flow of information and exchange of
ideas. We all can contribute our personal expertise and our opinions to
the giant resource of knowledge that is growing on the Internet.
These new online services that can be characterized as:
everybody
can participate - barriers to entry have
been lowered
(e.g. blogs, wikis, AdSense).
power
of the network used to reduce costs and improve
performance
(peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, VOIP).
giving
up control of the data
(APIs & mashups, RSS newsfeeds).
harnessing
collective intelligence - trusting users
as co-developers
(tagging, folksonomy).
online
communities
(photo sharing, social networking).
Although organizations will undoutedly continue to make
conventional
websites, their online presence will increasingly be supplemented with
these Web 2.0 services.
Web
Logs
(Blogs) are websites that enable the owner to easily
compose and post
pages on the Internet. The technology also enables readers to easily
post comments in reply to the site owner's writing. This often results
in a community of users maintaining a lively dialog about their topics
of interest. My blog - BRT
Insights.
Wikis
are
websites that enable a community of users to easily post articles that
contribute to an online encyclopedia of information. Learn how you can
be an author and contributor to the world wide web of
information. My
page at Davis Wiki.
Newsfeeds
represent a new way to produce and distribute news articles on the
Internet. Articles are produced using a format called XML and posted on
the Internet. These articles are then available for redistribution by
other people or other organizations. Articles on a topic of interest
from a wide range of sources can be collected and redistributed to
readers interested in that topic. This incredible, modern system of
news redistribution has many benefits for the readers. Readers do not
have to hunt down the original sources of the articles or sort through
many articles on topics that don't interest them. Learn how to use
newsfeeds to easily and efficiently get the news that interests you the
most (see panel on the right).
Social
bookmarks enable a community of people to view and
evaluate
each other's bookmarks of interesting sites on the Internet. My bookmarks at
del.icio.us. del.icio.us
produces RSS newsfeeds from the bookmark lists of their members to
facilitate sharing of bookmarks (see panel on the right).
Photo
Sharing Communities enable people to view and comment on
each other's pictures. Flickr,
one of the latest and greatest of these services, also
enables
users to be notified using RSS newsfeeds whenever a friend has posted
new pictures for viewing. My photos
at flickr.
Peer-to-peer
Shared File Downloading had a shady beginning as a method
for freely distributing illegal copies of copyrighted materials such as
music or movies. BitTorrent
has been developed as a secure and ethical method for small companies
to use the power of the community to achieve distribution of
large
software packages.