Web 2.0 Basics Lecture on Main Concepts and Examples
1. 2 December 2005
Web Information Systems
Web 2.0 Basics
Prof. Beat Signer
Department of Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
http://www.beatsigner.com
2. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 2
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 was
introduced by Tim O'Reilly
at the Web 2.0 conference
in 2004 to describe a new
generation of web apps
user-generated content
data as a driving force
- infoware rather than simply software
collective intelligence via social resource and knowledge sharing
the Web as a platform for software applications
Not a new technology but a change in how developers
and users build applications on the Web
user-generated content already existed earlier (e.g. Amazon)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Web_2.0_Map.svg]
3. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 3
Main Web 2.0 Ingredients
Social Web
end user as a participant and content creator
democracy
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
bring the desktop to the browser
highly interactive applications (e.g. with drag and drop)
based on AJAX, Flash, etc.
Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs)
enable the sharing of information and services between different
Web 2.0 applications
Web Services, RSS, mashups, etc.
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Web 2.0 Interaction
Service-oriented
Architecture (SOA)
information access
content creation
user-to-user
interaction
Web
collective intelligence
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Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
publishing participation
reading reading and writing (participatory Web)
content management systems wikis
personal homepages blogs
simple request/response interaction Rich Internet Application (RIA)
screen scraping (extract data from HTML) service-oriented architectures
taxonomies (classification) folksonomies (tagging)
companies communities
single user social networks
bookmarking collaborative tagging / social bookmarking
... ...
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Web 2.0 and the Long Tail
The term long tail has
been introduced by Chris
Anderson in 2004
article about Amazon etc.
- 'Touching the Void' and
'Into Thin Air' example
Main observations
the tail is longer than expected and now economically within reach
the niches form a significant market when aggregated
new economic model: combine infinite shelf space with shared
real-time public opinions and buying trends
Major part of Internet content made up by small sites
provide tools to address the long tail and not just the head
Joe Simpson, 1988 Jon Krakauer, 1997
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Video: The Machine is Us/ing Us
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Web 2.0 Examples
Wikis
Blogs
Media sharing sites
Folksonomies
Social networking sites
Web-based communities
Mashups
Web applications
...
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Wikis
The first wiki was the
WikiWikiWeb in 1995
Ward Cunningham
inspired by HyperCard
Any user can create new
wiki pages or edit existing
pages
no special software required on the client side (only a browser)
Democracy-based control of the content
revision history, discussion, ...
Various wiki software
MediaWiki, DokuWiki, ...
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Wikipedia
Open authoring model
registered and anonymous
users may contribute
some users (editors)
have special rights
Each article has
a history page showing
all of its changes
a discussion page
Issues
reliability not guaranteed since no central authority
vandalism
...
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Blogs
A blog (weblog) is a
chronologically ordered
list of information
personal diary
specific subjects
- e.g. celebrities
Tool for delivering news
and getting in touch with a large community of users
nowadays often used as a powerful channel in politics
much harder to control than print or broadcasting media
Popular blogs often generate revenue by advertising
access to content is often free
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Technorati
Blog search engine
indexes over 100 million
blogs
Use tags to classify blogs
Ranking based on a
blog's authority
number of inlinks from other
blogs
similar to search algorithms descibed later
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Flickr
Image hosting and sharing
website
Image repository that is
often used by bloggers
Managing images
collaborative tagging
- user-generated taxonomy (folksonomy)
- one of the first websites that implemented tag clouds
grouping in sets, collections and higher order collections
- note that an image may be added to multiple sets
Offers a powerful Web Service API
can easily be integrated with third-party applications
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Folksonomies
Folksonomy = 'folk' +
'taxonomy'
user-generated taxonomy
Social tagging
collaboratively creating and
managing tags
bottom up approach
- no fixed terminology
Applications
Annotea: shared Web annotations and bookmarks
Delicious: social bookmarking web service
Tag cloud visualisation
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YouTube
Video hosting and sharing
website
Social impact
YouTube Internet celebrities
Copyright issues
material from TV shows etc.
many broadcasting companies
use YouTube as new channel
Content can easily be embedded in external websites
blogs, social networking sites, ...
Acquired by Google in 2006
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Last.fm
Internet streaming radio
User profile based on
music listened to on
Last.fm and other devices
Audioscrobbler music
recommender system
based on collaborative filterling algorithm
find songs in the "neighbourhood" based
on other users with similar tastes
17. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 17
Facebook
Social networking site
Connect to friends and
share information
info about current status
post messages on a user's
public wall
send individual messages
share photos
Easy to add individual applications
Copyright issues
what happens with content that has been uploaded to Facebook?
Privacy issues
18. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 18
Twitter
Micro-blogging and social
networking service
Small messages (tweets)
can be posted to a user
profile
often added via SMS
reach millions of users from
any place around the world
within seconds
- used in protests and politics, emergencies, ...
Can we get too connected?
19. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 19
Second Life
Virtual 3-dimensional
world by Linden Lab
special client software
User represented by
an avatar
Linden dollar (L$) as a
currency
buy land
buy and sell goods and services to other users
Applications
education, business meetings, arts, ...
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Academia.edu
Social networking website
for researchers
Sharing and rating of
resources
research papers, conference
presentations, CVs, etc.
Find researchers with similar research interests
Other professional social networking websites
LinkedIn, Xing, ...
How to deal with profile information on different sites?
open standards for social networking
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SlideShare
Social networking website
to share presentations
High quality educational
material
Various APIs for inte-gration
with other social
networking websites
Content may spread virally through social networks
and blogs
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myExperiment
Collaborative environment
for scientists
Safely publish workflow
plans and share them with
other scientists
Reuse and repurpose
workflows
avoid to reinvent the wheel
get credits for workflows
...
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Delicious
Social bookmarking
service
store bookmarks and access
them from different browsers
share and discover book-marks
Non-hierarchical classi-fication
based on tags
Offers various APIs to access the bookmarks
24. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 24
Mashups
A mashup composes
information and services
from external sources and
offers them as part of a
new service
Various mashup tools
Yahoo Pipes, ...
Mashup example
composition of Google Maps and realtime information about the
position of airplanes
- http://www.flightradar24.com
25. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 25
Google Docs
Free web-based office
tools
word processor, spreadsheet
application, ...
Mobile access via mobile
phone
Software as a service (SaaS)
Data safety and privacy issues
26. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 26
Google AdSense
Highly customised delivery
of advertisements
shows advertisements delive-red
via Google AdWords
New models for payment
pay-per-click in addition to
pay-per-impression
Any website owner can enroll
sometimes very complementary information
- e.g. blog with reviews about specific products together with Google
advertisements for these products
27. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 27
Video: The Kindness of Strangers
28. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 28
Social Implications of Web 2.0
Data ownership and copyright issues
Collective intelligence (wisdom of crowds)
Shift of power from controlled media to
collaborative communities
New models for crediting an individual's
content that is accessed by other users or
composed in mashup applications
Everybody has a (big) voice
e.g. reach millions of users within seconds via Twitter
29. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 29
Common Web 2.0 Patterns
The presented Web 2.0 applications have some common
underlying patterns which are going to be discussed in
the next lecture
service oriented architectures (SOAs)
software as a service
asynchronous partial updates
- Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
mashups
self-organising communities
collaborative tagging
viral marketing
...
30. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 30
Exercise 6
Web Services
31. November 7, 2014 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 31
References
James Governor et al., Web 2.0 Architectures,
O'Reilly Media, May 2009
Chris Anderson, The Long Tail, Wired 12(10), 2004
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
Michael Wesch, The Machine is Us/ing Us
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
Jonathan Zittrain, The Kindness of Strangers,
TEDGlobal 2009, Oxford, UK, July 2009
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_zittrain_t
he_web_is_a_random_act_of_kindness.html
Live Flight Tracker
http://www.flightradar24.com
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References
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds,
Anchor, August 2005
33. 2 December 2005
Next Lecture
Web 2.0 Patterns and Technologies