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.

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.

Step 1: Sign up for a Google Maps API key via this URL.

The Google Maps API lets developers embed Google Maps in their own web pages with JavaScript. You can add overlays to the map (including markers and polylines) and display shadowed “info windows”.

A single Maps API key is valid for a single “directory” on your web server, so if you sign up for the URL http://www.mygooglemapssite.com/mysite, the key you get will be good for all URLs in the http://www.mygooglemapssite.com/mysite/ directory.

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Content moves beyond websites. Interaction is no longer just straight HTML. Users control how data is categorized and manipulated. RSS is used as an Interface. These are the characteristics of the current trend in the Web development. What I am excited about is, with the high popularity of RSS, the increasing availability of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the good applications of Folksonomies and Social Networking, it is possible to create useful web applications very fast and relatively inexpensively.

Example 1: Marumushi Newsmap. “It reads the headlines from Google News and displays topics to explore patterns in how stories are emphasized in the media.” (more…)

Service-Oriented Architecture : A Field Guide to Integrating XML and Web Services by Thomas Erl, Prentice Hall, 2004.

This is a highly-recommended book on Web services and service-oriented architecture. It can help you think differently about XML. It provides you with a step-by-step guide for succeeding with Web services. It is about software engineering with new technologies and new ways of thinking.

I have put it in my library, and will spare some time to have a go on it. Here is the website of the book: SOABooks.com, which supplements the book with a variety of resources, including a complete glossary, examples, articles, and current industry information.

What do you think about Web 2.0? The following is so far my favorite explanation on what Web 2.0 is all about, which comes from Robin Good’s recent article–Web 2.0 Examples: A Mini-Guide–dated October 6, 2005.

The article also gave six great examples of Websites that were built using this Web 2.0 approach. I also learn from it a Dutch company BackBase which has been doing a wonderful job on Web 2.0 and rich Internet applications.

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