This appeared in the December 2008 issue of Campus Firewatch along with How the Net Gen Learns

SPECIAL NOTE: Oddly enough, this is the most viewed and downloaded page on my website and I'm really curious as to who is using it! Please drop me a note and let me know...thanks! Ed Comeau, publisher and author.

Web 2.0 Terminology

Web 2.0 The term "Web 2.0" describes the changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web culture communities and hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. The term became notable after the first O'Reilly Media Web 2.0 conference in 2004. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but rather to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web. (from Wikipedia)

Basically, the difference between the “old” Internet and Web 2.0 is that instead of just clicking and reading, people can now create and upload content.  Control of the content on the Internet has shifted to the consumer who is now a producer as well as a consumer as exemplified by the term “prosumer” which is a contraction of “producer” and “consumer” (first coined in the book Future Shock by Alvin Toffler in 1979).  An excellent example of this is Wikipedia (see below) which has millions of articles, all written by people on the Internet contributing collaboratively.

Collaboration is the key to much of the content being developed on the Web and there is a wealth of tools available.  Wikipedia, YouTube, Digg, Facebook and Twitter are just a few examples.  With the advent of the mobile platform, people can now create, upload and view content from their cell phones.

There are a large number of terms and acronyms being used today in relation to the Internet and communications.  The following is a description of some of the more common ones that you may encounter.  What is important to remember is that to today’s Net Gen, much of what seems miraculous to the older, Baby Boomer generation, is every-day, mainstream technology to them.  Just as we know accept television as a mainstream medium, so does today’s generation accept YouTube, instant messaging, blogging and a host of other activities.

A blog (a contraction of the term "Web log") is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with
regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.  Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (artlog), photographs (photoblog), sketches (sketchblog), videos (vlog), music (MP3 blog), audio (podcasting), which are part of a wider network of social media. Micro-blogging is another type of blogging, one which consists of blogs with very short posts. As of December 2007, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 112 million blogs.  With the advent of video blogging, the word blog has taken on an even looser meaning — that of any bit of media wherein the subject expresses his opinion or simply talks about something. (from Wikipedia)

Digg is a website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories. Voting stories up and down is the site's cornerstone function, respectively called digging and burying. Many stories get submitted every day, but only the most Dugg stories appear on the front page.  Digg's popularity has prompted the creation of other social networking sites with story submission and voting systems.  (from Wikipedia)

Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email or eMail, is any method of creating, transmitting, or storing primarily text-based human communications with digital communications systems. Historically, a variety of electronic mail system designs evolved that were often incompatible or not interoperable. With the proliferation of the Internet since the early 1980s, however, the standardization efforts of Internet architects succeeded in promulgating a single standard based on the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published as Internet Standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982.

Modern e-mail systems are based on a store-and-forward model in which e-mail computer server systems, accept, forward, or store messages on behalf of users, who only connect to the e-mail infrastructure with their personal computer or other network-enabled device for the duration of message transmission or retrieval to or from their designated server. Rarely is e-mail transmitted directly from one user's device to another's.

While, originally, e-mail consisted only of text messages composed in the ASCII character set, virtually any media format can be sent today, including attachments of audio and video clips. (from Wikipedia)

When looking at the college-age demographic, it is important to keep in mind that email is not as widely used for communication as other methods such as SMS and IM.  One comment about email from college students is that “it is for old people.”  (Author)

Facebook (from the Facebook corporate page) was founded in February 2004 and is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people's real-world social connections.

• More than 130 million active users
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is those 25 years old and older
• Average user has 100 friends on the site
• 2.6 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day (worldwide)
• More than 13 million users update their statuses at least once each day
• More than 2.5 million users become fans of Pages each day

Folksonomy (also known as collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging) is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content. Folksonomy describes the bottom-up classification systems that emerge from social tagging.  In contrast to traditional subject indexing, metadata is generated not only by experts but also by creators and consumers of the content. Usually, freely chosen keywords are used instead of a controlled vocabulary.  Folksonomy (from folk + taxonomy) is a user-generated taxonomy.

Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications including social bookmarking and annotating photographs. Tagging, which is characteristic of Web 2.0 services, allows non-expert users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.(from Wikipedia)

Instant messaging (IM) or chat is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. The text is conveyed via devices connected over a network such as the Internet.  Instant messaging (IM) are technologies that create the possibility of real-time text-based communication between two or more participants over the internet or some form of internal network/intranet. It is important to understand that what separates chat and instant messaging from technologies such as e-mail is the perceived synchronicity of the communication by the user - Chat happens in real-time before your eyes. Some systems allow the sending of messages to people not currently logged on (offline messages), thus removing much of the difference between Instant Messaging and e-mail. (from Wikipedia).

A number of sites offer the ability to instant messaging, such as AOL’s Instant Message (AIM), Yahoo Messenger, Google Chat and others.  One of the problems is a lack of inter-communication between the different platforms, but some (such as Google Chat and AIM) have created bridges between the platforms to allow for interoperability. (Author)

Orkut is a social networking service which is run by Google and named after its creator, an employee of Google - Orkut Büyükkökten. The service states that it was designed to help users meet new friends and maintain existing relationships. Orkut is similar to other networking sites. (from Wikipedia). 

According to some sites, Orkut is one of the most widely-used social networking sites outside of the United States. (Author)

Podcast  A podcast is a series of audio or video digital-media files which is distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players and personal computers. Though the same content may also be made available by direct download or streaming, a podcast is distinguished from other digital-media formats by its ability to be syndicated, subscribed to, and downloaded automatically when new content is added.
Like the term broadcast, podcast can refer either to the series of content itself or to the method by which it is syndicated; the latter is also called podcasting. The host or author of a podcast is often called a podcaster. (from Wikipedia)

Ed Comeau, the publisher of Campus Firewatch, hosts and produces a podcast called Campus Firewatch Radio on www.firehouse.com as well as Fire Marshal’s Corner. (Author)

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.  An RSS document (which is called a "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an "RSS reader", "feed reader", or "aggregator", which can be web-based or desktop-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. (from Wikipedia)

Social marketing is the systematic application of marketing along with other concepts and techniques to achieve specific behavioral goals for a social good. Social marketing can be applied to promote, for example, merit goods, make the society avoid demerit goods and thus to promote that considers society's well being as a whole. This may include asking people not to smoke in public areas, for example, ask them to use seat belts, prompting to make them follow speed limits.  Although 'social marketing' is sometimes seen only as using standard commercial marketing practices to achieve non-commercial goals, this is an over-simplification.  The primary aim of 'social marketing' is 'social good', while in 'commercial marketing' the aim is primarily 'financial'. This does not mean that commercial marketers can not contribute to achievement of social good.  (from Wikipedia)

Social media are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings. The term most often refers to activities that integrate technology, telecommunications and social interaction, and the construction of words, pictures, videos and audio. This interaction, and the manner in which information is presented, depends on the varied perspectives and "building" of shared meaning among communities, as people share their stories and experiences. Businesses also refer to social media as user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated media (CGM). (from Wikipedia)

SMS or text messaging  Short Messaging Service (SMS) is the communications protocol that allows for short text messages, usually 160 characters or less, to be sent between mobile/cellular telephones.  Even though SMS is the communications protocol, the acronym has become synonymous with text messaging.  It is also possible to send and receive text messages on a computer by using the email client to send a message to a portable device.  However, Google just released an application that allows for real-time chat between a computer and a mobile device via the SMS platform.  (from Wikipedia)

Social Network Service (SNS) focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. Most social network services are web based and provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail and instant messaging services.

Social networking has created new ways to communicate and share information. Social networking websites are being used regularly by millions of people, and it now seems that social networking will be an enduring part of everyday life. The main types of social networking services are those which contain directories of some categories (such as former classmates), means to connect with friends (usually with self-description pages), and recommender systems linked to trust. Popular methods now combine many of these, with MySpace and Facebook being the most widely used in North America; Nexopia (mostly in Canada); Bebo, Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Tagged, Xing; and Skyrock in parts of Europe; Orkut and Hi5 in South America and Central America; and Friendster, Orkut, Xiaonei and Cyworld in Asia and the Pacific Islands. (From Wikipedia)

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service, that allows its users to send and read other users' updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.  Updates are displayed on the user's profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone being the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, SMS, RSS, email or through an application such as Tweetie, TwitterFon, Twitterrific, Feedalizr or Facebook. (from Wikipedia)

A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.   Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis.  Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and Knowledge Management systems. (from Wikipedia)

Wikipedia is a free, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki (a technology for creating collaborative websites) and encyclopedia. Wikipedia's 11 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone who can access the Wikipedia website. Launched in January 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, it is currently the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet. (from Wikipedia)

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees.  In November 2006, YouTube was bought by Google Inc. for 1.65 billion dollars, and is now operated as a subsidiary of Google. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as video blogging and short original videos. Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by members of the public, although media organizations including CBS and the BBC offer some of their material via the site. (from Wikipedia).

The following statistics regarding YouTube were taken from research conducted by Dr. Michael Wesch at Kansas State University http://mediatedcultures.net/ksudigg/?p=163.

• Total videos uploaded as of March 17th 2008: 78.3 Million
• Videos uploaded per day: over 150,000
• A wildcard search on YouTube (”*”) has given us the following totals (which approximates the total number of videos on YouTube)
  January 28th 2008: 70 million
  March 13th 2008: 77.4 million
  March 17th 2008: 78.3 million
  These numbers suggest that there are now between 150,000 to over 200,000 videos published every day on YouTube.