Web 2.0 and your project work

Version 1.1
If I make content edits, it will be reflected in the version number above.
Added content to the Wiki section.

This article serves to put all your project work in true context. The goal of the combination of your work has been to introduce you to Web 2.0 technologies in an active fashion. For the purposes of your project work this includes blogging, RSS, aggregated news readers and wikis.

Blog.
Your blog has enabled you to author a web site that comprises content that is:

• 'static': side bar content: this includes links to other relevant resources; building community by creating reciprocal links, establishing context (subject matter and author), adding a stats program such as sitemeter to track the number of visits and the referrer link, and creating advertising and affiliate marketing opportunities. The latter serves as a potential business model for your blog.
  
• 'active': your entries. Critical issues include the frequency of entries, quality of content, and use of appropriate keywords. These elements are critical to building an audience and for search engine optimization (SEO).
  
• 'collaborative': your comments section. You should author posts that lend well to continued dialogue. It is also important to respond to comments to encourage further engagement, and visit the site of the commenter if he / she is a fellow blogger. This helps build community.
  

SEO is also achieved by including the appropriate keywords in your meta tags and title tag. View the source code of this blog to see the meta tags included in the header section.

Developing your blog has also enabled you to explore HTML and CSS in a safe environment.

Your blog has given you freedom of speech to add your 'voice' to the dialogue that your subject matter creates. This type of communication, where customers truly have the ability to engage in dialogue, was first explored in the Cluetrain Manifesto.

RSS.
RSS (an XML format) is a format that allows a site to push content to subscribers. The web is primarily a pull medium that requires 'viewers' to access sites to discover new content. A subscription-based model, that allows sites to push fresh content out, is preferable for users over having users subscribe to e-mail lists. The subscriber retains control of the experience, and it is spam free. Examples of sites that generate RSS feeds include blogs (blogspot automatically generates a feed); news organizations (BBC, CNN); non profit organizations (Red Cross, University of Delaware) and for profit organizations (IBM, Intel).

News Aggregator.
A feed is only useful if you have a means to subscribe and read the feed. A news aggregator is how you accomplish this. We use bloglines, a web-based aggregator. You can also use desktop-based aggregators. While these 'viewers' are still in their nascent stage of development, forthcoming versions of web browsers will no doubt include a news aggregator. Firefox already does. This may challenge the viability of 'first movers' such as bloglines, but the future of web browsing will include a simple means to subscribe to feeds.

Some of the usability features of news readers include:

• they allow you to organize your feeds into categories
  
• you can read content when you wish, rather than when the site updates or when you receive an e-mail
  
• you have the ability to easily distinguish between sites that have new content and those that do not
  
• you can save content to read at a later time
  

Search Engines: how to search web 2.0
Most searches to your blogs come from the traditional search engines, google and yahoo! Time based engines, those that search RSS feeds, are mostly used by other bloggers interested in discovering the breadth of their space. These engines include google blog, technorati and feedster. Your blog should appear in all these engines. The time based engines should pick up your posts within a few hours. The traditional engines will likely take a few days to 'crawl' your most recent entries. The future of search engines will likely be a combination of the traditional engines and time-based, with a means to do effective local searches. Search engines have also become excellent media vehicles for companies, both by exploiting search engine optimization and creating a pay per click advertising campaign. Blogs themselves have become useful search engine optimization tools for web-sites that incorporate this technology.

Wiki
A wiki enables you to create a space that multiple people can edit and collaborate. Your class wiki enables you to collaborate within your team as you create and contribute to articles relevant to your assigned chapter. Collaboration should allow you to generate a final product that is more robust than if you were its only author. You will likely also be exposed to this type of shared work when you graduate.

We have also explored Wikipedia, the 'most famous' wiki. It is an interesting example of an open source-type model. Wikipedia is a resource to which you can contribute, along with the thousands of other contributors from around the world. You can also link to Wikipedia for word definitions to create greater access for the articles you are authoring, both for your own wiki project and your blog. I have done this throughout this article.

Wikis can also be useful as a collaboration tool between a company and its customers. Channel Nine, from Microsoft, allows non-microsoft developers, interested in developing products for the Microsoft platform, to engage with the Microsoft team. Wikis are also useful for internal knowledge sharing within a company. For example within customer service, the customer service representatives can add to a wiki when they hear new 'issues' directly from customers. The same representatives can then check the wiki as they answer questions for customers. A wiki can also work well within an extranet, where different members of a supply chain coordinate and communicate. Other marketing examples are cited here, and Amazon has recently launched ProductWikis.