I review what I have read and written about Web 2.0. The following three points summarize my best understanding.

1. The Web now is not simply a document delivery system. It becomes an application platform. It can be your programmable oyster through public API’s and web services.
2. With technologies that enable data to become independent of the website it originated on, content now can move beyond websites, can be altered, filtered or remixed by anyone for any specific purpose.
3. The Web now encourages more and richer user participation. Users control how data is categorized and manipulated. The Web now gives people more flexibility to find, organize, share and create information in a socially-networked fashion.

The following are two recently hot weblogs posts about reviews on Web 2.0 applications of 2005.

• Top 10 Innovative Web 2.0 Applications of 2005 (By: Mark Millerton)
• The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005

If you want a gentle introduction on what Web 2.0 is, I recommend this: What is Web 2.0? By Andy Budd of Clearleft Ltd.

I learned this list of magazines from an international survey of readers about software. In making this list of hyperlinks for furture reference, I searched the web by entering the names of these 16 magazines, one by one, for Google Search. It took me very short time (around 20 minutes) to complete the task, since all the first entries in those 16 searches brought me to the right places.

(01) Application Development Trends: News and articles on application development trends, intended for software developers for enterprise environments.

(02) Better Software Magazine: Better Software Magazine helps software managers, testers and QA staff develop and deliver better software.

(03) C/C++ Users Journal: A great C/C++ journal for the intermediate to advanced user. (more…)

A US technology company called Sonic Foundry, Inc developed a product called Mediasite. Mediasite is a professional rich media publishing system that enables automated recording, managing and viewing of rich media content over the Web or across the network. The company recently unveiled an online directory (via mediasite.com) of public presentations and lectures made with Sonic Foundry’s Mediasite system.

Mediasite.com is an open-access resource site that brings together expert presentations and lectures created with Mediasite system. Via it you have a free access to a steadily growing database of online technical content created by hundreds of experts. At the moment of writing this post, there are totally 6984 presentations listed on the site.

The following are direct links to two public lecturers that I enjoyed via this site: Looking Forward: Computing & Communications in the 21st Century , Distance Education Overview.

BOINC, Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing, is an open-source software platform that enables distributed computing using volunteered computing resources. You can donate yours after you download and run BOINC client software in your machine. On the opposite side, you can request donation of computing resources by create a BOINC-based computing project. You just need a single Linux server and install the BOINC server software to make use of the computing power equivalent to a cluster with tens of thousands of CPUs for your computationally-intensive tasks.

Scientific research projects that seek volunteered computing resources from participants include those that study climate change, search for gravitational signals emitted by pulsars, look for radio evidence of extraterrestrial life, and help researchers investigate and develop cures for human diseases. IBM’s World Community Grid launched a BOINC-based project in November 2005. (I mentioned World Community Grid in this post.)

I learn BOINC via Steve’s post on his weblog OnHongKongIsle. My thanks.