Welcome to the World Wide Web, 2.0…

“What do you want?”
“Information.”
“You won’t get it!”
“By hook or by crook, we will!”
–The Prisoner (1967)

Shortage of information is no problem today, now the real challenge is finding the right information, current, relevant, and of interest to us. Just as our computers are growing faster and more powerful, the World Wide Web that the computers power is also maturing into a full fledged open information platform, known as Web2.0. This article’s goal is to serve as a gentle introduction to the power of the Internet today.

There are a few web sites I’d like to introduce you to. First of all is bloglines, next is del.icio.us, and after than, it’s almost essential to give Backpack from 37 Signals a try. Have a look at these sites, go ahead… I’ll wait.

All done? Good!

So, lets take a closer look at each of these web services:

Bloglines: What if you only needed one web address to keep you informed of all the news on the Internet. What if you found that site, and it was more than you expected? Welcome to Bloglines.com. On the surface, Bloglines is a web based RSS client. However, on a deeper lever, bloglines is a personal information source, gathering information from your favorite news sites, friend’s and acquaintance’s blogs, local weather, classifieds and more! Say there are several sites that you go to each day for information. If these sites support either the RSS or Atom standards for syndication, you can include them in Bloglines. Bloglines will periodically check these sites for updates, and if found, will download the feed and provide you either with a full article or a summary, depending on the settings of the site. For my personal example, I use Bloglines to track Mac specific news, general tech news, several blogs, and a collection of “personal” feeds. I like tracking my own blogs RSS feed, just to make sure that my feed is working right. I also track my contacts new photos on flickr (which I’ll cover later), my local weather, and job openings on Monster and Indeed. RSS, the protocol behind Bloglines, is currently built into the Safari web browser for the Mac, the popular Firefox web browser, and even Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon by including RSS in their upcoming operating system upgrade due out next year.

Delicious: or, del.icio.us. One of the defining factors of Web2.0 is the ability to share information. This social aspect allows you to find more information that is more relevant to what you want to know, faster than a simple search engine. With the explosion of the web into litterally billions of web sites, once you have found one you like, sometimes its almost impossible to find it again. del.icio.us is a social bookmark manager, and a way to solve the problem of “lost sites”. To keep you bookmarks organized, del.icio.us uses a system of “tags”. Tags are keywords that you assign to a bookmark to describe it. OK, so lets say you just came across [blatent self promotion] my blog, sourceport, and you wanted to bookmark it. Using a simple bookmarklet (a tiny application that lives in your bookmarks bar in your browser), save the bookmark to del.icio.us, and tag it with, for example, “blog, mac, technology, writing”, and return to the site. del.icio.us doesn’t stop there though, it also includes RSS feeds of your bookmarks, which works extremely well with the “live bookmarks” feature of the Firefox web browser. If you have several bookmarks tagged with “favorite”, you can subscribe to the “favorite” tag with firefox and always have your favorite bookmarks there and updated. Ok, so you can do this without del.icio.us, but what if you have more than one computer that you use? Using del.icio.us tags and firefox live bookmarks, you can keep your favorite bookmarks readily avaiable and always up to date whenever you are online, from any machine that has firefox.

Backpack Backpack is a mobile organization system that travels with you. One of the most interesting, and useful, features is backpack’s take on reminders. Using the combination of technologies available in Backpack, you can have an alert on your calendar (using the ical standard), an email alert, and a text message reminder on your cell phone. If you’re a procrastinator like I am, having several forms of reminder is a real bonus. (Calendar reminder, I know, I know… email reminder, yes, yes, I know I have to do that… text message, Fine! I’ll do it now) As a recently added feature, you can now set recurring reminders to repeat on whatever basis you need. But, the reminders is only one part of backpack. Using the interactive web interface, you can update the content of your personal pages, adding lists, notes, files, and images. You can also share the content with friends and family, and if they register with backpack, they can also edit the pages. Even with the interactive interface, Backpack wouldn’t quite be web2.0 without an API, and with backpack’s API you can create and edit content on your backpack pages from an external application. As an example, I use the excellent Backpack dashboard widget to keep track of my reminders, lists, and notes.

The new web is all about interactivity and passing information. Personal and relevant, web2.0 is set to change our online life again.

–Jonathan