Examples of Web 2.0
- Hosted services, of which Google Maps is the prime example.
- Web applications (e.g., Internet-based word processing, spreadsheets, slide shows), including OpenOffice, Google Docs, and Flickr.
- Social networking. The online communities MySpace and Facebook are the most popular social network sites used primarily by pre-college (MySpace) and older audiences (Facebook), respectively.
- Video sharing sites, of which YouTube is the most popular example.
- Content Syndication (RSS). True to its name, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a simple yet powerful way to feed information across the Web in a news-channel format that can deliver text, audio, pictorial, and video content. Podcasting is a form of RSS; blogs and wikis also can create RSS news channels. Web-based news aggregators are NewsGator, Google Reader, and Bloglines. Moreover, the latest versions of the browsers have RSS readers built in.
- Wikis. You can get a free Wiki at Wikispaces.com. If you plan to install your own server, the recommended Wiki engines are MediaWiki (which powers Wikipedia), PmWiki, and Instiki.
- Blogs. Good places to start your blog are at Blogger.com and WordPress. Search engines for blogs are Technorati and Google Blog Search. There is a free Blogger add-in for editing blogs with MS Word.
- Microblogging. The most famous example is Twitter. Follow this link to learn how Twitter works.
- Podcasts. Search engines for podcasts are at Podcast Alley and the iTunes podcast directory where there are tutorials showing how to create podcasts.
- Synchronous conferencing. Audio and video conferencing is on every Macintosh via iChat A/V. Windows has AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) and Google Talk, which is available for both Macs and PCs.
- Mashups. An outstanding example is the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (Simile) project at MIT. This is what the World Wide Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, is currently working on, so it is definitely worth exploring. See especially the Timeline widget.
- Folksonomies. Social tagging whereby users collaborate and manage tags to categorize and annotate content. Examples are the Delicious social bookmarking service, the Digg social news service with voting, and the Diigo Web highlighter with sticky notes.
- Widgets. Prefabricated Ajax controls that can be embedded on a Web page. Examples include tabbed panels, data charts, and calendars with date-pickers.
- Content management systems (CMS). You can preview several open source content management systems at opensourceCMS or commercial systems at commercialCMS.com.
- Tagging. Enables a Web site to be searched via keywords and mined by aggregators that index Web content according to tagging.
- Tag cloud. A diagram that pictures the relative frequency of a tag’s occurrence by manipulating the size of the font to represent the tag’s importance in the search. Printed here is a sample of a Web 2.0 tag cloud. Click the sample to view it full size.
