For those who don't know [[Web 2.0]] is different from ww2 (Internet 2). Basically this is what it is: Internet Services taking the Internet experience to the next level. The latest phenomenon of social networking sites like digg, del.icio.us, youtube, flickr, meebo are examples of web 2.0 sites. It's not a technical protocol standardized by the W3C consortium, but its rather a way to seperate old school websites from todays far more useful futuristic web technologies.
I've blogged about RSS feeds before. Surprisingly I see technical people who still haven't caught on! I would suggest making an account at netvibes, a self proclaimed web 2.0 site which can be used to bring all of your internet needs together in one page, within one browser window!. The next step would be adding "feeds" from each of the websites you visit on a daily basis. Just click add feed, then enter the URL of your favorite websites. Most websites which are up to date will have RSS feeds set to be autodiscovered so ittl pick it up right away. You can try major sites like CNN, NPR etc. Another cool thing about netvibes is that it has set module which you can just add on. I can check my gmail, yahoo mail, aolmail, receive my ims on aim, msn, icq, yahoo, jabber (via meebo) all through modules. So I dont have to open up all these websites to access what I need to access.
I like the AJAX based netvibes alot. For the past few months I have been fighting with myself to figure out what the best way is to read my feeds. Because netvibes allows you create tabs, drag and drop I can easily create different tabs for all the different types of feeds I like to read. Google News and Yahoo News Generate feeds based on the searches you run. So I can get the feed for all Google News searches on lets say the words "Azeem Khan". So whenever a news story is released with the name Azeem Khan (use quotes) then my added feeds will automatically update. An even more useful usage of a user generated feed is one for job search sites like hotjobs. So everytime lets say a job in NY with the word "Joomla" is added to the site, I will immediately know about it. You can even use services like RSSfwd.com to have a feed sent to you as soon as its published.
For those who still don't understand what the hell I'm talking about… Listen you will get to see everything that you surf the web to see in one place. It might take you a long while to surf just a few of the sites which you like. If you use feeds properly you can heavily reduce the ammount of time you spend on surfing, and can use that time to read things which you really want to read.
Another very cool web 2.0 site out there is Dapper. Dapper is whats called a screen scraper site. Its a web service which can be used to generate RSS feeds off of existing sites. Watch this excellent demo to see how it works. This can be used on sites which don't currently have any feeds to create them.
Del.icio.us is a cleverly named web service which is used to store bookmarks online. There is an excellent Firefox module which can make bookmarking effective. Having your bookmarks online saves you the hassle of always having to back them up. Sometimes browsers crash and all of your bookmarks are gone! I've had that happen to me once, it's a horrible feeling.
Digg.com is a site you can waste hours and hours on. Its not just a news site. Its a user contribution based news site which revolves around discussion news items and more importantly allowing users to Digg an article if they feel its worthy, or to bury it if they think its garbage. What makes sites like youtube so good is the community element that it creates. Digg I feel does a great job of creating an online environment where people can discuss issues that are most important to them. There are a disproportionate number of geeks to regular people on the site though, therefore tech issues dominate the discourse.
I will blog more about this topic in the upcomming days. I want to create a video demo of how to use netvibes. So you can see how cool this stuff is.
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