Since last Saturday I’ve brought you four posts in my ‘Web 2.0 for Dummies’ series. This post will summarise what these posts were about:
I hope you enjoyed the series and if you have any comments on it as a whole please leave your reply on this post 
Tags: web 2.0 for dummies, web2.0, web2, web 2.0, web 2
Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here
We have covered various aspects of social media already in this series, such as video sharing and photo sharing, but one of the great activities going on online during the Web 2.0 era is blogging.
You could probably argue that blogging and Web 2.0 developed separately and blogging started well before ‘Web 2.0′ did but they are becoming increasingly intertwined.
So what is blogging? The definitions, like Web 2.0’s, are pretty fluid but generally it’s a website which displays articles written by ‘real people’ (as opposed to professional journalism that’s seen in magazines and newspapers) which are displayed in a reverse chronological order. The terms ‘blogging’ and ‘blog’ comes from ‘web log‘.
There are many ways of setting up a blog; some sites offer blog hosting and some offer scripts that you host yourself. Blogs provide a good way of connecting with your family, sharing a hobby or making new contacts (or indeed all three!) .
Hosted blog providers
WordPress.com: WordPress.com is a hosted blog provider which is built on the popular WordPress blogging software. Sadly, the free package WordPress.com offer limits the ability to customise your site’s appearance (you can only choose amongst a selection of templates). You can, however, pay for an upgrade which allows for editable templates.
Blogspot: Blogspot (aka Blogger) is Google’s blog hosting service. It offers a reasonable amount of flexibility but doesn’t allow for things such as plug-ins. Also, Blogger doesn’t use the popular RSS standard for people subscribing to your blog but instead uses Atom. You must subscribe to a service like Feedburner to add an RSS feed to your Blogger account.
TypePad: TypePad is hosted blogging software based on MovableType, a competitor to WordPress. Unfortunately, TypePad do not offer any free hosting and their cheapest package comes in at about $50 a year!
Blog scripts
If you have your own web hosting you might want to consider hosting the blog yourself; generally hosting a blog yourself gives you much more flexibility and also more freedom over what you post (WordPress.com for example forbids its users for being paid to write reviews whilst if you host WordPress yourself generally no such restrictions occur).
WordPress: WordPress is the script behind WordPress.com. It is PHP-based and is open-source (and also free of charge). There are a large number of template available for it and they may be edited or alternatively people can make their own. Also, there’s many plug-ins which boost WordPress’ functionality!
typo: Ruby on Rails-based typo is a less known blogging which is very heavy on Web 2.0 elements such as Ajax commenting by default (meaning the page doesn’t reload when a comment is sent), tagging and syndication with popular sites like Flickr and del.icio.us. Not all shared hosting accounts will support typo though due to its use of Ruby on Rails which is an upcoming web technology. A demo typo blog is here.
MovableType: Perl-powered MovableType is the blogging engine I used prior to WordPress. It has just launched its fourth version and is going to become at least partially open-source. At the time of writing a licence is required for commercial use of the script. 
.
Tags: web 2.0 for dummies, web 2.0, web2, web 2, web2.0, blogging, blogs, blog
Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here
Perhaps one of the biggest successes of the Web 2.0 era is YouTube (if you’ve been living in a non-broadband-connected cave for a couple of years, YouTube is a site which allows you to upload and view videos!) but the site has many competitors.
Web 2.0 has seen the growth of video being delivered through Flash (when in the Web 1.0 era it was usually the horrible Real or Windows Media formats). This coupled with the rapid growth in broadband has made streaming video very popular but this has led to criticism off anti-piracy groups (as you can often watch TV shows on YouTube’s competitors illegally) as well as ISPs (due to the amount of resources sites like YouTube hog!).
The odds are that the main video sharing site you use is YouTube but there are many (possibly better) competitors to it! This article will introduce those which make you money!
Revver
Revver is a video sharing site which places heavy emphasis on revenue sharing. Whilst sites like YouTube don’t give their advertising revenue back to the uploaders of videos, Revver does.
Revver pays the uploaders a 50% share of the advertising revenue it generates; them taking 50% might seem harsh but they are hosting and listing your video as well as trying to figure out the best way to monetise it .
They also provide the ability to download videos and users will still get paid for downloads! Not many video sharing sites actually provide the ability to download videos and it must be done through low quality copies of Flash video files.
However, Revver reviews all material before publishing it to stop explicit or copyrighted material getting onto it.
blip.tv
Unlike most video sites, blip.tv makes advertising optional. The video’s uploader gets to choose whether or not ads are displayed on their videos and they then get a 50/50 share of ad revenue.
blip.tv doesn’t accept formats such as MPEG-2 and prefers their users to upload compressed formats such as .mov (Quicktime) or .wmv (Windows Media). So you might have to re-encode your video.
It is refreshing to see a homepage without adverts!
blip.tv and Revver are both somewhat popular with vloggers due to the fact it employs fairly generous revenue sharing. Most of the advertising companies I use for things like text links only pay me 50% and they’re not paying overheads anything like these video sharing sites!
Metacafe
Israeli Metacafe will pay users $5 for every 1,000 views their video receives starting after their video has received 20,000 and has an average rating of 3.0 or above.
Requiring videos to gain 20,000 views and a high rating is pretty steep but it’s a good way to only pay for high quality content and not 20,000 1 second video clips!
In order to qualify for this scheme you must also give Metacafe non-exclusive rights to your video (meaning you can still redistribute it), own the copyright and assure the video is not erotic or offensive. Also, it should be between 20 seconds and 6 minutes in length.
One person has earned $50,000 from their publisher reward scheme! Most people who qualify seem to be earning between $100 and $200, though!
Don’t forget to check out LiveRail, too.
Tags: video sharing, web 2.0, make money, advertising, web2, web 2, web2.0
Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here
Yesterday we introduced and reviewed various social bookmarking services and today we’ll be doing the same but for photo sharing ones. Photo sharing sites allow you to share your photography with friends, family and/or complete strangers providing a good way for photographers to gain contacts and for family/friends to stay in touch.
Photo sharing services are nothing new, and indeed sites like Webshots are pretty Web 1.0. The latest photo sharing sites implement a number of features though which make it easier to find and share photos.
Like social bookmarking sites, most photo sharing sites implement a tagging system of some sort which allows you to come up with relevant ‘keywords’ for your photos which yourself or others can search through at a latter point. For example, one could tag a photo of Father Christmas as ’santa’, ‘christmas’ or indeed a more specific tag such as ‘doe christmas dinner 2005′!
Flickr
Flickr is likely to be the largest photo-sharing site and is owned, like del.icio.us, by Yahoo! To sign into Flickr you must now use your Yahoo! log-in which is good for new members but is a pain for people like myself as I could get my desired original Flickr log-in (computerjoe) but my Yahoo! ID which I now have to use to sign-in is computerjoe_uk.
Flickr has a lot of features, such as tagging as well as the ability to place photos on maps, but if I’m not mistaken limits you to 200 photos on a free account (you may still continue to upload and your previous ones won’t be deleted just you – nor anyone else – won’t be able to view them until you pay the US$24.95 a year).
The site also has good social abilities like being able to comment on photos, adding fellow users as contacts (and further categorising them into friends and family allowing you to restrict who has access to certain photos) as well as groups who you can ’send’ images and messages to; the messages form a forum.
As well as tagging (folksonomy) the site allows users to sort photos into sets and collections (which pretty much act as a taxonomy). For example, I have two collections: UK & Abroad and in those collections I have multiple sets which are the locations and dates I shot them (e.g. Tenerife 2006, Tenerife 2007 and Lake District 2007). Sets and collections can be used to sort photos in any manner you wish, though.
Zooomr
Zooomr is a site which got a lot of popularity from veteran Flickr users when Yahoo! instigated the use of Yahoo! logins opposed to Flickr ones.
Zooomr does provide you a choice of log-in options though; it supports the OpenID single-sign on much like Mag.nolia (a bookmarking site we reviewed yesterday) as well as the ability to set-up and login with a normal account.
They provide many of the same features as Flickr as well as a few more (such as the ability to license photos for commercial use at a certain price) however I feel that consequently the site’s interface is far too heavy and you get the feeling of ‘feature overload’ which you don’t over at Flickr.
Zooomr also offer pro accounts which aren’t served ads (whilst free ones are). Also, pro accounts will be given features in the future such as analytics for view of their photos which is pretty cool .
Sadly, there isn’t a way to import Flickr photos into Zooomr whilst keeping data such as tags (at least none I can see!). This is the fault of Flickr, though, for refusing Zooomr a commercial API (basically a commercial licence permitting Zooomr to grab data from Flickr).
Pikeo
Orange-owned Pikeo is another photo sharing site, sadly it seems to be based heavily on Flash. The Flash basis restricts the portability because although most internet devices have Flash some – such as my PDA – do not.
The site provides 1GB (1024MB) of storage with support for sending images from mobile phones (no doubt due to the fact it’s owned by Orange). In addition to this it provides geotagging, tagging, albums and comments.
Like Flickr they also provide groups however Pikeo’s have a much small niche (such as a group for a specific family as opposed to a group for ‘Web 2.0′ etc).
Pikeo seems to mainly target non-Anglophone countries (even though that the site is in English) because most of the uploaded photos seem to originate from France (where Orange has a big presence).
Tags: photo sharing, photosharing, web 2.0, web 2.0 for dummies
Web 2.0 for Dummies index page here
Over the next week, I’ll be doing a series of seven posts regarding the most basic aspects of Web 2.0: social bookmarking, photo sharing, video sharing and blogs. In each segment, I’ll be reviewing key sites as well as suggesting ones you might not have heard of.
Social bookmarking is the idea of being able to share your bookmarks (favourite websites which you ‘bookmark’) with other people and you can also use theirs. Also, social bookmarking provides a way for you to access your bookmarks from pretty much any Internet-connected computer worldwide!
A key feature to social bookmarking is something called folksonomy (or as it’s more commonly known: tagging). Folksonomy provides more flexibility than taxonomy (the category-based system that’s typically used) as folksonomy the user chooses by inputting ‘keywords’ related to the link. He can then search these keywords to find links with certain ones. This allows the user much more control than having to categorise things as ‘Internet’ as he could choose to split this up into many tags (and it’s generally quicker to create a new tag than a new category/sub-category).
del.icio.us
del.icio.us is, by far, the most popular social bookmarking site and is owned by Yahoo!. The site has a relatively small amount of features which consequently makes it easy to use! I personally use del.icio.us as it has all the features that I require.
They provide a bookmarklet which allows you to add bookmarks by simply clicking a button in your browser’s bookmarks toolbar or alternatively you can post them by manually entering the URL, title and description on del.icio.us’ site.
The form to submit a site is simple as it only requires you to enter the address, title, description and tags. Tags are suggested from your previous tags and other people’s tags for that site.
del.icio.us provide simple social features such as the ability of sending links to other users who you add to your network by tagging it as for:username (for example, to send one to me you’d say for:computerjoe). Of course, you can browse through other people’s public bookmarks and find users who bookmark the same sites as yourself.
As I mentioned above, you have the ability to specify whether you wish to make bookmarks public or not; to use private bookmarks you must visit go into settings>bookmarks>private saving and enable it. (see left image)
Furl is LookSmart’s social bookmarking engine which seems to use a strange of mixture of ratings, taxonomy and folkosonomy. You bookmark a site by clicking a bookmarklet which launches a pop-up. In the pop-up, you are asked to choose a rating, title, topics, keywords, write a comment and provide a clipping. A useful feature is the ability to mark a bookmark as ‘read’ or ‘unread’ as well as being able to have private bookmarks without altering any settings.
del.icio.us is much simpler to use than Furl and I think del.icio.us is much lighter and consequently fast to load whilst Furl seems to use quite a few graphics. Furl does have some nice features, though, such as the ability to search for a bookmarks based on the date they were posted.
I suggest you use del.icio.us, but you could give Furl a go!
Clipmarks
Clipmarks isn’t a typical social bookmarking site; the site provides ’social annotation’ which allows you to take extracts of text or images from a website (clippings), make a comment about them, tag it and then share it or keep it private.
Unlike the other sites reviewed, Clipmarks requires installation of a browser plug-in in order to post ‘clippings’ but none are needed to read them. This makes it much less portable than the other sites I’ve reviewed but it provides a much better experience.
Community is something which extremely large sites such as del.icio.us lack but Clipmarks is always complimented on having such a strong sense of it. You will often find other users commenting on your clippings or ‘popping’ them. Popping sends it to the top of a lsit attracting more reads of the clipping, basically a clipping is popped if someone finds it interesting.
Clipping is a productive way to keep notes, too, and people such as students would no doubt find it useful.
It’s rumoured that this site will soon be acquired by Forbes.
Ma.gnolia.com
Mag.nolia is another social bookmarking site but unlike del.icio.us or Furl it focuses heavily on community with features such as groups. It also allows you to use your OpenID, a single sign on which is explained well here, to log-in.
Mag.nolia has some of the features Furl has, such as ratings, whilst remaining as simple as del.icio.us. Adding a URL can be done through a form or bookmarklet and all you must provide are tags, a rating, description and title. You also have the option to keep it private. They also provide ‘tiny URLs’, similar to the ones TinyURL or SnipURL provide but just longer, for any address you submit.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s article on photo sharing!
Tags: web 2.0 for dummies, web 2.0, social bookmarking, bookmarking
