Web 2.0 And I

Web 2.0 is characterized by a new collection of promising Web technologies and methodologies that make the web more interactive between people via social-networking technologies, more semantic between separate software applications via open Web standards for describing and accessing data, and more real-time responsiveness of desktop applications within a browser window.

Jay M. Tennenbaum in the “Agent Meets Web 2.0: Building the Web of Tommorow, Today” describes the examples of the web 2.0 themes available today in the market as decribed above.

The first theme is participatory in web 2.0 that changes the way people collaborating in internet. Blogs, as a cultural phenomena in the social networking, share online journal where people publish their personal experiences and hobbies. According to Wired magazine, there are now over 12 million blogs, with nine new ones created every minutes. On the other hand, wikis are the facilities for people collaborating the contents of websites. Wikipedia, as the most popular wiki-based encyclopedia, provides over six hundred thousand articles on every conceivable topic, contributed and collaboratively edited by over 300,000 people. The last feature is syndication feeds. Feeds, such as RSS and Atom, show the information of a website such as the title of a posting, its URL, and a short description. Then, one can ping the favorite feed site to verify quickly if there is a change in the destination website. Site owner can also submit the updates to search engines and aggregators subscribed to numerous feeds. It means that the experience of surfing the web will be changed since individual may track effectively the changes in hundreds or even thousand of websites.

The second theme is semantic which includes elements such as tag, semantic web , and microformats. Web 2.0 introduces tag as the labels for describing the characters of web contents such as web pages, blog, photo, news, entertainment, etc. Unlike ontology which are formal, system oriented and experts required, the content of folksonomy may evolve through mass collaboration within a community. On the other hand, The Semantic Web uses ontology to add structure and meaning to the content on the Internet and makes it easier for machines to apply context to that content. The early development of semantic web uses two standard languages which are Resource Description Framework (RDF) as the language for adding machine-readable metadata to existing data on the web and Web Ontology Language (OWL) is the expressive web ontology language that extends RDF. The early developments of semantic web are already trickling into real-world sites, services, and other tools , for example semantic Web metadata underpins Yahoo!’s new food site, Spivack’s Radar Networks is building a kind of Semantic Web portal and a development platform, Jena working at HP. Semantic Web structures will also be found in Oracle’s Spatial database tool. Meanwhile, microformat contains a simple data schema to express people, events, reviews, lists and so forth. It will be embedded in web pages and blogs so that the content can be more easily discovered, indexed, aggregated, and summarized.

The next theme, real time, is perfectly explained by real-time search engine such as Technorati and Pubsub. They provides the indexing of the fast-changing subset of the web for example the latest blog, Flickr, Del.icio.us posts, news feed, etc. The users will know the new items are posted with subscribing the topic of interest and they will receive IM immediately after the new items are published.

Community, as the last theme, is about adding computation between the users and the content source so that the computation let users to take charge based on their requirements. Greasemonkey, as the example, is a Firefox extension that automatically invokes Javasripts when the browser visits selected URLs. The scripts are able to perform computation, convert the appearance of the web and even invoke external web resources. One example of the Greasemonkey script is Book Burro where obtaining and showing prices from the other booksellers when user visits any amazon page offering a book for sale.