I was having a chat with a friend last night about work amongst other things and was filling her in on all the exciting exposure we have been getting for the web 2.0 stuff we started doing a while back. Damien Mulley was great to write a blogpost about us and Krishna De interviewed me last week for PodcampIreland's Blogradio show which again was really interesting.
Chatting about all of this and I realised my friend had glazed over and was merely nodding and looking vacantly at me while trying not to yawn. When I asked what she had understood from our (albeit one sided) discussion her response was "Flipping nothing" so I realised just because I find this intriguing and understand the ins and outs of it (eventually) not everyone actually does soooo below is my "Web 2.0 for dummies" - not that any of you are dummies I hasten to add ;-)
Web 2.0 - is basically where websites try to interact more with their users, my understanding is that it's all about creating a community feel and allowing users to interact with one another and share information and for us its been about making the site more "human" and giving it a personality while adding things like this blog to let users interact with us, generate content and make suggestions.
Twitter - is a really simple tool to use to relay to your friends or anyone really what you are doing, be it everyday things like eating or working. It can be used to poll people so for example when this blog went live I asked people to look at it and give me feedback. Its essentially a quick and easy way to maintain contact and get opinions or advice.
A blog - is just the nonsensical raving of people like me - on a serious note its a way to give users relevant and informative content that hopefully they will recommend to other people and come back to check regularly
Social Networking - is websites like Facebook, Myspace or Bebo, you register and interact with friends and for me its great to post photos and keep in touch with people I don't see every other week!
RSS - this one is tricky and to be fair took me months to get the hang of - you will be seeing the little orange logo all over the place online - its so easy believe me - you download whats called a reader, I use feedreader.com because it was recommended to me but there are lots. Then you can add a feed to it so that you don't have to log directly onto a site every day to check it.
If you are anything like me you will love surfing various websites and checking them regularly - my life has not been the same since I discovered RSS, now I just add feeds to my reader and its automatically updated when something new goes onto the website - you can use it for anything from blogs to newspaper websites to our site to collect new jobs for you and just open your feedreader in the morning and flick down through them - it makes the whole process so much easier and faster.
Linked In - This is more of a professional website, similar enough to the whole social networking thing but people use it to network professionally. If you check out someone's LinkedIn profile it reads almost like a CV, you can be recommended by colleagues or clients and it's becoming more and more popular as a way to source jobs or put yourself on the market so to speak! Check out our profile here.
So all in all this web 2.0 stuff just makes your life easier, makes doing everything faster and gives you lots of new ways to keep in contact with people be they work colleagues or friends....
No doubt I have forgotten some vital parts to 2.0 so feel free to comment away below!!
Vic