I recently started writing a column for the European Newsletter of The Concours Group (updated: now part of nGenera). I'll use my blog here as a place to post these articles and make them available to others.
The purpose of the postings listed below is to build some common vocabulary in fairly simple "business terms". These articles will intentionally be short and written for non-techies. Here's an initial list of Web 2.0 technology topics that I plan to cover (or already have). As articles are written, the topics here will link to them.
- What is Web 2.0? -- a brief definition
- Blog Technologies-- the architecture of a blog
- Web Feed technology -- How to publish content from one site to other sites or to personal RSS?/Atom Readers
- Feed Reader Technology -- a tool that an individual can use to track postings to tens or hundreds of websites and blogs
- Drupal? platform -- An open-source LAMP? CMS? (content management system? based on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)
- AJAX -- a popular technology for creating real-time updates to webpages without having to refresh them
- Mashup -- The use of a thin layer of technology to combine two or more disconnected sites into an even more powerful combination
- Wiki? -- A simple tool to facilitate unstructured content collaboration
- Shared Calendar -- how to publish/manage an online calendar for a group or the general public (Google, Upcoming, etc.)
- iCal Reader/Subscriber -- how to subscribe to a shared calendar
- Joomla? -- another open-source LAMP CMS
- Ruby on Rails -- another popular technology for building Web 2.0 systems
- OpenID -- A fairly new standard for using a single userid/password to login to multiple websites
- SOAP/REST/JSON-based APIs -- ways of allowing websites to talk to each other (this is really web 1.0)
- Folksonomy -- how to categorize and popularize web content (Del.icio.us, Digg, etc.)
- Facebook / MySpace (and other social networking sites)
- Skype / Twitter (and other Video/Instant Messenger services)
- CSS and Theming -- Cascading Style Sheets, a key tool used to control the look and feel of a website and how content is presented, which is generally referred to as theming.
