For quite some time I’ve been wanting to put together a brown bag session on Web 2.0 for ASI. And in the spirit of web2.0 I have decided to write a blog post about this rather than do what I would normally do, a PowerPoint presentation.
Initially I guess I want to make sure that people know the tools that I use on a regular basis that I believe fall into the web2.0 bucket. Please note: I will not be defining web2.0 here, there is enough of that going on elsewhere.
So, here’s my list (in no particular order):
Suffice to say that there are thousands of examples of sites or services that may be classified as web2.0, so the list above is just a starting point. I guess see this is a baseline… if someone asked me how to “get into” web2.0 then this is where I would tell them to go.
So a little detail on a few of these:
You no doubt have heard of things like twitter or pownce or jaiku, these are services that allow you post micro-blogs, tiny snippets of information that tell other people what’s going on in your life. There are elements of this that are useful for business, and some for personal, but people addicted to these services basically post just about anything and everything. The problem that was realised however was that keeping ALL of these services up to date became a real challenge. Solution: FriendFeed. See my feed here. FriendFeed allows you to create a single profile page that scan almost anything you do online at many web2.0 websites and puts it all in one place. So as an example me feed shows my tweets (in twitter), my bookmarks (in delicious), my blog posts (from this blog) and a bunch of other things. Plus I can configure how much or how little information I want to see about my friends online. So instead of going to 10 different websites to see what’s going on you can go to one place and scan the hap’nins.
TripAdvisor is probably one of the best examples of true web2.0 in action, user generated content. I do a bit of travel for work (and leisure) and want to make sure that I’m staying in reasonable accommodations. TripAdvisor shows reviews from real people who have stayed at hotels around the planet and that have rated and commented on their experience, some upload photos, some upload videos. I’m at the point now where I almost use tripadvisor exclusively when deciding on hotels to stay in.
Google Docs is another great example of a web2.0 tools, but more targeted at collaboration than anything else. As an example, imagine being able to open an excel spreadsheet and work on it while someone else is doing the same… AND SEE THEIR CHANGES IN REAL TIME! It’s the coolest thing! We’ve used this a couple of times internally at ASI and slowly but surely more people are opening Google accounts making it much easier to share this sort of information.
Delicious is another great web2.0 application, however I use it more for personal reasons that anything else, rather than as a sharing tool. Del.icio.us is fundamentally a bookmark site, however instead of just a long list of bookmarks you get the ability to ‘tag’ or categorise your bookmarks. This makes then really easy to find later on. Additionally you can find things that other people have bookmarked using the same tags, and which of those are new or popular. Further it has a great Firefox plug, my browser of choice, to enable you to bookmark things you find as well as finding things you’ve bookmarked. My delicious links here.
LinkedIn is slowly becoming the ‘business facebook’ and rightly so. It’s a well organised, not overly complex site that allows you to keep in touch with other associates. However something you may not know about linkedin is that they have a great answers section of their site. If you have a question on a particular topic then you post your question and get answers from people around the globe, for free! It’s not really designed as a technical resource though, so don’t go looking for the syntax for some bizarre SQL function. However something really cool happened recently and I wanted to share it with you.
While perusing the questions on databases one night I came across this question, it was basically asking about data quality programs that you could put in your organisation. Simple enough, and I gave my 2 cents (today worth on 1.4 cents in the US). A whole of people did the same and I didn’t think about again, until a couple of days ago when Dylan, the guy who asked the question in the first place posted a blog posting summarising what he had found, and he did it with a really cool little interactive graphing tool as well. Real web2.0 in action, ask, receive, learn, share.
So, in closing you might be asking “Where do I find out about all these web2.0 apps?” well, there’s a place for that too. Go have a look at go2web20, it’s not the snappiest of sites so be patient but it does have a great search function and tagging function to allow to find tools, services and applications that are all web based and just might make life easier for you too!
Good Luck!
Update: One more thing to check out is crowd sourcing.
