Floodlights by the Disco Biscuits
[audio:http://www.archive.org/download/db2006-05-26.early-dpa4027.flac16/db2006-05-26early-dpa4027d1t02_64kb.mp3]
Word Source (word.sc) is an online dictionary which, unlike other dictionaries, is advertisement free. It is also pretty simple to manipulate the url (word.sc/[insert word]). Users can upload photos, rate words, all sorts of useless things.
Seventy-Four by Quagmyre
[audio:http://www.quagmyre.ca/music/seventyFour.mp3]
As the internet gets more advanced, it seems to become easier to get content from more websites faster. Instead of going to each individual site, I just check its RSS feed. While this does make things easier, it also disconnects me from a website I enjoyed. I was thinking about this when I was grabbing a bunch of podcasts from NPR. Instead of listening to the radio to listen to these shows, I can just listen to them out of context. That context provides some interesting additions, which add to the original show.
Crossroads, by moe. with Sam Bush and Trey Anastasio
[audio:http://ia310130.us.archive.org/1/items/moe2005-02-10.DPA4021s-splt.v3.flac16/moe2005-02-10d2t01_64kb.mp3]
This whole show is incredible, if you’re interested, archive has it.
So if you look around my blog today, you’ll notice some changes. I’ve gone and fully embraced Web 2.0.
What is Web 2.0? Well, thats not exactly easy to say, but by the end of this entry, I’ll have covered the concept.
I’ll detail the recent changes, in the order they appear on my sidebar.
The first is the Links block. These links come from del.icio.us, which is a social bookmarking site. Yes, I know, that phrase alone means practically nothing. The idea behind the site is that as you browse the internet, you can bookmark sites with del.icio.us, and these sites will be added to your del.icio.us account, where you can tag them based on the content of the site. These bookmarks are shared with the rest of the community, and allows you to see what most people are interested in at any given point. It can also help you find new websites you may be interested in based on simillar tags.
Next is my calendar from 30 Boxes. 30 Boxes is a beautiful web calendar, which you can share with friends who use the service. So when you view your calendar online, you can not only view what you are doing, but you can see the events your friends have added as well. And, you can syndicate your calendar like I have done, so it will display upcoming events within another webpage.
Now, the PagCam isn’t really Web 2.0. At the moment, it isn’t even Web 1.0…because it isn’t working. I’m still not sure why, but I honestly haven’t even tried to find out. But what is worth noting is that I’ve increased the size…so now you know for sure that its broken…whatever.
Moving on, we come to Last.fm, which is a service I love more and more everyday. With Last.fm, you install a plugin to your music player, and it will upload the details to their website, which aggregates and organizes what you’ve listened to into easy to read stats. It will also share these stats with other Last.fm users, and recommend artists and songs which you may enjoy, based on other users interests. This is a service that any music fan would appreciate. I’m displaying a list of the ten artists who I listened to most in the previous week.
Then there is of course Flickr. Hopefully, most people know about this service by now, but in case you don’t, Flickr allows you to upload and share photos. And like del.icio.us, you can tag your photos, so they are searchable by the community.
And the last change, which you will probably not notice is the link to Performancing at the bottom of the page. Performancing a plugin for firefox which allows you to write blog entries from a seperate window within your browser. I’m writing this entry from within Performancing right now, and I love it. And if you add a simple piece of code to your blog, you can get stats from performancing. It even integrates with del.icio.us, so you can add and tag bookmarks.
Now, I’ve used most of these services for a little while now (with the exceptions of del.icio.us and Performancing), but I’ve always kept them to their own sites, and never really integrated them together like I have here. And I like it. I like it a lot.
Firefox has extensions for most of these services, which make them incredibly easy to access. Some industrious coders have tried to integrate these extensions into the browser itself, and released Flock. In my opinion, Flock doesn’t compare to Firefox with all the correct extensions, but it may be right for some people.
So I don’t think I’ve answered what Web 2.0 is yet.
The term was coined by O’Reily (see their take in the link far above), and has since been adopted by everyone else to mean slightly different things. But Web 2.0 is generally more interactive and ‘social’ web applications, allowing people to connect and interact in new ways. The key word in Web 2.0 is dynamic. Web 1.0 content was static. That is the largest difference.
I am going to take all of this into consideration when redesigning somjuan.com, and I plan to make it as accessible as possible.
SomJuan 3.0 will be Web 2.0 compatible.