Web Information Systems
Web 2.0 Basics
Prof. Beat Signer
Department of Computer Science
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
http://vub.academia.edu/BeatSigner
2 December 2005

Web 2.0
 The term Web 2.0 was
introduced by Tim O'Reilly
at the Web 2.0 conference
in 2004 to describe a new
generation of web apps
 user-generated content
 social resource and know- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Web_2.0_Map.svg]
ledge sharing
 collective intelligence
 the Web as a platform for software applications
 data as a driving force
- infoware rather than simply software
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 2

Main Web 2.0 Ingredients
 Social Web
 end user as a participant and content creator
 democracy
 Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
 bring the desktop to the browser
 highly interactive applications (e.g. drag and drop)
 based on AJAX, Flash etc.
 Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs)
 enable the sharing of information and services between different
Web 2.0 applications
 Web Services, RSS, mashups, etc.
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 3

Web 2.0 Interaction
Web
information access
content creation
user-to-user Service Oriented
interaction Architecture
collective intelligence
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 4

Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0
Web 1.0 Web 2.0
publishing participation
reading reading and writing (participatory Web)
content management systems wikis
personal homepages blogs
simple request/response interaction Rich Internet Application (RIA)
screen scraping service oriented architectures
taxonomies (classification) folksonomies (tagging)
companies communities
single user social networks
bookmarking collaborative tagging / social bookmarking
... ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 5

Web 2.0 and the Long Tail
 The term long tail has
been introduced by Chris
Anderson in 2004
 head (20%) is favoured
against the tail (80%)
 The major part of content
on the Internet is delivered
by small sites (long tail)
 Provide tools to address the long tail and not just the
head
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 6

Video: The Machine is Us/ing Us
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 7

Web 2.0 Examples
 Wikis
 Blogs
 Media sharing sites
 Folksonomies
 Social networking sites
 Web-based communities
 Mashups
 Web applications
 ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 8

Wikis
 The first wiki was the
WikiWikiWeb in 1995
 Ward Cunningham
 inspired by HyperCard
 Any user can create new
wiki pages or edit existing
pages
 no special software required on the client side (only a browser)
 Democracy-based control of the content
 revision history, discussion, ...
 Various wiki software
 MediaWiki, DokuWiki, ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 9

Wikipedia
 Open authoring model
 registered and anonymous
users may contribute
 some users (editors) may
have special rights
 Each article has
 a history page showing
all of its changes
 a discussion page
 Issues
 reliability not guaranteed since no central authority
 vandalism
 ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 10

Blogs
 A blog (weblog) is a
chronologically ordered
list of information
 personal diary
 specific subjects
- e.g. celebrities
 Tool for delivering news
and getting in touch with a large community of users
 nowadays often used as a powerful channel in politics
 much harder to control than print or broadcasting media
 Popular blogs often generate revenue by advertising
 access to content is often free
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 11

Technorati
 Blog search engine
 indexes over 100 million
blogs
 Uses tags to classify blogs
 Ranking based on a blog's
authority
 number of inlinks from other
blogs
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 12

Flickr
 Image hosting and sharing
website
 Image repository that is
often used by bloggers
 Managing images
 collaborative tagging
- user-generated taxonomy (folksonomy)
- one of the first websites that implemented tag clouds
 grouping in sets, collections and higher order collections
- note that an image may be added to multiple sets
 Offers a powerfull Web Service API
 can easily be integrated with third-party applications
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 13

Folksonomies
 Folksonomy = 'folk' +
'taxonomy'
 user-generated taxonomy
 Social tagging
 collaboratively creating and
managing tags
 bottom up approach
- no fixed terminology
 Applications
 Annotea: shared Web annotations and bookmarks
 Delicious: social bookmarking web service
 Tag cloud visualisation
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 14

YouTube
 Video hosting and sharing
website
 Social impact
 YouTube internet celebrities
 Copyright issues
 material from TV shows etc.
 many broadcasting companies use YouTube as new channel
 Content can easily be embedded in external websites
 blogs, social networking sites, ...
 Acquired by Google in 2006
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 15

Facebook
 Social networking site
 Connect to friends and
share information
 info about current status
 post messages on a user's
public wall
 send individual messages
 share photos
 Easy to add individual applications
 Copyright issues
 what happens with content that has been uploaded to Facebook?
 Privacy issues
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 16

Twitter
 Micro-blogging and social
networking service
 Small messages (tweets)
can be posted to a user
profile
 often added via SMS
 reach millions of users from
any place around the world
within seconds
- used in protests and politics, emergencies, ...
 Can we get too connected?
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 17

Second Life
 Virtual 3-dimensional
world by Linden Lab
 special client software
 User represented by
an avatar
 Linden dollar (L$) as a
currency
 buy land
 buy and sell goods and services to other users
 Applications
 education, business meetings, arts, ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 18

Academia.edu
 Social networking website
for researchers
 Sharing and rating of
resources
 research papers, conference
presentations, CVs etc.
 Find researchers with similar research interests
 Other professional social networking websites
 LinkedIn, Xing, ...
 How to deal with profile information on different sites?
 open standards for social networking
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 19

SlideShare
 Social networking website
to share presentations
 High quality educational
material
 Various APIs for inte-
gration with other social
networking websites
 Content may spread virally through social networks
and blogs
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 20

myExperiment
 Collaborative environment
for scientists
 Safely publish workflow
plans and share them with
other scientists
 Reuse and repurpose
workflows
 avoid to reinvent the wheel
 credits for workflows
 ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 21

Delicious
 Social bookmarking
service
 store bookmarks and access
them from different browsers
 share and discover book-
marks
 Non-hierarchical classi-
fication based on tags
 Offers various APIs to access the bookmarks
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 22

Mashups
 A mashup composes
information and services
from external sources and
offers them as part of a
new service
 Various mashup tools
 Yahoo Pipes, ...
 Mashup example
 composition of Google Maps and realtime information about
Swiss trains
- http://www.swisstrains.ch
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 23

Google Docs
 Free web-based office
tools
 word processor, spreadsheet
application, ...
 Software as a service
 Mobile access via mobile
phone
 Data safety and privacy issues
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 24

Google AdSense
 Highly customised delivery
of advertisements
 shows advertisements delive-
red via Google AdWords
 New models for payment
 pay-per-click in addition to
pay-per-impression
 Any website owner can enroll
 sometimes very complementary information
- e.g. blog with reviews about specific products together with Google
advertisements for these products
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 25

Video: The Kindness of Strangers
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 26

Social Implications of Web 2.0
 Data ownership and copyright issues
 Collective intelligence (wisdom of crowds)
 Shift of power from controlled media to collaborative
communities
 New models for crediting an individual's content that is
accessed by other users or composed in mashup
applications
 Everybody has a (big) voice
 e.g. reach millions of users within seconds via Twitter
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 27

Common Web 2.0 Patterns
 The presented Web 2.0 applications have some common
underlying patterns which are going to be discussed next
week
 service oriented architectures (SOAs)
 software as a service
 asynchronous partial updates
- Rich Internet Applications (RIAs)
 mashups
 self-organising communities
 collaborative tagging
 viral marketing
 ...
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 28

Assignment
 In the next exercise session we will distribute the
assignment which covers various Web 2.0 issues as well
as other topics presented in the course
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 29

References
 James Governor et al., Web 2.0 Architectures,
O'Reilly Media, May 2009
 Michael Wesch, The Machine is Us/ing Us
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g
 Jonathan Zittrain, The Kindness of Strangers,
TEDGlobal 2009, Oxford, UK, July 2009
 http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jonathan_zittrain_the_web_is_
a_random_act_of_kindness.html
 Swiss Train Map Mashup Application
 http://www.swisstrains.ch/
October 22, 2009 Beat Signer - Department of Computer Science - bsigner@vub.ac.be 30

Next Week
Web 2.0 Patterns and Technologies
2 December 2005