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CHAPTER 5: SLIDE SHOWS
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pieces of digital content that you choose and manage. The small, portable, multi- meidia computers that we all soon carry will first build and then service a far more personalized network than we now know. This network will be filled with personal media—the kinds of stuff that this book is about.
logical order. Some blogs focus on particu- lar topics, while others operate as diaries. A blog titled DailyKos has a half million visits each day.
build files about themselves that can include photos, lists, blogs, music, and videos. The “social” part resides in pro- gramming one’s list of friends and hence building a personal network of relation- ships.
Web hosting is the backbone for Web 2.0—the availability of services, stor- age, and networking that is provided free to anyone with a personal computer and an Internet service provider (ISP) account. Hosting is provided by .mac, Gmail, Yahoo, Google, and many others.
WEB 2.0
Smashups are hybrid Web applica- tions that combine data from multiple sources into a single tool available to all. Examples include Google Maps and real- estate data on Move.com.
User-generated content. Some- time in late 2005 or early 2006, Web sites emerged where anyone could post and share “rich media”—music files, photographs, videos, and pod casts. The gorilla in photography is Flickr. In video, it’s YouTube.
Wikis are a form of software that al- lows multiple users to create and edit the same Web pages. The nifty term has its origin in the Hawaiian word for “fast.” The mother of this form is Wikipedia, which features encyclopedia-like entries and cross links and is authored by more than twenty-five thousand contributors.
The fourth screen is already upon us. In the last twelve months mobile phones have morphed to something new, thanks to Apple and Nokia. Faster and cheaper bandwidth, combined with wireless con- nectivity, has yielded an unprecedented evolution of online communities.
Peer-to-Peer commerce. Web
2.0 is evolving its own versions of eBay— places where sellers can post their goods and buyers can find a bargain. Craigslist is the best known site, but there are many others that collaboratively pool reviews of products and sources for buying things.
Virtual world. Second Life is a three-dimensional environment that oper- ates as a world with many parallels to our so-called real world. You choose (con- struct or buy) an avatar that represents yourself and can explore, do business, build out real estate, and interact with other “residents.” Other virtual worlds include There and Activeworlds.
We are only just beginning to see the contours of Web 2.0. But already a migra- tion is underway that is certain to change and expand personal media.
Lest we overlook the power of Really Big screens, here are some oversize posters created by Tsang Seymour Design for New York’s Cooper- Hewitt National Museum of Design. Note how
I’m referring, of course, to what is be- ing called Web 2.0. If Web 1.0 was about finding, Web 2.0 is about sharing.
RSS feeds are “push” publishing services that regularly e-mail multimedia content to those who choose to sub- scribe. RSS stand for “Really Simple Syndication.” Typically these feeds pop onto your computer screen when it goes into “save power” or “inactive” mode. RSS requires a Web-scouring functionality that is built into almost all of today’s Web browsers.
You will already be familiar with some and maybe all that Web 2.0 has to offer. But a quick look at the set of interactive communities can remind you of the op- portunities out there to enrich and share the things you create.
they read at a distance. The Cooper-Hewett is an inventive hotbed. Visit its site. Courtesy of Tsang Sey- mour Design & CHNMD. Used with permission.
APIs (application programming inter- faces) are Web-based applications that make it easy to do things that previously required an installed piece of software on your computer. For example, Google has word processing, spreadsheets, collabora- tive space, slide shows, and so on. All are live online and all are free.
Social bookmarking lets Inter-
net users team up to build, store, and share bookmarks for Web pages. The best known of these is del.icio.us, which is credited with popularizing the use of “tags” for cross-referencing. A tag is a
key word used to index a site. Tagging is a central concept in Web 2.0 life.
Blogs (weblogs) are personally run sites with regular entries posted in chrono-
Social networking sites are places like Facebook and MySpace. Here users