What is Web 2.0?
Sunday, October 5, 2008

The Internet is changing. Well, it has changed, and it’s still changing. The global structure and view of the Internet is being transmogrified.
The term used for this morph is Web 2.0, a phrase coined by Dell Doherty and Tim O’Rielly at a conference back in 2004. O’Rielly is a publisher of tech-centric books with quaint woodcarvings of animals on them. He’s also a big supporter of free software and the open source movement.
Web 2.0 has many definitions, but basically it means that users help to create the content. The 2.0 Internet is a global project contributed to by millions of people every day who upload blogs, wikis, photographs, classified ads, household items for sale, news, opinions, videos. It’s created by people who join cyber communities like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, and Cyworld. It’s expanded by people who vote on news, collect and create RSS news feeds, contribute to folksonomy -- collaborative tagging and annotation of content with services like Delicious, Digg, and Shoutwire.
Web 2.0 isn’t just a database that users access. It’s a database that is created by being used. Every link, every shared resource, every online interactive service contributes to the growth of Web 2.0.
To compare it to what is retroactively called Web 1.0 – let’s just say the old web was static. Web developers created content and visitors viewed it. Go. Read. Enjoy. Leave. Everything was a download, a local cache. In the new world of Web 2.0, upload is king. Sharing creates content. The Internet is the mushroom and we are its fertilizer.
EBay and Craigslist are Web 2.0 sites. I love Craigslist. I recently had a garage sale without ever sitting in my driveway. I took pictures of all my stuff and posted it. It was gone in a blink. I sold a motorcycle in the time it took me to use the bathroom. I sold a bicycle while pouring a glass of milk. A lot I gave away. I gave away a broken color laser printer with new toner cartridges in it in less than 3 minutes. I gave away 100 muskrat traps abandoned at my mini-storage in Nevada in about 10 minutes without leaving Benicia.
I run a website, three blogs, and a wiki, and I’m small fry. Many have more. I pay to use SurveyMonkey, QuizStar, and Lynda.com. I also have an avatar on Second Life, a virtual world where I can fly and shop at Target. I’m Buckley Skytower and I live on ISTE Island where I converse with educators about classroom technology. I have a dozen Youtube videos and hundreds of photos on Google’s Picasa.
Here are some lesser-known Web 2.0 sites worth visiting if you haven’t yet, and you can’t afford to go outside:
4teachers.org – 15 interactive educational services including lesson-plan builders, teacher and student web-making apps, a magnificent and free RUBRIC creator. No teacher should be without one.
Second Life – which I mentioned. It’s a metaverse where you create a person, build a house, join a community, and meet people around the world. You can buy and sell virtual items, sometimes for real money. They recently had their first virtual-real-estate millionaire. There are alternate metaverses at activeworlds.com and there.com
Illuminate.com & Vyew.com – free three-person conference rooms. You can talk and view each other, share a white board, computer screens and files. You can even let someone take control of your computer – for example if you have a tech problem and a friend in Wisconsin can fix it. You pass him your mouse and sit back while he troubleshoots and talks you through it.
Voicethread.com – add verbal captions to your photos and tell a story.
Fictionpress.com lets writers share their stories with the world – and everyone can comment, while you comment on theirs.
iTunes University – watch free college lectures and educational videos on anything.
Proboards.com – create a free online discussion board that you can restrict to chosen members or open to the world.
PBWiki.com – make a wiki (i.e. Wikipedia) of your own and invite your friends to join in. It’s basically your own website. Mine is tubenicia.pbwiki.com. You create the topics and the content and everyone’s an editor, if you wish.
Screen-o-matic.com – let’s you capture screen activity along with your voice, turn it into a movie, and share it with the world.
Spore.com – got kids? What to keep them busy for about a year? Buy them Spore and stand aside. They will create a guide a creature of their design through five stages of evolution. Watch them learn survival skills while playing.
Zoho.com – don’t want to buy Microsoft Office? Want a free word processor, presentation and spreadsheet maker, email, wiki, planner, chat, and much, much more? What are you waiting for? Go Zoho.
Openoffice.org – free office suite. Is compatible with Microsoft Office.
Google Docs – free office apps. Is compatible with Microsoft Office.
Last, when you’re ready to turn your computer into Internet TV, check out miro.com

A house of cards on a hill of beans
Sunday, September 28, 2008



Deregulation. That’s it, to my thinking. That’s at the core of the problem with our flattened, crushed, stomped-out economy. Since Reaganomics, the push of business against government has been to deregulate. Government was made out as the bad guy, the uptight bully, strangling businesses with red tape and unnecessary restrictions on the free market, thwarting hard working industries from making a good honest buck.
Once the drive to deregulate began, it hit every sector: savings and loan, telecommunication, import export, oil and energy, banking, real estate, insurance. They fell like dominos. Now we’re a trillion dollars further in debt and the guys who did this are looking to the taxpayers to bail them out. I’m against it.
I know we’re trapped it seems. Here’s a grim analogy: imagine all the bridges in the Bay Area were privately owned by one company, that was run by a spendthrift who squandered all his money at the race track. Then to recoup it, he doubled all the bridge tolls. First we gave him the money to waste, now he wants double from us to restore his failed bridge business. If we refuse to pay, he shuts down all the bridges and goes out of business. Now we’re trapped. We can’t get around. Everyone suffers. It’s a hostage situation.
The government is supposed to protect us from enemies -- not just crazy terrorists with C4 in their vests, but from greedy overlords. Greed is our greatest enemy, and it is rampant in this country. It is the government’s job to protect the people, not to fleece the people to bail out the same idiots who created this mess in the first place.
I’m no friend of the banking industry, as you well know if you read this column when it’s not funny. I’ve taken heat for it by a small few, been accused of exaggerating the skullduggery. It would be hard to exaggerate the current economic situation.
I’m against our money being controlled by anyone other than us and our public government representatives who are answerable to American citizens and must do their work in public with cameras and microphones and reporters and overseers and vocal critics.
I’m against private think tanks and councils and commissions and foundations who whisper and keep secrets. I’m against energy commissions run by energy company CEOs and energy lobbyists. I’m against CEOs being appointed to head public offices assigned the tasks of overseeing the CEOs’ former employers. It’s the fox guarding the hen house.
I’m against our banks being run by appointees who can plan in private. I’m against fractional reserve banking – eg loaning more money than you have on reserve – eg printing money out of thin air -- because it gets abused and abused and abused. Banks print money, loan it to other banks, who can then print more money, loan it to others banks, and so on to the cupola of a house of cards.
The first people to get their hands on that Monopoly money get to spend it in an un-inflated market. By the time those dollars trickle down to the Average Joes they have inflated the market and are worth pennies on the dollar.
I’m angry as the rest of us at these shady real estate firms who gave risky loans to people made poor by other shady business dealings, then sold the debts to other shady businesses and everybody won until now, when everybody loses. Well, not everybody. The money that has been sucked out of our economy over the last few decades didn’t cease to exist. It’s stuffed away in a few dozen deep pockets somewhere and there’s a whole lot of laughing going on in a handful of mahogany-lined lounges and tropical retreats.
I’m sick and wary of short sellers because it’s easier to destroy a company than it is to make it thrive. There’s real money to be made in running a shorted company into the ground.
I’m against the idea of privatizing everything under the sun, including the sun. The are powerful efforts afoot to privatize prisons, water, war, highways, schools, retirement funds, seeds, disaster relief, voting, democracy and the American way.
The sick irony is that those who loathe even the hint of socialism are all in favor of the American people as a group buying up all the failed banks, insurance companies, and real estate houses in the country. If this deal goes through America will be a socialist country. We, the people, through bad advice and failed leadership, will own everything that can’t make a profit.
Imagine a basketball game or a football game without referees: no one there to watch for foul plays, to blow the whistles, throw the flags, levy the penalties. That’s the way our business model has been working in America for too long. The government has been firing the referees, blurring the lenses, cancelling the instant replays, denying access to the locker rooms, and driving all the players into forced secrecy through contracts of non-disclosure, and now they’re tripling the price of tickets.