Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
7
THE WORLD OF
WEB 2.0: BLOGS,
WIKIS AND
WEBSITES
Chapter summary
•
Interactive web sites have enabled an enormous growth of user-generated
web content.
•
Blogs tell an individual's story; they're typically a monologue that allows
for an occasional question or comment, as opposed to open interaction.
•
Wikis are multi-user web site editors, which is why they are a popular
collaboration tool.
In the following pages we'll discuss the basics of web sites, weblogs (blogs)
and wikis, and the ways in which they are being used for research pur-
poses. In previous chapters we discussed technologies that allow users to
send and receive information to and from a specific list of addressees. Web
technology is different from email and messaging in that a document is
published on the web and viewers themselves make the decision whether
to access it. In the context of this book, the web is interesting in that it is
both a medium for distributing information and a seemingly infinite
source of data to research.
In its earlier days, that is, before roughly the year 2000, the web was mostly
a publishing tool. Web servers were mostly in-house or at a commercial web
service provider. A certain level of expertise was required to operate the web
server and also to generate web content. Recent combinations of increasing
network speeds, huge increases in disk storage capacity and software to ease
the creation of web sites and web content, have made possible sites such as
MySpace
,
Facebook
,
YouTube
,
flickr
and ones like them, as well as blog and
wiki sites. This has made it much easier for the average person (with access
to a computer and the Internet) to express him or herself to a world-wide
audience without having to go through a mediator such as a magazine or
