Web 2.0 - The internet as platform

This week's lecture introduced the idea of Web 2.0.

Web 2.0 is the idea of the internet as a platform, rather than a computer as a platform.  It is the web that can be written to as well as read.  Back in the day, if you wanted to put something on the web, it involved learning HTML and writing up a web-page manually.  Waaaaaay back in 1997, I had to go to my college library, get out a book on HTML, learn the basics, sit down in Notepad and type out my website.  Yawn.  And more often than not, it looked pretty pants.

Now fast-forward to 2011.  Why the hell would you want to bother with typing out pages of HTML just to make a website.  Google Sites has pre-made templates for you already.  Dreamweaver can write all the code for you.  Your thoughts can be put up on the web in a matter of minutes if you have a blog.  Seconds if you're on Facebook or Twitter.  And whatever type of computer platform you have, everything all looks and works virtually the same.

This is the crux of Web 2.0.  Everyone can publish on it without having any technical skill at all.  Web 2.0 effectively harnesses network effects that get better the more people use them.  Social networks are at the heart of Web 2.0, and Web 2.0 can be said to be so successful because, through sites like Facebook, they mirror the social networks and interactions in our everyday lives.

Interaction is basically at the heart of Web 2.0.  And this interaction isn't only of the purely social kind.  We all have the ability to become pseudo-experts by contributing to Wikipedia.  We can make Amazon better by leaving reviews.  We can create our own tags on Flickr and Delicious - indeed, in the ocean of un-indexed junk out there, folksonomies are becoming one of the most effective ways of organising web information.

The World Wide Web (version 2.0).

But all this inevitably comes at a price.  Some of the issues we discussed are mapped out here:-

• Does having the ability to log every mundane event in your everyday life with ease create propensity to narcissism?
• Is Wikipedia as reliable as, say, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and does it promote a culture of amateurism?
• Does the internet, as a platform for freedom of speech, promote a 'safe' environment to for people to act in an offensive and derogatory manner?
• Would it be fair to say that important events somehow become trivialised by the hype of the web?
• What does the privacy settings change on Facebook in February 2010 have to say about the public nature of the data we may unwittingly put on the web?
• How do we deal with the ephemeral nature of the web?

What do you think?

My 'first' website - DITA exercise

Just posting the result of my second session DITA exercise - pretty simple stuffs. :)

http://www.student.city.ac.uk/~abkb824/index.html

DITA von Tease

What is the internet?

Yes, I am one of those people who would have answered - it's the World Wide Web.  And if someone had asked me, "What's the World Wide Web?", I would have answered - "Duh!  It's the internet!"

Today I learned that the internet and the WWW are not the same thing.

Really, it's one of those things you've heard about and know at the back of your head, but if you were to describe the difference between the two, you wouldn't have a hope in hell of explaining it.  Well, I wouldn't anyway.

Richard had a very good way of explaining it:-

"The internet is the road, and the World Wide Web is the car that drives the road."

In other words, the net is the infrastructure, and the World Wide Web is a service that allows you to 'navigate' the net.  There are other services that allow you to traverse the net in different ways to the World Wide Web.

The Information Super Highway.  There really is a reason for that vehicular analogy!

The 'net' began in the 1960's, and was developed by the military in order to make sure that even when one computer with information went down (or was destroyed by a nuclear warhead, as the case may be), that information would still be stored and shareable amongst other computers in the network.

Back in those days, computer servers were huge, clunky things that probably needed a whole department to run them.

The days when the Information Super Highway was more like the
Information Super Monolith.

Nowadays, the gap between client and server computers is narrowing.  Client computers are now becoming more and more powerful, and the traditional distinctions between the two are blurring.  In a way, we are all becoming servers.  I'm not sure exactly how it works, but torrenting and peer exchange seem to be proof of that closing gap.

Anyway, in the computer lab we got to make our first web page, after learning the basics of HTML.  We kind of take it for granted nowadays that someone else will make our webpage for us.  Many sites have web templates, or we can use a program like Dreamweaver to create one like we would create a document on Word.  The last time I actually wrote HTML was in 1997.  But even then I was no whizz-kid at it.  I certainly didn't really get it.  So what did I learn today?

• Tags like <b> and <i> are now 'old-fashioned'.  Semantic tags like <em> and <strong> are now the way to go, because they're more 'global-friendly'.
• I finally know what CSS stands for!  I finally know what CSS is!  WOOT! XD
• LAN = Local Area Network; WAN = Wide Area Network; Internet = a vast network of all these networks.  TA DA!!!

See, it's really all very simple; I think that these computer scientists really just like to tease the hell out of us with their crazy acronyms... ;)