In the past, I’ve thought that the catch phrase “Web 2.0” was terribly silly, but the fact remains that there is some really cool stuff out there that makes the web more interesting than it was a few years ago. So I thought I’d share some of my favorite new things (well, they’re new to me) in the web technology area. Note that all of these are free.
del.icio.us
For those of you who haven’t joined the ranks of social bookmarkers, del.icio.us is a wonderful tool for organizing your bookmarks and sharing them with others. Best of all, since it is web-based, your bookmarks are available to you from any computer you might be using. Once you “tag” a site in del.icio.us (i.e., save the site to your bookmark list and associate it with keywords of your choosing) you can see who else has saved the site and then take a look at those bookmark lists to look for more sites on the topic. For the developer, del.icio.us also has a very easy to use API if you’d like to display your links in a web page. If you’d like to take a look at my del.icio.us links, go here.
Zotero
You probably have to be either a student or a librarian to love this one. Zotero is a Firefox plugin that allows you to save snapshots of web pages and other research documents. It’s somewhere between advanced bookmark management and a citation helper like EndNote. Once saved, documents can be organized into folders and also tagged with keywords. Bulk imports from many databases are possible.
GoogleDocs
This one is so simple that’s it’s easy to take for granted. Back when the web was invented, wasn’t it supposed to be a collaborative work space? Somehow that vision got lost, but GoogleDocs makes it very easy to share and collaboratively edit documents like word processing files and spreadsheets.
WordPress
I spent years laughing at the whole bloggin phenomenon, but I have finally caved in and started to write, and even read, blogs. If you’re looking for a way to set up a blog and you have your own server space, consider installing WordPress rather than going with the various web-based blog engines. WordPress allows unbelievable customization. With a little knowledge of PHP, you can tweak WordPress to do just about anything, including convincing it to function as a full-fledged content management system. As a CMS, it is far easier to use than any of the “real” CMSs like Droopal or Joomla.
That’s it for now. I may think of some more, but those are Ron’s top picks for Web 2.0. Feel free to share contrasting opinions.