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.

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.

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.

Step 2: Upload a minimal HTML page provided by Google Maps to your web server. This URL shows you what I got from Google Maps.

Step 3: Study this tutorial: Google Maps EZ — Get Started.

Step 4: Follow the given examples in the tutorial and change some code to suit your needs.

So, building a location-based web service using Google Maps is not so difficult as you might expect. What you need is a good idea. This Wiki Web, Map Projects - GoogleMapki, does a good job in collecting information about what people are doing with Google Maps. It also demonstrates the usefulness of Wikis.

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.”

Example 2: Andale: Powerful Solutions for Online Sellers. “It produces reports of the hottest selling products on eBay, using eBay’s API to extract the data, to help sellers identify and price their products.”

Example 3: Flickr Related Tag Browser. “It takes user-inputted tag and generates an alternative interface to browsing pictures on Flickr.”

These are what I get after I read this article: Web 2.0: The Power Behind the Hype, by Jared M. Spool, on User Interface 10 Conference, October 10-13, 2005, Cambridge, MA, US.

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.

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.

Web 2.0 refers to technologies that allow data to become independent of the person who produced it or the site it originated on. It deals with how information can be broken up into units that flow freely from one site to another, often in ways the producer did not foresee or intend.

The Web 2.0 paradigm allows net users to pull information from a variety of sites simultaneously and deliver it on their own site to achieve new purposes.

But it is not a world of stealing others’ work or pirating information for one’s own gain. Instead, Web 2.0 is a product of the open-source, sharing notions the internet was founded on, and makes data more connected. This allows new information and business opportunities to be built upon the shoulders of the information that came before.

Web 2.0 lets data act as its own entity, which can be changed, altered or remixed by anyone for any specific purpose. When data is an entity, the net moves from a collection of websites to a true web of sites that can interact and process information collectively.

Linux: the open source operating system that runs on many types of computing machine.

Apache Web server: the most popular Web server software that runs on most operating systems.

MySQL: the open source relational database management system (RDBMS).

Perl / PHP / Python. These are dynamic scripting languages that can work with information available at runtime.

The various Web applications that I installed in my domain are using LAMP. According to IEEE Computer Magazine September 2005 issue, there is a growing commercial adoption of LAMP for large Web applications. ActiveGrid is one of them.

ActiveGrid, the Enterprise LAMP company, provides enterprise features built on the proven LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) software infrastructure stack. ActiveGrid’s Enterprise LAMP helps enterprises rapidly create Web 2.0 applications with rich user interfaces that weave together existing enterprise systems into new services and applications. ActiveGrid Enterprise LAMP applications can be flexibly deployed on grids of commodity machines or at virtually any ISP.

Do you know how to build such an interactive and Web-based tool for demonstrating and visualizing HTML? Such a cool tool can be used as an aids to teaching junior students the concept and basic elements of HTML. It is also a good application example in teaching senior students about recent advances in Web-based technologies.

Your Internet application sends data to the HTTP-Tunnel Client, which in turn tunnels the data over HTTP (port 80) to the HTTP-Tunnel servers. The servers then send the data to the intended destination and forward the responses back to the HTTP-Tunnel client. This forwarding technique effectively bypasses firewalls, (or for users who do not have a firewall, but want secure, monitor free usage), permitting the user to successfully use thier favorite application.

So, you now know that HTTP sometimes is not real HTTP. It could be a black tunnel for people to transmit anything they like.

Members download and install a small program onto their computers. Those computers, when idel, will request data from the server of World Community Grid, then do some computations on this data, and then send the computation results back to the server. They will ask the server for a new set of data to perform another cycle of work.

As of 3 October 2005, there are 92,928 members around the world that contributed 149,689 computing devices. That scale of contributions is equivalent to around 17,234 years of computation if performed by a single computing machine. There are 194 members from Hong Kong that contributes 381 devices. According to this press release:

World Community Grid Gains Momentum in Hong Kong (20 Sep 2005)

The University of Hong Kong is the first Asia-Pacific academic institution to join World Community Grid.

Tim O’Reilly said this article is an attempt to clarify just what we mean by Web 2.0. However, I find it very informative and insightful. I particularly like it relates Web 2.0 to design patterns, lightweight programming models, and software engineering. Here is the outline of the article, which is attractive enough for me to have a go on it.

1. The Web As Platform
2. Harnessing Collective Intelligence
3. Data is the Next Intel Inside
4. End of Software Release Cycle
5. Lightweight Programming Models
6. Software Above the Level of a Single Device
7. Rich user Experiences

Google Web API — With it you can query billions of web pages directly from your own programs.

Google Maps API — With it you can develop location-based services for your users.

Google AdWords API — With it you can write computer programs that interact directly with the Google AdWords server. The API is mainly for advertisers to build application that help managing their AdWord accounts.

Google Desktop API — With it you can develop your own plug-ins for Google Desktop Search.

I am interested to know more about how people use these Google APIs and what applications have been built.

It is the second annual Web 2.0 Conference. It will focus on the services, applications, and businesses models that are reshaping the Internet. It will address how innovative new web technologies redefine markets and create new opportunities for media and entertainment, communications and mobile, and will touch the concept of the web OS. I like this year’s theme–Revving The Web–and the following quotes that are shown in the website.

“The Web is a fundamental shift in power toward the bottom, toward the people as they organize themselves, and away from a small group of people who want to impose a policy top-down.” –Pierre Omidyar

“Web 1.0 was making the Internet for people, Web 2.0 is making the Internet better for computers.” –Jeff Bezos