Web 2.0

Publishing

Blogs:

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about? At its most basic, a blog is just a personal home page in diary format. But as Rich Skrenta notes, the chronological organization of a blog “seems like a trivial difference, but it drives an entirely different delivery, advertising and value chain.”

Collaboration:

Wikis:

A wiki is software that allows users to create, edit, and link web pages easily. Wikis are often used to create collaborativewebsites and to power community websites. These wiki websites are often also referred to as wikis; for example, Wikipedia is one of the best known wikis.^[1] Wikis are being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets and for Knowledge Management. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as “the simplest online database that could possibly work”.^[2]

From the Wikipedia page defining wikis.

• Another example for both collaborating and publishing is Google Docs

Networking:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Twitter

Community:

Social tools for framing commutieis, all of these elements push towards mediated communties for publishing, collaborating and sharing, and this is the very transition to educational uses we can begin to examine in more detail:

• Edublogs
• UMW Blogs
• Jon Beasley-Murray’s Wikipedia Project