3.19  Wrap-Up

In this chapter, you learned how Web 2.0 embraces an architecture of participation, encouraging user interaction and community contributions. User-generated content is the key to success for many leading Web 2.0 companies. Harnessing collective intelligence can result in smart ideas. Collaborative filtering lets users promote valuable content, and flag offensive or inappropriate material. The wisdom of crowds suggests that a large diverse group of people can be smarter than a small group of specialists.

We presented several popular Web 2.0 business models. You learned how you, the user, are deciding which news and information outlets you trust, enabling popular blogs and social media networks to compete with traditional media powerhouses. People are using social networks to interact and network, personally and professionally. We discussed popular social bookmarking sites that let you share your favorite websites, blogs, and articles with other users.

You learned about the Long Tail economic model and how Web 2.0 Internet businesses are increasing exposure for lesser-known products in a way that traditional businesses cannot. Web 2.0 companies are monetizing their content with advertising, affiliate programs and more.

We discussed how the explosion of content combined with people’s increasing demands on time has led to an attention economy, increasing the importance of search engines used to find content online. SEO, link building and SEM can help you maximize your website’s findability and improve search engine results. Many Web 2.0 sites enable discovery, pointing you to valuable new content that you might not have otherwise sought. Tagging and folksonomies help you locate content on the web more effectively, especially content that computers have a hard time identifying, such as photos and videos. Search engines are using localization to provide you with geographically relevant content.

You learned how Software as a Service (SaaS) applications offer companies (and users) many benefits, including fewer demands on internal IT departments, increased accessibility for out-of-the-office use, an easy way to maintain software across a diversity of platforms on a large scale and more. Rich Internet Applications offer responsiveness, “rich” features and functionality similar to desktop applications. Web services are used to create feature-rich mashup applications, combining content or functionality from existing web services, websites and RSS feeds. Many people believe that the Semantic Web—the “web of meaning”—will be the next generation of the web, enabling exciting new kinds of applications.

This chapter concludes our introduction to computers, the Internet, browsers and Web 2.0. The remainder of the book is devoted to building web applications—you’ll learn how to program the client side and the server side, including interacting with databases. We’ll focus on building Ajax-enabled Rich Internet Applications. We begin in Chapter 4by discussing how to use XHTML (the Extensible HyperText Markup Language) to create web pages to be rendered by web browsers. You'll use XHTML to incorporate images into your web pages, add internal linking for page navigation, create forms for collecting information from a user, create tables and more.