The definition of Web 2.0 varies depending on who you ask. But it seems that everybody agrees that tagging, social networking, RSS, blogging, bittorrent and context sensitive ads are part of Web 2.0.

To summarize I suppose that you could say that Web 2.0 are the things that can help make the web a social place, where you can actually interact with others.
This diagram attempts to explain Web2.0
That perspective should be compared to how the web was percieved during its first five years of existance (in the public sphere.)
During that period people came online to research, shop and perpaps participate in a forum.

Technologies and attitudes over the last five years or so has changed all that though. Active participation of users is now the most desirable state of things on most websites. Thats is what Web 2.0 is all about. Individuals. organisations and companies no longer wants to simply tell you things. They want you to get involved as well!

Below is a list of some of the most famous Web 2.0 sites today. I have left out some of the obvious ones that I expect you already know about; Wikipedia, Technorati, YouTube and MySpace….

Site	Description
Wink	Search all the big social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, Xanga, LinkedIn (and many others) in one go. Much more practical than trawling through these sites one by one looking for your friends (or for a blog in a specific location or on a topic that interests you.)
Linked In	Social Networking for professionals. Recruitment consultants love it. It’s cheesy like you wouldn’t believe, but it actually is pretty good for getting head-hunted. I get a few quite relevant phonecalls every week, just from having an entry there.
Last FM	A community music site that offers you good quality streaming radio based on music that is recommended to you. The recommendations are based on what others with similar taste to you have liked previously. The site offers plenty of opportunities to make online friends and participate in groups based on music taste.
Pandora	Music selections streamed based on a computer’s selection. All music in Pandora has been analysed and categorised by the Gnome project. As you give the songs played the thumb-up or thumb-down, the Pandora software quickly learns what type of rythms you like, as well as what type of genres, lyrics, instruments and tonal scales please you. Within half an hour, Pandora’s got your music taste all sussed out and is able to suggest new artists and songs that you are guaranteed to like. Well done Gnome - I love Pandora!
Flickr	Photosharing. Upload your photos, tag them and share them with the world. Anybody searching for ‘Paris’ will be able to find your snapshots of a certain tower… The comment functionality allows people to let you know what they think - and they do, usually in an encouraging way. Flickr appears to be big among professional photographers and aspiring professionals. I currently don’t use it.
BTJunkie	Somebody researched all the bittorrent sites and found that this site is the most comprehensive. Personally I tend to use Torrentspy, Demonoid or The Pirate Bay though. In order to use the notorious bittorrent technology to download films, music and software you have to install a bittorrent client such as uTorrent. Once it is installed, you simply visit a BT site, search for whatever it is that you want, click on the link and you are in business. In order to get a good performance, you need to do some tweaking though.
9Rules	A sort of ‘elite’ blog network. A blog that is considered for membership gets thouroughly scrutinized by the 9Rules team. The site can only join if it measures up to some farirly high standards. I would like to join but they currently don’t even accept new applications. There is no guaranteed that my site even measures up!
Del.icio.us	I didn’t use this “social” bookmarking service for ages because I thought the name was silly. But it is actually pretty good. If you can manage to find somebody with who has a great set of bookmarks, you can learn a lot on a rainy day… I haven’t used it to it’s full extent but lots of people swear by it. Timewaster warning!
Stumble Upon	Stumble will bring you to random sites, based on your interests. Tell this service what type of sites you would like to view, then sit back and click the ‘Stumble’ button in your browser’s toolbar as you surf sites that have been recommended by members. If you come across something that you don’t like, just give it a thumbs-down. Again, Timewaster warning!
Second Life	If this life isn’t enough for you, you can have a Second Life online. Why would you want that? I have NO idea, but lots of people do… The second life has everything that the first life has; love problems, fashion, private property, airports and a currency. Do I need to say Timewaster warning?
Mybloglog	This community site is about finding out more about the people who read your blog (see the ‘visitors’ section in the right-hand column. Alternatively, it lets you find out about those who read blogs that you like, such as here on this site. By clicking on their picture, you can find out all about what their online likes and dislikes are, if they have their own blog as well as links to their pages on lots of other web2.0 sites. It is not an intrusion of their privacy, since they get to decide what information is public and what is not. The service only works with people who signed up. I like the feature that lets me add a module that shows the last readers.
Pageflakes	Your personalised start or newspage. Lets you keep up with the activity on your favourite blogs and news sites without surfing around like a madman. Simply add the RSS feed from your favourite pages to Pageflakes and you can spot any updates to the sites from there. A particularly nice touch is that you can create new tab pages for different topics. For example you may have one tab for blogs, one each for specific topics that interest you, and one for news weather and local events. Also check out Netvibes which does the same thing as Pageflakes. Note: To use this site successfully you should understand the basics of RSS. There is nothing difficult about it - just look it up on Wikipedia.

Hope you found the list useful! Please let me know if I missed anything that you think is important, and I’ll update the list.
It took me some time and effort to research this a couple of weeks back and I hope that it will save sombody else a bit of time to see a comprehensive list instead of finding scraps or information here and there.

And finally: The ten commandments of Web 2.0 at Lohad’s site.
Technorati Tags: web2,
web2.0,technology,
bookmarking

I have updated the site and the theme a bit as you may have noticed! I have also turned on the Wordpress (my blog engine) caching which means that pages will load much faster. It hasn’t been possible to keep the caching on, as I have been doing development on the site on and off.

On my way home from work yesterday I listened to an old TWIT (This Week in Tech) podcast about Web2.0. It suddenly occurred to me that my blog has to be “socialized.” Only about fifty people per day have found their way to this blog, and most of them seem to be too shy to post comments. Most of the people who have come so far have been really lovely though.

But I was curious to see whether ’socialisation’ actually works. I have now signed up with a few of the social networking sites such as Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and Squidoo. (I had to add a “lens” there. I chose my “popular” topic of ‘femininity,’ something I really care about, as it happens. Follow the Squidoo link to have a look.)

Well, I am looking forward to seeing what will come of all this! If you don’t know about social networking sites, you really should check out the ones above. I had a really nice time investigating.

High time I wrote an actual post now though. Sorry it’s been a while..

By the way, I am thinking of changing the first letter of each post on this blog to a really fancy 19th century capital letter. I believe it’s called “dropcaps! What do you think of that idea?

Technorati Tags: networking, redditdigg,socialize

I am doing some maintenance to this site right now. (Apologies for any ‘disruptions’ to the ‘service’ – you may see odd pictures or un-aligned borders etc… I don’t have a setup for testing offline.)

Browser Usage on This Site

I just had a proper look at the statistics for this site and found that the split between internet browsers is as follows for this site:
Stats for Vikingprincess.net
Why, oh why do 33% of visitors have to use that nasty, evil browser Internet Explorer 6?

(If you are asking yourself at this point “What are these ‘browsers’ she is talking about? - Well, they are software that can do the same thing as Internet Explorer, but better. They are completely free.)

I want to be a good hostess and cater for all my visitors but it takes so much extra time to code for that browser! Some of the IE6 problems I’ve got, I simply haven’t been able to figure out a way of solving.

For example, IE6 cannot properly display .png images with a transparent background (such as the stone image in the upper left corner). If left alone, IE 6 would display that picture with a solid grey background!

In order for the picture to display properly, I have to parse and transform every single .png image on the site using a fix that I found online. However, before I can even get on to that, I have to put in an ugly hack to single out IE6 from other browsers so that the other browsers don’t waste their time using the hack (it slows down page-loading somewhat)

IE6 Bugs on This Site

If you look at the border of the wooden panel, that is supposed to have a shadow effect against the ‘linen table cloth’ beneath. I can’t find a way of fixing the .png-transparency problem with background images, so the image displays as an ugly grey band in IE6.

Also, in IE6, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you’ll find that the page doesn’t finish neatly at the bottom of the wooden border the way it does in all other browsers. It goes on for a bit, displaying the ugly grey shadow border and giving the whole trick of the ‘shadow’ effect away. It looks ugly and I have tried (unsuccessfully) to fix it.

I have tried to fix the window re-sizing problem in IE6 but I don’t quite understand how DOM scripting works, so it’s not exactly perfect. If you make the screen narrower in any other browser, the content narrows automatically with the window. In IE6 this doesn’t happen though, and I have to use javascript to try to cater for people who uaw IE6 and have a low screen resolution (i.e. needs a narrow window).

The bugs I mentioned above are those that I couldn’t fix, or that took ages to fix. There are about 30 bugs that I did work out how to fix, but it took considerable time and effort.

How to Upgrade - Stop using IE6!

If you are still using Internet Explorer 6, please be aware that this browser is completely sub-standard and full of bugs! You should upgrade or change to a different browser. More on this further down.

If you want to see some examples of nice and honest techies who hate IE 6, just click on this link to a Google search for the phrase “I hate Internet Explorer 6”.

Here is an acronym between IE6 and Firefox; Imagine that everybody for some reason was wearing a t-shirt from Asda/Wal-Mart that was ugly, ill-fitting impractical and full of holes (that’s IE6..!) But some clever people had figured out that there were great T-shirts available elsewhere at the same price (free, in this case).These T-shirts had no holes, were stylish and had lots of fashionable and useful details and accessories. (That’s Firefox). Get it?

The reason IE 6 has been the leading browser has nothing to do with quality of the product, or consumer choice. It is to do with one thing only; Microsoft bundles it with the Windows operative system and has done it’s darndest to make it tricky to use any other browser. People who are not technically interested will not make the effort to find out whether there is a better alternative. There is nothing complicated about switching browsers.
Browser usage on the Internet, from W3
If you don’t feel brave enough to switch to Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape or Opera, then at least upgrade to Internet Explorer 7!

Although IE7 still isn’t on par with Firefox in terms of quality and functionality it is a big step up from IE6. It uses tabbed browsing which will significantly improves the browsing experience. Quite a few of the bugs (but not all) from version 6 are fixed.

If you have an hour or so to spare, you really should upgrade to Firefox and look at customizing it to your taste. I promise you it’s worth it. It is 50 times nicer to browse the internet in Firefox compared with Internet Explorer 6. It is much more efficient as well. There is an extension to facilitate everything you ever dreamed of doing online, and much more.

Examples of Add-ons for Firefox

Check out my screenshot below which shows that you can organize your bookmarks really conveniently. (My bookmark collection has grown huge since I started it about 2001 – I always backed it up regularly… )

The Web Search Pro toolbar lets you highlight any word on a web page and execute an immediate search for it in any of over a thousand search engines. Saves enormous amounts of time, and unlike most other toolbars it does not spy on your internet usage, or store anything that you do. Thanks ‘Captain Caveman!’

There is no comparison; Firefox is completely superior in every way…

Temporary Inbox (partly visible on my screenshot) lets you use a temporary, instantly generated mailbox that can be used when you want to register for a site and need to submit a valid email address.

The temporary inbox is up and running for a few hours and can be accessed with a single click on a toolbar button. Delivery there is always faster than delivery to my desktop email account, so no waiting for the email to arrive. Also there is no pesky registration or login required for Temporary Inbox.

After a few hours up, the temporary account gets ‘killed’ and any emails sent there do not get delivered. This means that you never have to see any of the promotions, updates or spam email that would otherwise pester you following most registrations. Next time you need to register, you simply click the button and get a new temporary account. Click the logo to get Firefox!

Firefox can be run using less memory than Internet Explorer, so a poor system spec is not a good reason to stick with Internet Explorer either. In addition, Firefox is open-source software.

Nobody gains financially from your usage of it. It is free and will always remain so. Thousands of volounteers all over the world are working on improving it, or develop free extensions that will make your web browsing nicer.

Why support the Microsoft’s undeserved and unfair monopoly in the browser market when there is a much better alternative available that takes five minutes to install as a basic setup? If for some strange reason you do not want Firefox, then please consider one of the other alternatives; Seamokey, Opera, Netscape or Internet Explorer 7..

If you are a Mac user you already know about Safari. I have never used it, (and have not been able to test the site in Safari so apologies for any bugs… ) however I hear it is a great browser.

Go on, what are you waiting for? You know me as an honest person and I am telling you; Ditch Internet Explorer 6 NOW!

No hard feelings if you can’t/won’t do it though - after all, I’ll hardly change the world with one blog post. Millions will still be using it at the end of the year, no doubt. However I wanted to do my part in spreading the good news about alternatives to the useless Internet Explorer 6…

Technorati Tags: ie6, Internet Explorertechnology”,browser

As I am downloading the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica (I told you I am a geek girl!), I am asking myself: How immoral is it to download bittorrents?

I am a Christian and I believe that stealing is wrong. Yet I use bittorrent! I keep meaning not to do it, then I fall for the temptation and end up doing it anyway. I have downloaded a number of music albums, blockbuster films, TV series and the rest. “Lead me not into temptation… ” >Bittorrent is such a temptation to a Christian techie! It is a very cool technology; it lets you get things for free that you would otherwise have to pay for, and there is virtually no chance of getting caught…. (How horrible that last bit sounded!)

But is it really stealing? In the legal sense of the word; where exactly is the crime being committed? I am in the UK, downloading an American film via a tracker at a bittorrent site in Sweden. The seeders are all over the world. Who is the criminal? Me, the seeders, the bittorrent site, or all of us? Or none?

Perhaps bittorrent or an equivalent technology will be perfectly legal in ten years time after a change in copyright laws. (There is plenty of talk about a potential fundamental change to copyright laws because of bittorrent usage) Where would such a change leave my actions today, 2007?

Are you a Christian or a person with a strong sense of personal morality? Do you know how to use bittorrent but refrain from doing so because of the shady legal situation? Or are you happily downloading without worrying about the legal/moral aspects?

(Wow, I am downloading ‘BSG’ at 420kb/s!)

Ought I stop using BT?

Technorati Tags: manhood, bittorrent,
old-fashioned,conservative”,
gentleman,
antifeminism

Hi! Please can you help? This site is new and I have not been able to test it properly, as I only have one PC at home.
I have only tested in a fairly high resolution in IE7, Opera 9 and Firefox. How does it look in Internet Explorer 6? What about Safari?

I would really appreciate your feedback on style, bugs, layout etc! Are the side-bars (columns to the right and left) displaying properly? I am having some problems with Javascript on my machine and the column height is calculated by Javascript. If you see anything that looks wrong on the site, please let me know.. Alternatively if you think the theme is nice, please tell me !
Thanks for stopping by!”
Cordelia