Editor's note: Liam Rattray is one of Green Options' "rock star" interns. Liam and fellow intern Ryan Thibodaux (also one of our writers) were instrumental in getting Green Options launched on time!

 

Web 2.0 is the essential buzzword, everyone knows it, but not many people know what it actually is. Even industry specialists disagree over the definition of "Web 2.0", but most foresee it changing the way people interact with the internet and each other. This short post on Web 2.0 is centered around the visionary YouTube video entitled "Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us" (5 min) by Michael Wesch an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology of Kansas State University. If you haven't seen this video, zip on over to it using the good old fashioned hypertext link provided. In the time it takes you to watch this video 542 new blogs will have just been created throughout the world.

 

Now that you've experienced the wonder that is YouTube, I'll explain what Michael Wesch has brought up. The traditional form of written communication is text unilinearly printed on paper. This medium was, and still is in some podunk parts of society, used to convey one persons or a group of persons thoughts to a reader. It was terribly inefficient and multiple drafts of one document had to be written in order to achieve a copy that didn't have mistakes or parts that the author wished to move about.

 

In comes the digital age and bang! correctional fluid with the stroke of a button and the ability to move about pages of text with the twitch of a mouse. Computer text editing with applications like Open Office (much like Microsoft Office but $100s cheaper through the power of open-source) made writing and editing much faster and flexible. With this new technology scientists managed to exploit the idea of hypertext, an idea from the late 40s that envisioned a system that could automatically follow any citation in any document, and with the World Wide Web users could use hyper-textual links like those in this document to zoom around text in multiple directions.

These new documents were coded in a computer language called HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, that allowed users to insert links and add formatting much like text editors allow you to do. However, HTML had many drawbacks because the language was used to define only the structure of the content of what you wrote, which meant that computers were unable to separate form from content easily.

 

In the late 90s a new language, XML or Extensible Markup Language, was developed. XML allows our documents information to be categorized and analyzed by computers by using tags, just as links are tags, to identify key parts like the title of the document and a simple description of it. XML has become the backbone of Web 2.0 and is what most Web 2.0 applications, or interactive websites, use to convey information.

 

Web 2.0 utilizes HTML and XML among many other internet and computer technologies to facilitate the movement of content online so that users can more easily collaborate and share information with others. This capability is utilized by a "second generation" of websites including social networking sites like Myspace that allow users to interact and keep in touch with friends online, social bookmarking sites like digg that allow users to share interesting links, wikis like Wikipedia that allow users to collaborate on and publish articles, applications like Google documents that allow you to do collaborative word and spreadsheet processing, podcasts that allow you to create, share, and consume independent original content, rss feeds that allow you to keep track of published works by organizations and individuals, and folksonomies like Flickr that allow you to classify an item, like a photograph or website, with a series of tags to create a massive user database of terms that describe an item. The creation of all of this content has been even more streamlined with the invention of the blog. Blogs allow people, just like you, to write and publish whatever they wish online using simple online applications like WordPress that allow you to publish a website without ever touching code. To do this with video is called vlogging. Database technologies, the languages that transfer information between them, and most importantly- you, the user and creator and consumer of content are what is driving this new internet paradigm.

 

The real benefit of Web 2.0 is that all of these web applications allow you to tap into the collective intelligence of millions of people. Ever hear that two heads are better than one? Web 2.0 is that taken to the extreme!

 

Here's a list of some great Web 2.0 sites to get you started:

 

Social Networking: for the building and maintaining of online and offline social networks between friends, family, and work-mates. For a full list go here.

Myspace- the classic general social networking site

Facebook- originally for students, but now everyone!

LinkedIn- for business professionals

Stumbleupon- social networking for surfing the web

Care2- social networking for green living and activism

 

Social Bookmarking: used to share and recommend online bookmarks

Del.icio.us- allows you to publish all of your bookmarks in a simple list, the bookmarking standard

Newsvine- social bookmarking for news

Digg- one of the larger bookmarking sites used primarily for technology related topics

Technorati- social bookmarking for blogs

Reddit- a simple social bookmarking site

Hugg- bookmarking for green living and environmental news

Stumbleupon- is also used for bookmarking

Metafilter- really good stuff.

 

Wiki: "is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change available content, typically without the need for registration." -Wikipedia. Wikis can be found on almost every topic here.

Wikipedia- a very comprehensive encyclopedia

Appropedia- green wiki

Intellipedia- a wiki that the US intelligence community uses…I couldn't find the link (imagine that…!)

And, of course, Green Options' own Green Life Guide 

 

Podcasts: a media file, video or audio, that is distributed by a subscription, typically via RSS feeds, for playback on televisions, computers, or portable media players. News, special interests, television shows, and movies can all be found through podcasts. They can be found on every imaginable subject through these directories.

 

Media Sharing: websites that allow the free movement of media

Flickr- for photographs

YouTube- for video

OurMedia- for grassroots media and news

 

RSS Feeds: subscriptions that allow you to automatically collect websites, articles, podcasts, and other media by using a RSS Aggregator like these

Netvibes- a fantastic online aggregator, as well as a thousand other things

Shrook- the free desktop aggregator for Macs

Bloglines- an online aggregator for blog subscriptions

AggCompare- a directory of other aggregators