Introduction – What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is a term that seeks to encompass the changes in Internet technologies, approaches to web development and peoples use of the web that have occurred since around 2003.  The term describes an approach to the web that emphasizes communication, collaboration and information sharing.It can be considered to be the move towards perceiving  the web as a platform on which other software can run.

Web 1.0 – the version of the web we have considered up to this point.

The defining elements of this era

* content designed for low bandwidth

* static pages

A few stylistic elements were

* animated GIFS

* the blink tag

* guestbooks

* frames

Characteristics of Web 2.0

*A rich user experience – instead of reading through a web page then clicking to get to the next page, web 2.0 sites offer the user an interactive experience.  Pages are dynamically generated and respond to changes the user makes, content can be added seemlessly.  This shift to seeing the web itself as a platform has been referred to as cloud computing.

* User participation – users are in the process of creating the pages.  Sites like Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr and Facebook are some of the most popular site in the world, their content provided and appreciated by the same group of people.

* Metadata – metadata is data about data.  An example is delicious.com a social bookmarking site, delicious members can bookmark sites of interest and tag them with your own choice of keywords.

* Dynamic content – the generation of dynamic pages through the separation of form and content.  The way the page looks (the form) is separated from the information on it (the content).

* Content sharing – all kinds of media, videos, audio etc can be accessed and/or added easily via the web.

Activity 1 – Newsflash

Rss (Really Simple Syndication).  We went to news.com.au, made a note of current stories under ‘breaking news’ then looked at news feed just under it.  RSS feeds are not limited to news sites, they can be from any web page where content is updated regularly (eg blogs).

Activity 2 – creating a delicious acount

We created a delicious account and tagged sites that may be useful in our studies and added a bookmark button to our browser. We tagged specific sites with Net11_test.  We aimed to gather at least five useful sites.

Four technologies that have emerged from web 2.0.

* Blogs – an online journal, sharing text,images and other media.

* Wikis – is a network of web pages that can be worked on collaboratively by a group of users.

*Social networking – based on connecting people with one another.

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and what is the World Wide Web?

The World Wide Web is a wide area hypermedia information retrieval initiative aiming to give universal access to a large universe of documents.  Tools required for a working World Wide Web consist of :

*  a transfer protocol  (HTTP  -Hypertext transfer protocol)

*  A web server

*  a language to display the information  (HTML – Hypertext Markup Language)

*  a web browser

August 1991 saw the debut of the Web as a publicly available service.  From 1993 onwards saw the public awareness of the Internet and the web skyrocket.  The World Wide Web was the public face of the Internet and within a few years, URLS  (Uniform Resource Locators) were a common sight as business moved on to the web.  The web was the first many to many communications medium.

*  Understanding HTML and the Web

A web browser is a piece of client software with which we can access the World Wide Web.  By access we mean retrieve and display hypertext documents that are stored on web servers all over the world. The browser requests the page, the server delivers it and the results display in the browser window.

*  HTML and Hypertext

The documents we view in our browsers are predominantly written in Hypertext Markup Language. (HTML)

As well as formatting text, images can be added and most importantly, hyperlinks can be created to other pages.  This is Hypertext.

Activity 1 –  Show me the HTML

This week we went to the discussion board and typed a comment and looked at the HTML code and then also checked out the change when added bold and italics.  I am amazed to see this, this week  has taught me so much,  I did not even know anything about HTML until this week.  I had never even heard of it or seen it before.  I assumed what we saw in our browser was just how it was written.  The HTML looks like a bunch of words with brackets everywhere at first.  It looks very complex on my first look but after some analyzing of the HTML code I noticed that it can be readable with further study.  HTML is the code that the web browser is written in.

Hypertext – why the fuss?

The early web was built on the idea of these static pages, all interlinked to form an enormous repository of information.  Hypertext enables us to turn our attention to whatever takes our fancy at any given moment.  Since the early days, the technologies behind the web have changed dramatically and web pages are no longer limited to static form – they can also be generated dynamically.

Activity 2  – Going way back

We took a look at the way back machine.  Going to Internet archives at http://www.archive.org/…Here we looked at curtins homepage to see how the page had evolved over the years.  We looked at several other websites as well through the way back machine.  It was interesting to see how much they had changed over the years.

How big is the World Wide Web?

In July 2008, google reported that it had indexed 1 trillion individual URLS.  1,000,000,000,00

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