So what tools and technologies make Web 2.0 possible? With a little bit of help from the Wikipedia, here are the terms and their definitions.
Social software
Social software enables people to collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. It can encompass older media such as mailing lists and Usenet, but more recently it suggests genres such as blogs and wikis.
Social software can also be referred to the use of computer-mediated communication to create communities. People, then, will form online communities by combining one-to-one (e.g., email and instant messaging), one-to-many (Web pages and blogs), and many-to-many (wikis) communication modes.
Blogs
A blog (a shortened form of weblog or web log) is a website in which content is posted regularly and displayed in reverse chronological order. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging.” Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries.” A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger.”
A blog has certain attributes that distinguish it from a standard web page. It allows new pages to be easily created simply entering data into form and then submitted. Defined emplates allow you to add the article to the home page, create the new full article page, and archive via date or categories. It also allows the administrator to invite and add other authors, whose permission and access are easily managed.
Wikis
A wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing. A wiki system provides various tools that allow the user community to easily monitor the constantly changing state of the wiki and discuss the issues that emerge in trying to achieve a general consensus about wiki content. Wiki content can also be misleading as users may add incorrect information to the Wiki page.
A defining characteristic of wiki technology is the ease with which pages can be created and updated. Generally, there is no review before modifications are accepted. Most wikis are open to the general public without the need to register any user account.
Podcasts
Podcasting is the distribution of audio or video files, such as radio programs or music videos, over the internet using either RSS or Atom syndication for listening on mobile devices and personal computers. A podcast is a web feed of audio or video files placed on the Internet for anyone to download or subscribe to, and also the content of that feed.
Podcasting’s essence is about creating content (audio or video) for an audience that wants to listen when they want, where they want, and how they want.
RSS feeds
Web feeds provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other metadata. RSS in particular, delivers this information as an XML file called an RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel.
In addition to facilitating syndication, web feeds allow a website’s frequent readers to track updates on the site using an aggregator. Web feeds are widely used by the weblog community to share the latest entries’ headlines or their full text, and even attached multimedia files.
Simpler web design
Design becomes focused on developing a community rather than selling to an individual. Whereas alot of web sites are rich with Flash-based presentations and other “bells and whistles,” the design in the Web 2.0 world gets simplified. Think of how sparse the Google home page is and how well it does with community-building with its offerings.
Blog templates, which are customized with CSS, are designed to showcase the content more than other elements on the page. This simplicity allows for the colloboration of many authors who don’t need to know much more beyond the basics of HTML to publish content.
Folksonomy
Folksonomy, which combines “folk” and “taxonomy,” refers to the collaborative (but unsophisticated way) that information is being categorized on the web. Instead of using a centralized form of classification, users are encouraged to assign freely chosen keywords (called tags) to pieces of information or data, a process known as tagging.
Examples of web services that use tagging include those who allow users to publish and share photographs, personal libraries, bookmarks, social software generally, and most blog software, which permits authors to assign tags to each entry.
Ajax
Asynchronous JavaScript And XML, or its acronym Ajax, is a Web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire Web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the Web page’s interactivity, speed, and usability.
What’s Next?
Now that the techy portion of Web 2.0 has been defined and examples given, we’ll explain how blogs fit in and how marketing teams must repond to this new environment