Web 2.0 – More Than a Cool Technology
Blogs, Wikis
Web 2.0 that a set of seven powerful ideas to change the way people communicate. These strong ideas are not a Web 2.0 exclusivity; they are reflections of the network qualities; this is the reason why Sir Tim Bernes-Lee, the creator of WWW, says that Web 2.0 is only an extension of his ideas, longtime forgotten. Web 2.0 media concentrates on services such as video sharing, blogs, social podcasting and networking, where people can contribute as much as they need.
There are many web based services, including wikis, blogs, sharing services, podcasting and content tagging new services, content syndication, almost all relatively stable. There are new features too, continuously improving their performances.
The term blog was used for the first time by Jorn Barger (1997) and defines a simple page consisting of paragraphs of information, personal diary entries, opinions and links. All are posts, and are arranged with the most recent first. Many blogs allow visitors to write their comment bellow the blog entry.
This commenting process fulfills the main goal of blogging (an exchange of opinions). Each post is tagged with a keyword or more, the subject of the post can be easily categorized. This is a way to archive in an organized way the old posts. Linking is also an aspect of blogging and it is very important to deep the conversational nature of the blog.
Blog software facilitates syndication, the headline become available to other software via RSS. The content is aggregated into feeds, and blog reading features can make use of the feeds. The term blogosphere, express the sense of a world of bloggers working in their environment. Bloggers can incorporate media into their blogs (videos, photos, music) and the evolving technology allows incorporating multimedia from mobile phones.
Wikis
A wiki is a page that can be edited by any user who is allowed access. Wikipedia has a huge success, proving that the concept of the wiki is understood and widely applied. A Wiki page has an edit button and the user can access an easy to use editor to change, add or delete content. A simple, easy to use hypertext linking is used to create a set of pages. Unlike blogs, wikis have a history function. This function allows seeing the previous versions. A rollback function restores previous versions. There are problem using such open system. Wikipedia was subject to vandalism, but the mistakes are quickly rectified by the moderation processes.