Long time no see + Google Pages

Well, the Web 2.0 group seems to develop Web 2.0 not so fast. People
keep talking about tools, and rewrites theories. So, since I have
nothing new to show, I decided to talk about those Google Pages.

Sometimes
my students say that "Google Cola" will be the next Google Product.
It's just a joke, but not far from true – Google is working in lots of
different areas. But Google Pages is close to what Google seems to
think as a good tool, and close to Google's business. And pretty simple
to use. I decided to use it because it has (surprisingly) a better
photo support than Flickr. I created my own home page. Go there and take a look…

 

Web 2.0 Events

(First of all, sorry for the delay. People were too worried about Google’s new stuff (Writely and Calendar), and during some days I can’t read much about Web 2.0)

Dion Hinchcliffe, whose blog I read often, published in his last post some Web 2.0 events reports. And those reports make me wonder about how seldom we heard about Web 2.0 events. It looks like something important – even for those who don’t believe that Web 2.0 should be a standard. In fact, too much important to have so little marketing. My boss never heard about it. No one at my company ever heard about it. Rarely people at my University heard about it – I recently wrote an e-mail to an interfaces teacher, asking him to chat about Web 2.0, and got no answer. I never saw a single talk about Web 2.0 in any Free Software-related event. This sounds no good for me.

But I’d not be able to answer the three-letter-question: “Why?”. Would you?

 

Web 2.0 and standards

Helder just published about a “Wiki 2.0″. WetPaint is a full of Web 2.0 techniques wiki, and looks like interesting. I particularly don’t think that some wikis (like MediaWiki) need to have much improve, but WetPaint have some improvements, like talk pages structured as weblog comments.

I was willing to try WetPaint, when I stared with a page saying: “Go away, because your Firefox version is not welcome here”. Well, I, as root user of my machine, am solving it by upgrading my Firefox. But I, as a developer, don’t want that my client be unable to use my service, just because she has an older version of her browser.

Web stardards was, on my mind, an old issue in web development. On my mind, only old-fashioned web pages do not open in any browser. This showed that I’m probably wrong, and that web standards should be subject of Web 2.0 discussions also.

 

About Web 2.0 funeral

One of my students brought to me yesterdey, during the Graph class, the information of a brazilian weblog who said that Web 2.0 means nothing. I started to read it and, well, that post means nothing. So I went following the links (many of them in English, if you want to follow), and found there are some people really thinking that Web 2.0 is a piece of crap.

This criticism is probably a natural reaction to all buzzwords that gravitate around the Web 2.0 concept. But it lacks in a point. Web 2.0 means what we want it to mean. If we’re worried about giving names to stuff, then they’re right. But if we’re worried about things that should rule the future IT market, then we got a point, and studying Web 2.0 is not a complete waste of time.

For me, I pretend to keep Web 2.0 alive.

 

AJAX Howto by Mozilla Foundation

When I started to speak about all tis Web 2.0 stuff, some programmers asked me about development-related tutorials. There’s a very simple one, made by Mozilla Foundation, in several languages. Definitely, people should try it.

 

The Confunding Walls of Confusions

I have a problem with certain types of definitions. In Software Engineering, for instance, they have lots of names for some intuitive and common things. Looks like many Software Engineering related works have lots of redundant names and useless terms that transform your ten-page project definition in a two-hundred-page specification.

Then, during my Web 2.0 exploration, I stepped with an article concerning what’s called “The Five Walls of Confusion”. Looked like jargon crap. But there’s some pretty good definitions, that really should be remembered. Alphabetically sorted:

• The Wall of Buzzwords: all geek names that we have now should be, in a proper moment, banished, and replaced with “human explanation”. It’s a right thing to think, besides that giving a name to it is too much ironical.
• The Wall of Complexity: this one is also ironical. Creating huge diagrams and putting different and complex concepts concepts together, should be avoided. Giving wall names to problems that’s simpler to just explain, also.
• The Wall of Hype: there’s something here that could be a real problem. “Is that Web 2.0 real, or just a marketing crap?” is the question. At this point, better for us who believes that Web 2.0 could be real and powerful, in my humble opinion, is to keep the Web 2.0 concepts strictly in the real world.
• The Wall of Ignorance: this one can be changed to the phrase “Easyness or die”. People don’t know what a Wiki is, for instance. The most important part: people don’t need to know what a Wiki is. But, anyway, they have to use Wikis, blogs, and related stuff. What’s the solution? The old “KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid” should be enough. But user-oriented KIS, Stupid.
• (Last, but not least) The Wall of Significance: people from TI market must know what exactly does Web 2.0 is, and its significance. I still don’t know if it will be inevitable to understand Web 2.0 philosophy, or if Web 2.0 will be only a strong tendency. Anyway, it’s something that people should look.

I hope I didn’t make some serious mistakes. But, as far as I understood about the Walls concept, the whole concept could be reduced to these short definitions (and with ironies elimination) without loss. And reducing and simplifying are things that we should be worried about since the beginning…

 

Blog publishing at ordinary media

There’s an apparently new (as written in TechCrunch) Web 2.0 tool that looks like it’ll work very well. It tries to get the best part of weblogs and the best part of ordinary media, and put it all together.

It is fundamented on a simple idea. Webloggers, by default, want to maximize their posts’ views. News sites, by default, want to get the best quality texts in their issues. If webloggers can show their posts to news sites, news sites could link their pages to good quality weblogs’ posts. Got the point?

There started BlogBurst. A web page where you can subscribe your weblog for free, and whom news sites can hire the service. Looks like it is not 100% available for publishers (but I put my weblog there anyway), so it’s still unknown how exactly will it work. But looks like good enough to be checked…

 

Even Paul Graham is looking at this…

Googling, I found a Paul Graham’s article, with some concerns about Web 2.0. It’s a critical view of Web 2.0. Looks much like what I think about Software Engineering’s current ways, besides that nobody made up my mind about it until now. The article has some critiques, but ends with an interesting phrase: “Web 2.0 means using the web the way it’s meant to be used”.

It’s an interesting definition, but it has too much compromise. Because in the future the way web’s meant to be used probably will be pretty different than it is today.

(Excuse me for keep giving good references, with no critiques about the matter. I actually found some bad stuff, and I think there’s a point at this Universe – the Web 2.0 Universe -, where I’ll have to take tares apart from wheat. But I need to study more first, otherwise there’s good chances that I write some terrible mistakes)

 

Permalinks?

Since I’m kinda new to this Web 2.0 stuff, I’m still learning the jargons. And the first one that appeared was this one: permalink. If it was a parmalink, we can think about an Italian city. But it was not.

Well, I found a good definition in an article at Tom Coates’ weblog, but it’s too long. Let me, so, try a shorter definition.

Permalinks is a short for permanent links. When you have a web page such that changes its index a lot (for instance, a weblog), you can store old indexes at another addresses, so that you can forever refer to that page’s information. It’s just a concept, but pretty useful to Web 2.0 – at least to the little that I know about Web 2.0.

 

What is Web 2.0?

It’s interesting how things happen. I was just looking for design issues, and then a friend of mine appeared with some strange idea: the Web 2.0. “What is Web 2.0?”, that was my first question. And then he showed me a Tim O’Reilly’s article concerning precisely this issue: “After all, what the heck is this Web 2.0 you’re talking about?”. I didn’t finished the reading yet, but sounds pretty interesting. And it was chosen to be the first quotation here, at this weblog.

This weblog, by the way, mean to be a place where I’ll keep Web 2.0 related information. Please feel free to post, ask, help, even correct me. I’m just a newbie regarding the subject, willing to learn. Thanks in advance.