Social Bookmarking

Podcasts or Webcasts: As broadband internet connect connections and wireless networks become more and more common throughout the entire world, the podcast or webcast is gaining in popularity.

While people do still read, they are better at looking and listening to information thanks to television, hence, the advent of podcasts or webcasts.

You can find and tune into podcasts or webcasts on almost any subject imaginable today. Those who have blogs are making use of this technology to sell products and to promote their websites in record numbers.

Web 2.0 is definitely here to stay and those who are still trying to do things the old Web 1.0 way are falling behind this wave of today and of the future. Will there be changes to Web 2.0?

Well, of course, there will be. Web 2.0 is fluid and it is every changing. New technology will be developed and as it is developed people will use it. People are, after all, the driving force of Web 2.0.

And, you might ask, just who will benefit the most from Web 2.0? It will be those who embrace the new technologies as they become available and it will be us…all of us.

The internet no longer belongs to the few and the privileged. Big business has lost its edge. The Internet and Web 2.0 has leveled the playing field.

All of us (you, me and all those who have access to the Internet) can now compete and win.

RSS Feed: The acronym RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and is yet another Web 2.0 feature that allows the web to be driven by people rather than by the powers-that-be. Those who use RSS content use reader or aggregator technology. Users subscribe to these feeds.

The reader or aggregator then checks the user’s website and when the site has new content, it is picked up and sent to the user. That is a rather simplified explanation but that is basically how it works.

A client based reader or aggregator is a stand-alone program that is attached to an existing program such as a web browser or an email reader.

A web-based reader or aggregator makes the user’s feeds available on any computer with web access.

Wiki: A short definition of Wiki is “Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.”

In short Wiki technology allows editing of material posted on a website by the poster or by others.

The best example of Wiki technology is action on the Internet is Wikipedia. In the old Web 1.0 way to doing things the owner of a website had full control over all material that was posted to the website and only website owners could edit material posted on the website.

With the advent of Web 2.0 that idea has gone the way of the horse and buggy.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking is more or less a by-product of blogging but it is based on the same basic technology.

Social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, allow their users to upload their own favorite site bookmarks so that everybody else in the world can see and use those bookmarks.

When a user uploads his favorite site bookmarks into his online account, a backlink is created to that site. When enough people click on the link, the site that has been book marked gets indexed and gains a rank by search engines.

It is a form of user driven advertisements that is far more successful than any kind of paid-for advertising can ever be.

There are a great many social bookmarking sites on the Internet now and new software is being developed all the time that makes these sites more and more productive as advertising tools and traffic driving tools.

Blogs: Blog is a term that is derived from the blending of the two words ‘web’ and ‘log’….Blog. Fairly early in the history of the World Wide Web people could build personal web pages. It is true that not many people did build personal webpages but it was, nonetheless, possible.

Still, these personal webpages were static websites. The owner of the website could post information about himself or his interests but others could only read the information that the owner of the website posted.

He could keep an online journal that he could allow others to read but it was ‘read only’.

Then along came technology. Blogging software was developed. Now those who had personal websites could not only post about themselves, but they could allow their visitors to comment on what had been posted or ask questions. It was a huge advancement.

Because of that technology, today blogging is very big business.

People visit and post to blogs all over the Internet about any and every subject that they are interested in and the owners of these blogs have figured out that they can make their blogs very, very profitable indeed.