Socialization and aggregation of the web

The web has always been a place for people to share ideas and post their views and comments, but it hasn’t always been easy. Today, the web has become much friendlier, with the popularity of such sites as MySpace and Wikipedia. The software behind these types of sites makes contributing, and taking part, in the online community easy and more personal for users. Even novices are finding their way into the social community of the new web.

Socialization on the web takes place through the many ways users can build communities if friends and family who share the same interests or views: sharing of pictures and videos, conversations through comments, and online ‘presence’ streams through such sites as Jaiku or Twitter.

Over the next few days, I’m going to cover some of the sites and tools that I find fun, useful, or just plain interesting. But before we get too far, an important tool to understand is content syndication or RSS Feeds, and a general defining of the term “Web 2.0″

Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many

Web 1.0                     Web 2.0
Britannica Online           Wikipedia
personal websites           blogging
publishing                  participation
directories                 tagging
stickiness                  syndication

It means distributing your resources onto the internet network. Think of it as the Internet Operating System. Almost everything you use your computer for now will done online, without software installed on your computer. And many tasks you don’t use your computer for can be done more efficiently online.

Web 2.0 Meme map from “What is Web 2.0” by O’Reilly

In the 1.0 model, you bookmarked a web site you found interesting, and maybe you remembered later to return to it and check for new content. Today, syndication is major part of almost all regularly updated sites. Syndication is accomplished through RSS Feeds.
The technical acronym for RSS is “Really Simple Syndication”, it was created to syndicate news, and be a means to share content on the web. A great (simple) explanation of RSS can be found at “How to Explain RSS the Oprah Way”

So, to make RSS much easier to understand, we’ll say RSS stands for: I’m “Ready for Some Stories”. It is a way online for you to get a quick list of the latest story headlines from all your favorite sites all in one place.
Suppose you have 50 sites that you like to visit regularly. Going to visit each site everyday could take you hours. With RSS, you can “subscribe” to a the site, and get “fed” all the new headlines from all of these 50 sites in one list, and see what’s going on in minutes instead of hours.

That one place where your RSS list is created is called an RSS Reader, and it gathers all the headlines from all the sites you have subscribed to.

To “subscribe” to a site’s RSS feed simply means that you are telling that site, “Yes please. Send me your story headlines.” It’s like subscribing to a magazine or newsletter. Instead of getting a magazine or email, you will just get a list of headlines sent to your RSS reader. If the headline looks interesting to you, all you have to do is click on the headline and you’ll be sent to the whole story.

In order to subscribe to a site’s RSS, all you have to do is click on an RSS symbol like one of those shown in the diagram above, or a text link of the words “Subscribe to our RSS feed”.

If you’d like your RSS list to be accessible from any computer or mobile device you may have like a PDA, laptop, or cell phone, some popular RSS readers include

MyYahoo
MyMSN
MyAOL
Google Reader
Bloglines
NetVibes

And many popular email programs have the ability the add RSS feeds, as well. Then, when you check your email, you’ll get your subscription feeds as well.

Another use of RSS feeds is for you to consolidate all of your own online presence streams, comments, and networks into one, such as importing all of your blog posts, Jaiku postings, photos, videos, music, and friends onto one consolidated site such Virb, Zude, or PageFlakes. (we’ll cover these later in the week…)

Feel free to add to the conversation with your comments or questions. And if you have a favorite social or aggregate site we don’t mention, please share it with us!