What is Web 2.0?

Web 2.0 is approaching being passe but it is still interesting to me that the term has varying meanings depending on who you ask.  I found this today on the new Microsoft World Wide Telescope website:

“Web 2.0 is the next generation of the World Wide Web wherein technologies and social practices use metadata or tags to enable communication and resource sharing in a variety of forms (text, audio, video, links, etc.) through the Web without a centralized authority’s intervention or approval. Rich visualization software provides a graphical visualization of large structured data sets. The software’s interactive graphical user interface provides users with a more data-rich presentation of the data and enables them to explore, filter, analyze, and interact with the data, resulting in a better understanding of that data.”

From this page: http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/whatIs/whatIsWWT.aspx

Thank you Microsoft.

Others of course claim that Web 2.0 does not really exist and still others claim that it has to do with the social web rather than the commercial web that pre-dated the dot-com bust.

For me Web 2.0 is all about data driven websites.  Interactive sites that allow you, as the user, to log in and customize your interaction with the site in some way, or give and receive data with the site.  Social networks, blogs and wikis are all examples of this kind of interactive web.  I distinguish Web 2.0 sites from the old HTML sites that gave info and left it at that.  Looking back in time, using the Wayback Machine for example, it is interesting to see web sites from the 90’s that have static front pages providing info on a company or brand and that offer no way to join or get more info beyond what the webmaster chose to put there. Hard to imagine now.

Web 3.0, if there ever is such a thing, will likely be an extension of the web 2.0 data model where data from diverse sites will begin to come together using tags across sites or by linking user profiles across sites.  Somehow the various stores of data will be connected and manipulated by users in ways that the data can not right now because it is tied to one domain or one company.

We’ll see.

Google Spreadsheets now as a Wiki!

Google Spreadsheets, the online spreadsheet program that is part of Google Docs, has just added a new feature by which you can make a spreadsheet open for editing to anyone and everyone.  Before, you could invite collaborators but you had to provide them with a link that included a secret code so only invited people could participate.  Now you can have it open for anyone to click a link from a web page or blog and edit in real-time with many others.  See a full explanation at http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-spreadsheets-become-wikis.html

Cool.

Asus EEE PC 900 review

Wired’s Gadget Lab has a preliminary look at the Asus EEE 900.  It looks awesome but the price is getting a little high to be an ultra-affordable ultra-portable.  I would say $400 is a max for a machine like this as you can get a full-fledged Dell laptop for around $600.  The new EEE 900 is priced at $550 according to Wired.

Wired Review

I suppose you could get three of these instead of one MacBook.  I really like the EEE, but the iLife suite is a great set of tools for students and I am not sure if the EEE, without a CD drive, would be as suitable for young kids, software-wise.

Carry Documents Around in Your iPhone

Here’s a simple way to add documents to your iPhone.  This applies to OSX Leopard but I am sure you can do the same thing somehow in Tiger or even on a PC

1) Open your document in its native app.  I wanted to put some Word documents on my phone so I open them in Word.

2) Go to File…Print and choose the PDF button at the bottom.  Save the doc as a PDF.

3) Open the PDF in Preview.  Save as… and save it as a PNG or other image format.

4) Import it into iPhoto.   I created an event called iPhone Documents and then a smart album to hold anything that has the word iPhone (thus the entire event).  You could also just create an album and add documents to it whenever you add them to iPhoto.

5) In iTunes set your iPhone to sync that smart album to your iPhone.  (I already only sync selected albums as I have too many photos to fit on my phone.  One other thing I find useful is syncing the “Last Import” album.  When I connect my iPhone it opens iPhoto and I import any photos I have taken.  I add them to an existing event if applicable or create a new event.  Then I delete the originals from the iPhone.  Then iTunes syncs that last import back to the phone using the event name I chose, and if I added them to an existing event, it syncs that entire event back to the phone.  Seems like a waste, but I find it very handy.  I then have three albums on my phone, the photos I am taking on the phone, the last import and my documents.  Nicely organized.)

Done.  Now you can view your docs in the photo gallery on the iPhone.  The quality is not superb, and text size of 10 will be unreadable, but I think it is cool that you can take docs along if you want.  No editing, mind you, at least not ’till this summer when Documents to Go or something like that comes out through the app store, but handy for now.

Google Shows Mac Users Some Love

Thanks to LifeHacker for this heads-up:

Google Adds Mac-Specific Search

“If you run into a problem on a Windows computer, all you have to do is type a little description of the problem and Google takes care of the rest; Mac users, on the other hand, often need to include a little context in their search—instead of typing a query like text editor, you type text editor mac. Google’s Mac-specific portal, found at http://google.com/mac/, now includes a Mac-specific search box. It’s not groundbreaking, but the guaranteed Mac-specific results could come in handy next time you’re looking for a specific application or you’re troubleshooting your Mac.”