Professor Bebo White was one of the speakers at the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) tutorial that took place this week at the WWW Conference here in Banff. I found his talk on Web 2.0 very informative, so I thought I’d share my notes from the talk. I’ll add links to official resources to the bottom of this article.

What Web 2.0 Isn’t

Bebo started by telling the audience that if they could define Web 2.0, they knew more than him. I think he was being a bit facetious, because he proceeded to elaborate on a pretty good definition. He started out with a description of what Web 2.0 isn’t:

Excuse the image quality from my cell phone pix ;). Many cynics about Web 2.0 consider it to be just hype for Blogs, AJAX and mash-ups. Well it isn’t just those things. It is in part all of the things in this slide, but they are merely parts of a bigger whole, or emergent properties of a more complex system, if you want to be geeky about it.

What is it, then?

• Websites are not to be single sources of information; the user community contributes to that information resource.
• Microcontent which can be machine-parsed, captured, and integrated in other places beyond the control and context of the original source.
• Tags and other systems allow users to categorize information according to their own needs or those of their community. As it turns out, such "folksonomies" can be remarkably useful in general, and there is much research underway on them in all kinds of information contexts.
• The network as a platform; platforms are stronger than individual applications, because they can put together different parts of multiple applications.

Some interesting stats:

• 55% of web users aged 12-17 use social networking sites
• 12.28% of total web traffic comes from social networking sites

Big Ideas of Web 2.0

• Fresh, useful data is the core
• Availability, i.e., through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
• "Living" applications
• Harnessing the collective experience
• The web as a platform that is independent from the user platform

For example,

• YouTube allows comments and more importantly, allows the user to easily embed its videos in other websites.
• ChipIn makes it easy to do a common but painfully tedious social task.
• Yelp allows people to write reviews and recommendations on practically anything.

The Development Side of Web 2.0

• Web 2.0 apps are essentially great interfaces sitting on top of huge databases
• Small groups of developers doing rapid prototyping is the most effective
• AJAX allows you to think of information in terms of microcontent, moving as much computational work as possible to the client
• Throw out “browser” and adopt “User Agent”.
• XSLT allows for independence from the User Agent
• The AJAX use of onReadyStateChange of the HttpRequest object; use to reduce traffic to/from the server, getting and updating only the information that needs to be changed, the dynamic content only, not the whole page, menus and all

More examples:

• The Kiko online calendar
• Box, shared online storage
• Goowy desktop apps, PIM, etc.

Accessing Web Applications

It is a big advantage when building applications to leverage existing web-services instead of re-inventing the wheel. If you’re building new services, use open standards to publish information about these services, such as how to use them. Become familiar with:

• SOA
• WSDL
• WML
• SOAP, or better yet, REST

Mashups

• turns data into knowledge
• pulls together disparate data sources into a single realm of related data that is a useful resource
• See ProgrammableWeb for available API info. It provides an overview of what is going on in a given place: weather, web cam veiws, maps, local events by RSS, YouTube videos (with folksonomy)

Accessibility

Consider the community for which your site will serve in making accessibility decisions. For example, how relevant will a ski conditions page be for those who are visually impaired?

Other bits

• Semantic Web: all about machine parsing, metadata. A common vocabulary is needed to parse information, a schema.
• Taxonomies vs Follksonomies: hierarchical, formal categorization vs non-hierarchical, searchable tags
• Microformats: humans first, machines second. eg. XFN and rel attributes.

Other resources

• WOWTechMinute: a blog maintained by Brent Norris tracking WOW events such as this talk. There are some videos posted from this talk here and here.
• Apparently the slides from the talk will be made available; I will post a link here once I find them.