The Internet, Intranets, and Extranets - Principles of Information Systems - page 293

libraries of reports, collaborative word processing, and other useful tools to allow those in
the field to quickly exchange and access information.
Another social networking site called Twitter ( www.twitter.com ) allows members to re-
port on what they are doing throughout the day. Referred to as a microblogging service,
Twitter allows users to send short text updates (up to 140 characters long) from cell phones
or the Internet to their Twitter page to let others know what they are doing. 24 Twitter updates
can be forwarded to MySpace or Facebook Web sites.
Media Sharing
Media-sharing Web sites such as YouTube for video sharing and Flickr for photo sharing
provide methods for members to store and share digital media files on the Web. YouTube
allows members to post homemade video content in categories such as comedy, entertain-
ment, film and animation, how-to, news, people, pets, sports, and travel. As mentioned
earlier, Flickr allows members to upload photos to their own personal online photo album
and choose photos to share with the community.
What makes these media-sharing sites part of Web 2.0 is their focus on community. Both
Flickr and YouTube provide ways for members to comment on the media. YouTube allows
visitors to e-mail favorite video clips to friends. Both sites provide methods for visitors to
view the most popular media or search on a particular topic.
Flickr uses a methodology of ranking content that has become popular with many Web
2.0 sites. Formally called a folksonomy or collaborative tagging, Flickr allows users to associate
descriptive tags with photos. For example, you might tag a photo of your pet Weimaraner
at the beach with “Dog,” “Pet,” “Weimaraner,” and “Beach.” Using associated tags, Flickr
can easily group common photos together and gather statistics on photos. Flickr uses this
information to create a tag cloud—a diagram of keyword links with the size of each word
representing the number of photos that use that tag (see Figure 7.16). Smugmug is a photo
sharing site that supports higher-quality images than most such sites and allows members to
sell their photos to others for profi t 25 .
Figure 7.16
Flickr's Tag Cloud
Flickr's tag cloud uses font size to
indicate which tags have the most
photos associated with them; users
click a tag to see the associated
photos.
(Source: Flickr Web site,
www.flickr.c om.)
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are another example of Web 2.0. These sites provide a way for Web
users to store, classify, share, and search Web bookmarks—also referred to as favorites. The
typical purpose of social bookmarking sites is to provide a view of the most popular Web
sites, videos, blog articles, or other Web content at any given moment. Often social book-
marking sites include Web browser add-ons (extensions) that provide a button on the toolbar
for recommending Web content. For example, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking Web site
that provides a “what's hot right now” button. When you sign up for del.icio.us, you can