The web 2.0 essay

 

Introduction

What is web 2.0? Businesses and companies go around saying web 2.0 this and web 2.0 that.

But do they really know what it means, no. The term web 2.0 is used as a marketing buzz for these companies to slap on a web application. Which majority of those websites are not even close to being web 2.0. Through this essay I intend to explain and explore web 2.0 and explore the minds and technology behind it.

Web 2.0 is not a new update or technical specification, but rather a new way of sharing and interacting in the World Wide Web. Web 1.0 is more of read/write idea, Tem Berners-lee intended the World Wide Web to be “a collaborative medium, a place where we [could] all meet and read and write”. He called it the “Read/Write Web”. (Wikipedia. 2011. Web 2.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0). Web 2.0 focuses on access and interface, user participation and collective intelligence.

Web 2.0 can be best described by 3 parts. Rich internet application, which describes basically bringing visual experience from web to desktop, it can be focused on a graphical point of view or a usability point of view. Another one is Service oriented Architecture is a key part of web 2.0 which helps define web 2.0 applications and expose the functionality of other applications which will create a set of much richer applications. The last one is Social Web, which makes the end user a more integral part. An example of this is in Web 2.0 provides users with information storage, creation, and dissemination capabilities, which was not available in web 1.0..

 

A perfect example of web 2.0 in the web today is Google. Google’s main difference from web 1.0 web companies such as Netscape is that Google did not fall into that category of software companies such as Microsoft and lotus. Google is primarily seen as a web application, no price, no license codes and no software release dates. That difference is one huge part of web 2.0; Google, eBay and Amazon are all web 2.0 categories.

How it works? The web browser technologies used in web 2.0 are Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax). Ajax programming uses JavaScript to upload and download new data from the web without undergoing a full page reload. This aspect allows users to continue their browsing whilst data is sent to the server, the data being sent back is separated “asynchronously” otherwise the user would have to wait till the data is sent and resent back and wait for the page to reload. This aspect is just one of many new technologies that web 2.0 employs.

Besides just how the website works, web 2.0 also had to change the way the servers’ retrieved and sent data. Web 2.0 uses many of the same technologies as web 1.0. But what has changed is the way data is formatted. The Reason for this change is back in the beginning websites didn’t need to communicate with each other, or share data. But since 2.0 the web has become more like a “participatory web” and the sharing of data between websites is an essential part of a websites performance and capability. This is achieved when a website is able to generate output in machine readable formats such as XML, Atom, RSS and JSON. These formats allow websites to link together, allowing for data to be easier to find and be categorized. This Change is one of the Major parts of thinking that lead to the Web 2.0 movement.

Web 2.0 changed a lot of ideas and boasted a lot of new age ideas. But as any new idea, there are they critics. Web 2.0 caught a lot of criticism since day one, mostly due to the fact that people didn’t respond to its idea, saying that it does not represent a new World Wide Web at all, But continues to use and base its foundations off web1.0. “Tim Berners-Lee described the term “Web 2.0″ as a “piece of jargon”: (Wikipedia. 2011. Web 2.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0)

“Nobody really knows what it means…If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along.” (Wikipedia. 2011. Web 2.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0).

“Andrew Keen argue that Web 2.0 has created a cult of digital narcissism and amateurism, which undermines the notion of expertise by allowing anybody, anywhere to share and place undue value upon their own opinions about any subject and post any kind of content, regardless of their particular talents, knowledge, credentials, biases or possible hidden agendas.”  (Wikipedia. 2011. Web 2.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0). Keen’s argument is a very true one, it allows people a new medium of free speech, yet this social aspect would have come in eventually, to say that its narcissistic or that peoples comments will undue comments made by people with actually social or certain credentials, is false, Web 2.0 has just made communication a whole lot easier.

In conclusion Web 2.0 is the Web of today, allowing the world to connect, communicate, share, download etc. The Web 2.0 movement has made the web it is today. The World Wide Web allows all of us to connect, through its fundamental changes in technology, the software and of course the minds behind it. Though of course without this Web 2.0 technology the internet today would be a completely different, World Wide Web.

Reference’s.

“Wikipedia. 2011. Web 2.0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0”

“What is web 2.0. 2011.http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html”

The Google Titan

Google

What is Google.

Google Inc, is an American corporation, in which is a online search engine, Google was founded by Larry page and Sergey Brin while they were students at Stanford University. its huge use the site has been numbered most visited site according to Alexa, and has been also Been identified by Fortunes magazine as the number 1 best place to work multiple times. Google’s goal in its creation is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. The strength of Google is through its widely know usage and its popularity having no Target Audience creating a strong and easy interface, making it simple and user friendly.

Google’s not just a search engine but it also contributes other software such as Image Search, Google news, Google Product Search as well as interactive Usenet archive, Google groups, Google maps and more, besides these other search engines to combat YouTube  Google employed Google Video, which allowed  users to both upload videos, and search and watch videos from the Net. but in 2009 Uploads to Google video where discontinued.

As Google has grown other applications have been designed for desktop  use such as Google Desktop, Picasa, Sketch up and Google Earth. Google Earth gives users the ability to explore geographic pictures from around the world through satellite imagery that covers the planet, as well as the ability to see houses, cars and even people clearly. besides the use of Google Earth which has many complaints from national security as to the geographic ability to get a bird’s eye view on critical  infrastructures and even government resources.

From Google’s search engine to Google earth, Google chrome, an entire new web browser was released on 2^nd of September 2008, combating browsers such as fire fox and internet explorer and as of July 7^th 2009, Google announced the project to develop Google Chrome OS, an Linux-based operating system. where will Google go next

History

Google began in January 1996, as a project by Larry page, by which Sergey Brin was soon to join “They hypothesized that a search engine that analysed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques, which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page” humourlessly the domain name Google.com was registered on 15^th of September 1997, and the company was incorporated as Google Inc on the 4th of September 1988 in a friends garage. The companies home base based in California, at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway from Silicon Graphics (SGI) in 2003 and has remained there since. and in 2006 Google brought the property from SGI for $319 million, the complex has since become to be known as Googleplex. today Google’s enterprise is valued at 31.768 billion dollars since 2008 which is the company’s total assets, its incoming is at 6.632 and has 19,665 employees since September 30th 2009.

How it works

Google is a search engine in which the program allows for us to type in any particular word and search websites around the world for information needed. Google works by focusing on relevancy. the search engine works in a way in which Google takes the termonolgy you have given it and it will determine the relevance of it finding a page with the most relavent information. it ignores meta tags, in which people use so that there websites would get results. As to this Google retaliated it by not looking at meta tags but actually referring to the websites overall text content as well as the site as a whole. The exact Google Algorithm has not been released to public information, but we can hypothesise what information has been used such as keyword density, flow of the text, amount of code, domain names and how long visitors stay on a site all seem to be used within the search engine to determine results. Besides the use of domain names, and text relevance to determine a search result, Google also looks at other factors linked to the site, such as looking at what other sites are linking to the search result. this means that the more links you have on your site implies that  your site is adding highly relevant data to the search engines terms involved. this piece of information is key now to a websites success, since Google’s usage is over 50% of all search engines, yahoo coming 2nd with 19%. The process in question about the growth of links, is called Reciprocal Linking. to combat this Google now has  devalued such links because it no longer represents a measurement of value in determining relevance to keywords in the site in question. Google has redesigned its way at looking at key links, taking into account links relevance to the site, giving high value to inbound links, this means someone is linking to your site with you linking back. Determining how Google works cannot be answer only intepruted due to its highly secret algothrium and process in searching, one thing is clear word association is the trick,

Google today is one of the most popular websites to date, and has even been ranked number 1 according to Alexa, besides its globally renown search engine, its movement into software, and even a computer system, will surly see Google a strong competitor  in this technologic world,

 

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