tech-ed collisions

What does Web 2.0 mean to you?

Having recently had to write a brief on Web 2.0 I guess it has been occupying my thoughts a bit lately so I was very interested to read the following article:

Web 2.0 = a piece of jargon by ZDNet's Dan Farber -- During a podcast interview (transcript here) last week with Scott Laningham of IBM developerWorks, the father of the Web Tim Berners-Lee offered his view on the term "Web 2.0": LANINGHAM: You know, with Web 2.0, a common explanation out there is Web 1.0 was about connecting computers andmaking information available; and Web 2 is about [...]
To state the obvious there has been a great deal written about what Web 2.0 is all about and there seems to be a number of themes to which it seems to fall into. Firstly, there is social networking and the plethora of services emerging with collaborative technologies. Blogging, wikis, tagging, folksonomies, photo sharing, sharing any thing that can be digitised for that matter, etc have changed the way that we use the Web completely. We can all be publishers just as easily now as we can be consumers of content and services. Another really interesting area is mashups, using the Web as a platform to combine multiple functions into new, richer services. Many of the applications that this company has developed have open apis that anyone can use. The major players as well have long recognised the benefits obtained by opening up their services for other sites to consume. What makes this interesting now is the way that these services are being consumed and enriched using frameworks such as Ajax to combine the services with other functions. Of course there is also the debate about the term Web 2.0 itself. Who invented it and whether or not there is any ownership of it or related terms makes fascinating reading and debate. Tim O'Reilly's definition is an important document to read and one which I have in the past encouraged people to read when asked what Web 2.0 is. Ownership is an interesting area to explore as well. As Tim found out while on holidays recently, there is a huge amount of passion around the use of the term itself and how it should be used. What interests me is how this interest and passion has developed, what set the scene for it. I believe that Web 2.0 is the result of many things that have roughly come together at this point in time. The general availability of broadband and quite reasonable Internet access in the home has had an enormous impact on the use of the Internet which has created a vastly different audience with different demands from the Internet of 10 years ago. Digital technologies have revolutionised the way we take photos, shoot movies, play music etc. These digital technologies store our content in a way which lends itself perfectly to the Internet. The emergence of photo sharing services and other digital content sharing services were just a matter of time. If such content was not stored digitally would we have a Web 2.0 which has the same impact or would the mainstream Web be quite different to how we percieve it?  Likewise with Bandwidth and access - without broadband would the Web be as attractive to the general population as it is? These and many other external and social factors need to be considered as well as the technical innovations and new services appearing on the Web when trying to really understand Web 2.0. So, is Web 2.0 the label which identifies a technical description such as Tim's? Is there really just the Web (which in my interpretation is what Sir Tim is saying)? Is Web 2.0 simply a great marketing term? As the Dan Farber article mentioned earlier in this post, anything 2.0 seems to be an overdone marketing tactic at the moment. Does Web 2.0 hail the re-emergence of parts of the tech sector following the dotcom bust? Given the general Internet public's attachment to the term, is it merely the label by which the majority of us use to identify with a generalised set of Internet services (eg social networking, the read-write web (which is another term in itself worth discussing)). I think the answer for me is all of the above - the definition of Web 2.0 and what it means is a highly personal one and is likely to remain so for some time.

technorati tags: , ,

My Life (nearly) Online

Like many people in IT I have to confess to having a love for new gadgets and the one that has my attention at the moment is Sony's new Mylo wireless broadband communications device. Targeted at your average (traditional) uni student's age group, it seems natural that people will start assessing this device's potential in an educational context. Mylo supports instant messaging, Skype, Web browsing, photos, video, music, text, and streaming content to other Mylo devices. It is a very convenient size, looks cool and for those of us who are challenged when messaging with numeric keypads, has a slide out querty keyboard. I can't wait to get one!. However, I see one of its great strengths as a weakness here in Australia at least. It is totally reliant on the presence of a wireless network. While this may seem great - using wireless to make voice calls with Skype, perform all your messaging etc avoids the cost of mobile calls, I wonder how practical this will be for most people. I have a wireless network at home and there is one at work, but most publicly accessable hotspots seem to be quite an expensive alternative. Also, wireless hotspots do not seem to be as ubiquitous as they need to be to make this type of device really useful. I am not sure how many schools, campuses etc have really good wireless coverage but until wireless is much more generally available, I think that we won't be seeing the full potential of such a handy device. Here's an interesting video review of the Mylo

Specifications for Repository Federations - Part 2

Harvesting Let's start off with something that is not so contentious - a specification for harvesting (harvesting is the gathering of information about resources (metadata) from one or more repositories and storing it for use in (potentially) value-add services). At work we are involved in a number of federations and there is really only one specification that comes to mind for harvesting and that is OAI/PMH. OAI/PMH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting):

"is a low-barrier mechanism for repository interoperability. Data Providers are repositories that expose structured metadata via OAI-PMH. Service Providers then make OAI-PMH service requests to harvest that metadata. OAI-PMH is a set of six verbs or services that are invoked within HTTP."

IMS LODE

IMS LODE update Components

  • repository
  • harvester
  • searcher
  • registry
LO Query LO Exchange Protocols Search - sqi/srw/u - lom context set - result format Harvesting - OAI-PMH