The Post-Google Expanding Web

While Google continues to dominate the search industry, rolling out a dazzling display of new services, critics are questioning its purity. With its huge profit from AdWords, has Google's motive shifted from information to profit? Google's new products, such as Gmail, desk-top search, maps, and blogsearch, depart from web search. Lawsuits over Google's book digitization project have put the company on the defensive. Signs are pointing to a different web future.

Increasingly, search is evolving into a social-search phenomenon. The creation and distribution of web content are increasingly characterised by open communication, decentralization of authority, and freedom to share and re-use. Popular social software services encourage the growth of virtual communities, defined by Wikipedia as a "group[s] of people communicating or interacting with each other by means of information technologies, typically the Internet, rather than face to face. Virtual communities are also known as online communities or mediated communities." Virtual communities allow people to share information and harness their collective intelligence, implicitly trusting users as co-developers.

Following are web applications and technologies representative of the evolving web, or Web 2.0, as some are calling it.

Blogs and RSS feeds

What is a blog?

A blog, short for "web log," is the fastest growing medium on the web. A blog is a web page written in a diary format. Blogs consist of brief entries, or posts, by the blog author(s). Usually, the posts are arranged in chronological order with the most recent posts at the top of the page. As you scroll down, the posts get older.

Blogs differ from other websites in a couple of ways:

First, blogs are designed to be frequently and easily updated. A blogger does not need to be proficient in (X)HTML to post a message. A blogger, and reader can usually post a message simply by filling out a web form and submitting it.

Second, blogs are actively promoted and distributed throughout the Internet using a technology called RSS. Together, these two technologies form the "blogosphere."

Google offers a free blogging tool, Blogger, at http://www.blogger.com/start.

Users can search Google to find blogs entering a topic of interest followed by the word "blog." Alternatively, users can use a blog-search engine, such as Technorati, at http://www.technorati.com/.

What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, although it can also mean Rich Site Summary. RSS is the technology needed to subscribe to a blog. By means of software known as an aggregator or feed reader, a user can set up new posts on a blog to come to them, instead of their having to visit the website. Subscribing to an RSS feed saves time, because no longer does a user have to check back with a site to see whether there has been an update; instead, the new information comes to them as an RSS feed, as soon as it is created. Bloglines.com at http://bloglines.com/ is an example of an a fee reader. Accounts are free with registration.

Major news outlets, including CNN and The New York Times, use RSS technology to provide RSS feeds of their content. These services provide subscribers of the feeds with immediate updates of the major headlines, and the subscribers can then select the stories they want to read.

RSS may potentially exert a profound impact on the way people get their information. As more people rely on RSS to bring their information to them, fewer will rely on search engines to find the information themselves from multiple websites. Blogs and RSS may change the way in which people get their information online.

Tags

Tags, the collaborative categorization of websites, are a type of metadata--data about data. Tags are keywords used to categorize information and make it easier for search engines to serve up the information to users. Tagging fills the need to categorize and index the vast amount of content published online everday by distributing the task among a group of people. Services, such as Flickr, a photo-sharing site, and del.icio.us, a social bookmarks manager, and Furl, an online archive of shared pages and social bookmarking service, let their users tag content by assigning it whatever classifiers they deem best. Rather than imposing a rigid taxonomy, tagging takes a more democratic approach to classifying information, known in the blogosphere as "folksonomy," a conflation of "folk" and "taxonomy." Folksonomy relies on the judgment of peers for authority, not a top-down authority, such as a webmaster.

Wikis

A wiki, from the Hawaiian word for quick or rapid, is a web application that allows users to both add and edit content on a collaborative basis, using any web browser. The focus is on content and not page layout. The idea behind wikis is to make collaboration easy. The wikipedia.org encyclopedia is an example of a wiki. Most of the wiki software is open source and is available for free. Examples of wiki software are Jotspot and PmWiki.

Media searches

Video

Audio

Images

Personalized spaces and services

Online Homepages

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