The days of merely browsing the Internet are over. In today’s Web 2.0 era, Web users aren’t merely expected to soak in whatever’s put in front of them, but to contribute and shape content themselves. Whether it be writing a compelling blog, recording an unmissable podcast or sharing photos and videos with the world, the demand for “user-generated content” has never been greater.
How do you get involved? This feature will provide you with all the information and advice you need to become a fully paid-up member of the Web 2.0 generation. We’ll offer practical guidance on how to get started with the six key technologies, with step-by-step walkthroughs in every section to show you exactly how it’s done.
The good news is you no longer need to master HTML to make your Web presence felt; most of the Internet services we cover in this feature require little more than form filling from your browser. Yet, even though it’s relatively simple to create a blog or social-networking profile, it’s much harder to create enthralling content that people will want to visit time and again — especially as there are millions of others all clamouring for attention. Therefore, our experts not only guide you through setup, but offer hints and tips on how to best exploit each technology.
That’s not to say technical expertise has suddenly been made redundant. With the entire world able to build a serviceable website on MySpace, the cutting-edge designer needs to go a step further, implementing powerful new technologies such as AJAX. We’ll explain how to take advantage of these modern protocols.
But before you embark on your Web 2.0 work, shouldn’t we explain what the term actually means? This is difficult. Defining exactly what distinguishes a Web 2.0 site from its forebears is like trying to evaluate Pi – there’s no complete answer. A recent series of newspaper interviews, with more than a dozen “Web 2.0 entrepreneurs”, produced more than a dozen different answers to the simple question “What is Web 2.0?”.
Wikipedia (an encyclopaedic Web 2.0 site in its own right, ) takes a stab at the following definition:
“The supposed second generation of Internet-based services — such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools and folksonomies — that emphasise online collaboration and sharing among users.” It’s the best answer we’ve come across, and it was arrived at by dozens of different Web users collaborating. It’s proof that Web 2.0 really works.10,000 new blogs are created every day. We show you how to build and promote a professional-looking site.
Of all of the Web 2.0 mediums, blogging has certainly made the biggest impact. Anyone fit to put finger to keyboard can set up, access and update a blog. The only thing needed to make it a success is a little bit of care and something interesting to say.
Putting an exact figure on the number of blogs in the “blogosphere” (and that’s the last time we’ll be using the word) is nearly impossible, as a blog can be almost anything. Accounts on Blogger.com obviously qualify, but then so could regularly updated forum posts, diary pages and news websites written from a first-person perspective. And, a blog doesn’t have to be written — with YouTube offering free, unlimited bandwidth and compatibility with almost all kinds of footage, starting a video blog (or “vlog”) could hardly be easier. If you have a digital still camera or camera phone, you could even start a photoblog or “moblog”. These terms may be slightly absurd, but one certainty is that blogging is absurdly popular. Technorati, the blog-tracking service, is currently watching more than 59 million blogs, with 1.3 million new posts (or blog entries) every day. Blogging may not be “taking over the world”, as one national newspaper recently claimed, but it’s clearly a force to be reckoned with.
But why? As a method of getting your writing and ideas in front of an audience of potentially millions, there are few methods more effective than blogging. Don’t mistake a blog with a mere personal website – a blog demands updates on at least a weekly basis and should provide links to other interesting or relevant blogs. These links then provide further links to other websites, thereby improving traffic but also improving chances of stumbling onto a truly great blog.
Blogs offer a few notable advantages over traditional websites — ease of use is chief among them. The simple templates of Blogger may all look similar, but they don’t require any knowledge of HTML to post an entry, and are tried, tested and guaranteed to work in all Internet browsers. Even a fairly complex and customisable blog engine such as WordPress allows you to enter a new post through a simple, form-based interface. Once your blog is set up, you could go for months without seeing an HTML document. Friends or colleagues can be added as additional co-authors, none of whom need to know anything about website design or programming. This, quite rightly, moves the focus away from the technology being used to the quality of the content.
And, because blogs are easier to use than custom websites, updating them
is a seamless, fast process. Seen something newsworthy? Forget about firing up Notepad to add a few lines to your homepage – just add a blog entry.
A whole new breed of citizen journalist is springing up, light on training but heavy on first-hand reportage. Best of all, services such as Blogger are capable of handling huge amounts of traffic, so if you break the story of the century you won’t need to worry about your server flailing helplessly before collapsing under the strain.
But blogs aren’t merely frivolous excuses for self-aggrandisement.
When Salem Pax started his blog in 2002, he could have had no idea that a year later he’d have a front-row seat for the invasion of Iraq. His blog catapulted him to fame precisely because he could do what no media organisation could – report directly from Baghdad with a resident’s perspective.
You don’t even need to be in front of a PC to blog. You can email entries to many of the blog services, which means if you’re so inclined and have a smartphone you can blog from the beach. Ditto for sending photos. And while these methods of blogging take an inevitable hit in terms of quality (writing on a smartphone doesn’t lend itself to careful editing, while the cameras on most phones aren’t up to much), it allows you to respond to events as they unfold in front of you, giving a whole new meaning to “live on the scene”. It’s no coincidence that in a major incident, such as the London bombings in 2005, bloggers and mobile phone snappers are almost always the first on the scene, unhampered by the logistical constraints of getting a professional journalist and photographers across town.
A blog can be a great way to boost your business profile and cement a relationship with your customers — and all for next-to-no cost. This goes double if you’re self-employed — what better way to demonstrate your enthusiasm for your profession than by blogging about it?
It provides a more interactive and interesting way for prospective clients to get to know you and your work than simply handing over a CV.
With roughly three blogs in circulation for about every person in Australia, getting noticed in the babble is a considerable challenge. Fortunately, there are ways to promote your blog that will help attract a readership of more than one.
Let’s get the mildly insulting advice out of the way: make sure your blog is interesting. The line between “blog” and “very often updated news site” is becoming increasingly blurred, but the phenomenal success of commercial blogging networks such as Gawker Media, Orble.com and Shiny Media prove conclusively that it’s relevant, well-written content that separates the wheat from the chaff.
This is even more relevant than you might at first think. Your blog may be plodding along with a few dozen readers, but the day you write an original entry about something topical, you can see a thousand-fold spike in traffic. The important lesson here, though, isn’t about that short-term sugar rush, or the fact that the tutorial page is still attracting plenty of daily visits, but that the blog now gets six times as many hits a day than before the tutorial.
Relevant content, then, is vital, but so is getting it noticed. There are dozens of democratic news/social bookmarking sites such as Digg, del.icio.us and Furl, most of which put a heavy emphasis on getting the wider community to rate posts. The reason is that comment postings can swell the potential audience, and you should also exploit this resource. Submitting every one of your own stories to these services is frowned upon, not to mention desperate. It’s much better to give your readers easy ways to add specific posts to these sites. Plug-ins exist for services such as WordPress that can automate this process, or you can use services such as www.egmstrategy.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm to generate snippets of HTML.
The important thing, though, is to engage. Make a valuable or entertaining comment on a related, popular blog and many people will click through to your page (provided you include a link in the comment!) just out of curiosity. There are countless “Web rings” — loose affiliations of like-minded blogs and bloggers — you can join, which usually supply graphics for buttons you can use on your site. More discerning and formal rings exist; 9rules.com, for example, only occasionally opens up registration to new members, insisting on passion and commitment.
It’s also well worth promoting your blog on the various blog-tracking services such as Technorati. The process involves nothing more than pasting a snippet of HTML into your site and means you’re officially as much a part of the blogging community as it’s possible to be. Encourage those who enjoy your blog to bookmark it through whichever services you’re registered to. Similarly, most blogging platforms allow you to ping sites such as Technorati or weblogs.com every time you post.
Finally, pimp your blog’s URL as much as possible. Sites such as Flickr encourage you to associate your account with a URL, and with every (personal) email or forum post you write you can advertise your blog. Just don’t go overboard — the line between an over-enthusiastic blogger and a forum spammer is thin.
Blog services reviewed
www.blogger.com
Owned by Google, Blogger boasts a huge range of features designed to be used by everyone from total novices to those comfortable wading knee-deep into HTML code. You can choose to host your blog on your own FTP server or on Blogger’s own servers for free and, because of Blogger’s ties with Google, it’s easy to include AdSense advertising on your blog in the hope of making money. Add to this the ability to post to Blogger account from an email address or Microsoft Word, and you’ve got all the features most bloggers will need.
www.wordpress.org
Totally free and open source, WordPress is one of the most powerful blogging tools there is. Download the latest build from the website and install it onto your own hosted domain, or run your blog for free from WordPress’ space. The chief strength is that it’s totally customisable, and changing the look and features of your blog can be done with a little technical knowledge. The drawback is that updates to the blogging engine aren’t automatic, which means if someone finds an exploit for WordPress the onus is on you to install the patch.
www.typepad.com
TypePad is a subscription service that offers enormous flexibility over your blog’s design, without requiring technical expertise. Sophisticated widgets – such as reader polls, audio players and search boxes – can be added with a few mouse clicks, while TypePad’s intuitive interface makes adding links and resizing photos painless. TypePad also provides a stream of visitor statistics and a list of sites that are linking to your blog – a great way of discovering new fans and foes. Prices start from $4.95 per month and a 30-day free trial is available.
www.movabletype.com
If you believe a blog is central to your business, you’ll need a professional-looking site backed up with customisable features and support. Moveable Type blogs can be hosted on your own website or on Yahoo. For personal accounts with a single user, Movable Type is free, but for more users and professional support you can get it from as little as $49.95. As a commercial platform, though, Movable Type is inherently less tweakable than WordPress.Social networking sites aren’t just for bored teenagers. We show you how to raise your profile
When it comes to participating in Web 2.0, social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Profile Heaven are right at the vanguard, making it easier, and irresistibly fashionable to establish a creative Web presence. In just three years, social networking has moved from the drawing board to centre stage. MySpace has already amassed 130 million users, with a quarter of a million new users flocking to the network every day. And there are more than 400 networks catering for every niche and age group.
Social networks act as hubs, offering members a small piece of prefabricated real estate on the Web and a ready-made community, where members with similar tastes can chat about shared interests, exchange ideas or music and find a date or business contact.
Depending on age and preferences, social networks are the online equivalent of the playground, golf club, the FreeMasons or a late-night chatline. Contact lists can grow exponentially, and with very little effort, it’s simple to build a network of professional contacts that runs into the thousands on a site such as LinkedIn.
For Web 2.0 evangelists, though, perhaps the biggest success of these networks is that they’re attracting people to participate in the Web. Building a website used to be the reserve of the IT professional. Now, anyone in their teens or above is tinkering with templates to bring their personalities to bear on their social-networking profile. “It used to be difficult to set up a website: you needed to learn code or a design program,” says Web designer Sean Griffith. “Sites like MySpace make it easier for anyone to have a Web presence. Some are better than others, but the key is that people are getting used to the idea of a life online and having a persona and sense of community.”
MySpace, for example, provides a form-filling path to your own, er, space. Yet those Web 1.0 skills aren’t necessarily wasted, as advanced users can also post HTML/DHTML or CSS into those textboxes to alter the design.
Influencing the masses
The combined voices of the networked are increasingly shaping life offline too; unknown singer Sandi Thom last year produced a series of webcast concerts through MySpace. The gigs pulled 100,000 listeners and earned her a recording contract with Sony. According to social-networking guru Danah Boyd, it’s impossible to overestimate the impact networks will have. They provide huge target-specific audiences to advertisers and aren’t tainted by the perception of the fusty old-boys’ network of traditional media.
While the world of social networking — like text messaging before it — might have grown on the back of adolescents’ desire for cheap, creative communications, the medium has grown into something far more pervasive. So much so that the biggest businesses in the world are sitting up and taking notice. Brand-conscious companies such as Coca-Cola and Apple are anxious to use the social networks to target the hard-to-reach teens and young adults that are increasingly online, rather than in front — just out of curiosity —
of the television.
When News Corp paid $580 million for MySpace in July 2005, it was seen mainly as a land grab for ad space to the hard-to-reach youth consumers. News Corp executives have described the acquisition as a goldmine for ideas and as a barometer of the Zeitgeist, or “spirit of the time”, measuring the sum total of current interests and values. Using MySpace, the company can cross-market its other media offerings and build a buzz around its own brands and those of advertisers.
Professional purposes
Although far smaller in scale than the likes of MySpace, professional networks are growing too, putting like-minded business people in touch with one another – from finding a supplier to a new managing director.
“I use both LinkedIn and Soflow for my business networking. I can’t say I use the sites to promote my clients’ businesses, but more for researching potential new clients and keeping up to date with changes among my contacts,” said Katie Oliver, managing director of marketing company Momentous.
“Big brands such as Xbox, Sprite, Honda and others who are using social-networking sites like MySpace and Bebo can effectively reach their target audience and spread their message virally,” she said. “But, social networks still appeal to smaller businesses. Forums are a strong way to promote your business and offer help to other small businesses.”
And, of course, social networks are a fantastic way to promote yourself. “I always check someone’s profile on LinkedIn or Soflow before making contact or following up a business lead,” said Oliver. “It’s great to see how people present themselves on the networks, as this can give you a better idea of how to pitch yourself and your business. I know a head-hunter who contacted me via LinkedIn and uses the networks significantly to fill roles for her clients.”
As ever, it’s who you know, not what you know that can make the critical difference in landing a job. Social networks are an extension of those offline, but they’re much more closely linked and easier to search. And they won’t cost you a fortune buying drinks.
 |
| Singer Sandi Thom launched her career from MySpace. |
Produce a show to rival the broadcasters, with our guide to recording and promoting your own podcast.
There’s a reason why broadcasters normally have a multinational company behind them — it’s a fearsomely expensive business. Broadcasting live over the Internet is no different. Streaming requires huge amounts of bandwidth, plenty of storage, beefy Web servers to handle the requests for your content — not to mention professional facilities to produce your broadcast.
So if you can’t afford or don’t want to stream, how do you make your voice heard? The answer is podcasting. The word derives from the merging of broadcasting and iPod, and involves recording a complete audio file that’s made available for listeners to download and play at their leisure, either on their PC or, more commonly, an MP3 player. Most importantly, a podcast is cheap to create. You don’t need expensive streaming-capable Web hosting; any Web space big enough to hold your podcast file will do, and almost anyone with a home Internet connection has free Web space as part of their package. Most podcasts aren’t produced in a studio, but at home with a microphone and free audio-editing software (see our guide to making your own podcast, opposite).
How did podcasting emerge? The first podcasters are generally accepted to have been former MTV presenter Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer, both of whom in 2001 began producing what we now know as podcasts to a tiny audience.
The inclusion of podcasts in the iTunes Store two years ago led to an overnight explosion in podcast production and downloads, and brought the medium out from a geeky niche to a mass audience. The iTunes Store provided the simple means to both find podcasts and download the content and, if used in conjunction with an iPod, even downloading the content on to your device could be automated.
However, the mainstream access to podcasts brought with it interest from established media giants, and a quick look through the iTunes Store will show amateur podcasters sitting side-by-side with content from broadcasting and publishing giants such as the ABC, its youth brand Triple J, and Channel Seven. “Of course, just like blogs, anyone can do it. That means there are a lot of podcasts out there that air to five people, and a lot of poor-quality podcasts alongside the very good ones,” said Ewan Spence, executive director at The Podcast Network, which produces 60 different shows.
Despite still being a new medium, podcasting has already started to evolve. Soon after audio podcasting became popular, video podcasting emerged. Mainstream broadcasters including Channels Ten and Seven are making clips and shows available as video podcasts, as well as hundreds of successful homebrew video podcasts, such as the Planet TV Show and Tiki Bar TV, which has a cult following.
How can the amateur podcasters/videocasters hope to compete with the big boys? A glance at the iTunes Store’s top 20 podcasts is enough to confirm that the well-known names such as Ricky Gervais (star of TV comedy The Office), are dominating. Yet, for the one-man bands, attracting a niche audience of like-minded listeners can have its own rewards, stealing eyeballs and listeners from traditional mediums. As television advertising executives are finding out, the days of the mass audience are slowly beginning to crumble.
Five model podcasts
Diggnation
Presented by digg.com’s Kevin Rose and his friend, TV presenter Alex Albrecht, Diggnation is a weekly technology and cyber culture show based on discussion of the top Digg news stories. Diggnation is unusual in that it’s available as both an audio-only podcast and a video podcast.
Dr Karl’s Science Show
Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is an Australian science spokesperson whose job is to enthuse young students about science at the University of Sydney. His regular radio show on Triple J is popular nationally and you can access it as a podcast. The Internet is an obvious way to get access to broadcast material that you missed when it was originally aired.
Ask a Ninja
A low-budget comedy video blog, Ask a Ninja shows that a few creative people can make something quite popular without spending great wads of money. Beginning with the whimsical premise of a Japanese assassin answering people’s questions like an agony aunt from a magazine, the writing is witty and the presentation is inspired.
Physics for Future Presidents
Richard A. Muller is the Professor of Physics at Berkeley, University of California. In his genuine subject course for students of politics or non-science degrees, he explains basic concepts in modern science for the layperson, with respect to the very latest advances in scientific research. Fascinating and genuinely educational, take part in a fun university course for nothing, thanks to the Internet.
The Ricky Gervais Show
Frustrated that radio stations weren’t interested in picking up his show idea, comedian Ricky Gervais surprised many in December 2005 when he and his writing partners, Stephen Merchant and Karl Pilkington, began producing a half-hour anarchic comedy show. The podcast was an overnight hit, and now holds the world record for the most downloaded podcast at over eight million downloads and rising. In the world of Web 2.0, the reader is in control. So how can you make sure your content is seen?
You don’t need to be a journalist or a blogger to shape the news agenda; nor do you have to run your own portal to direct people towards your favourite websites. In the Web 2.0 era, the wisdom of the crowd prevails.
With its simple but innovative ranking system, Digg has rocketed to prominence since its launch in November 2004. It was the first of the democratic news sites, soon to be aped by competitors, including the redesigned Netscape. Digg and its ilk encourage their members to submit links to stories they’ve found elsewhere on the Web. Readers are then asked to vote on whether they think the submitted stories are newsworthy or not. The stories with the most votes (or Diggs) are promoted to the homepage; those that fail to grasp the public’s attention wither in the site’s archive and are eventually expunged. Thus, the audience becomes the news editor, deciding whether stories deserve a front-page splash or a swift trip to the recycle bin.
Digg now covers mainstream news, sport and entertainment, but it started life as a technology news site. It could be described as the Web 2.0 equivalent of the renowned Slashdot.org: whereas the latter invites readers to submit their own stories and employs a team of professional editors to decide which make it onto the homepage, Digg hands the entire decision-making process over to its users. “Whatever is on the homepage is a representation of the community for that moment. Because of this, you’ll find stories side-by-side that no sane newspaper editor would place together in print, and I think the community gets a kick out of that,” says Digg founder Kevin Rose.
There are several advantages to letting the readership determine the site’s homepage content. There are none of the usual accusations of political or editorial bias that dog mainstream publishers. If a story about foreign policy failures becomes the lead story, it’s because a large group of people think it’s worthwhile, not because an editor has a political axe to grind. Similarly, Digg can’t be accused of being in bed with Microsoft if a poor review of a Mac makes the homepage.
From a user’s perspective, knowing your vote can directly affect the content of the site is alluring and provides a compelling incentive to keep coming back to check whether your favourite stories have made the homepage. However, that’s not nearly as satisfying as actually getting one of your own suggestions on to the homepage.
From the site’s point of view, it doesn’t have to waste money on expensive editorial staff.
However, it’s worth remembering that sites such as Digg can sometimes be dominated by a relatively small proportion of users. Earlier this year, the site had to defend itself against accusations that a team of its readers were “gaming” the site by all voting on the same stories to ensure they earned enough votes to make the homepage. Why would they do this? Aside from the kudos, making the homepage of Digg can drive huge swathes of traffic to your website. In fact, the so-called “Digg effect” regularly brings websites and blogs with limited bandwidth to their knees. As a result, the unscrupulous band of Diggers can earn extra advertising revenue on their websites by attracting thousands of links from their artificially promoted stories.
Digg is well aware of the problem. Like Google, the company is constantly changing the algorithm that determines which stories make it to the top of its rankings, to keep fraud to a minimum. “A lot of behind-the-scenes stuff goes into the promotion algorithm. It isn’t based on pure raw Diggs to keep people from gaming it. It’s much more like a Google page rank. And we’re constantly tweaking it and applying knowledge we’ve taken in since launching the site. The community itself is great at self-policing and voting down or burying spam,” said Rose.
The future of news?
Will more websites follow Digg’s example and allow their readers to dictate their content? Pete Clifton, the head of the interactive arm of the English broadcaster BBC, recently claimed that the corporation plans to open a special section on its website dedicated solely to content supplied by its readership. The BBC is also considering introducing “aggregation pages”, where links are provided to external news sites, blogs and websites. Both have echoes of the Digg model, and both could appear by the middle of 2007, subject to regulatory approval.
Other mainstream media outlets are also paying attention. Several Australian newspapers have their journalists maintain blogs about current events, and tap into Digg’s traffic-generating abilities to promote their online stories.
Yet, not everyone’s rushing headlong into democratic news. Editorial voice and story selection are what distinguish one newspaper, magazine or website from another, and few are prepared to surrender that control to their readers just yet. “I think Slashdot’s uniqueness is largely determined by the people who make the final selection of content for the index,” says Rob Malda, the site’s editor. “That’s not to say there aren’t ways we couldn’t get help from readers, but I think that balancing the wisdom of crowds is part of Slashdot.” And, as Malda points out, the public isn’t always right. “If the story is stupid, I don’t care if it’s submitted by a thousand readers. Our advantage is that we have a few people maintaining a certain level of consistency and quality control over our homepage,” he added.
Bookmarked by popular demand
It isn’t only news that’s being given a dash of democracy. The popular social bookmarking (and infuriatingly punctuated) site del.icio.us lets people store links to their favourite Internet sites online. Unlike other online bookmark repositories, however, del.icio.us counts each saved link as a vote, providing a measure of how popular each website is. The del.icio.us homepage gives a running tally of the hottest sites of the moment. Users are invited to add tags to each bookmark — “technology”, “news”, “computing” for www.pcauthority.com.au for example – so that visitors can search for those terms and find the most popular websites in each category. There’s also an element of social networking, with the site allowing you to form bonds with other like-minded people.
The Internet Explorer and Firefox plug-in StumbleUpon takes social bookmarking to the next level. Once downloaded, the StumbleUpon button is embedded into your browser — you simply click it to go to a random site recommended by your fellow Stumblers. Should you “stumble upon” a website you particularly enjoy, you too can give it the thumbs up and add it to the list for others to find. Sites are broken down into categories, so you aren’t inundated with sites of no interest. But be warned: StumbleUpon is the enemy of workplace productivity.
 |
| Digg founder Kevin Rose regularly votes for stories on his own site. |
Don’t let your programming skills go to waste — build a custom, dynamic website.
The price of convenience is a lack of flexibility. You need no programming skills to use WordPress or Blogger, but that limits you to pretty basic point-and-click driven customisations and drop-in modules written by others. The alternative is to design your website yourself.
There’s a good and simple reason that the world has moved towards tools such as WordPress, though. Designing a small website has never been a difficult job, but with more than a few pages it can become laboriously time-consuming. As the Web 2.0 world comes to expect richer sites with more features and a professional look and layout, it isn’t getting any quicker or easier to build a site from scratch that won’t be a stylistic embarrassment. There’s nothing wrong with the notion of wanting a website that’s entirely your own design, and if you have the time it can be incredibly rewarding.
The easiest way to start is with a static site based purely on HTML and CSS. Static sites — those in which there exists a separate HTML file for each page, which can’t be changed either programmatically or by user input — do still exist. It’s a method that’s always tended to verge on being unviable for anything more than a few simple pages, but it does have its benefits.
A key advantage of the static HTML approach is that you can get the site off your local hard disk and onto the Internet very easily. Any Web host will do, including the free ones, since there’s no complex setup needed on the server side. With a static site, the visitor’s Web browser will ask the server for the page; the server will return the exact file that you created with no further processing required; and the browser will render it. To put the site on the Web, you can just copy the files across to the Web host using an FTP client such as Ipswitch WS_FTP.
The beguiling aspect of a static HTML site is its initial simplicity. You can make a static Web page by opening up Windows Notepad and typing something like this:
<html>
<head>
<title>This is the web</title>
</head>
<body>
A web page in just a few lines of HTML!
</body>
</html>
Save the file as text, but with a HTM or HTML file extension rather than the default TXT. Now double-click on it and it will open up in your Web browser in all its unstyled, static glory. In fact, even that’s more complex than is absolutely required. Those line breaks and several of the HTML tags (the parts in the pointy brackets) aren’t necessary to make the page open in a browser. You can even get away with a single-line page:
<html><body>A web page in one line of HTML!</body></html>
That, however, is verging on the criminally non-compliant.
Compliance is the key
In the early to mid-1990s, the HTML code behind most websites did indeed look just like the example above. Tim Berners-Lee, widely acknowledged as the inventor of the Web, developed HTML version one as a simple hypertext system. It was intended as a way of exchanging flat text documents, but with the ability to embed clickable ‘hyperlinks’ in that text which pointed to other documents. It was meant as a simple academic tool, not a distribution channel for mass media. But it was quickly hijacked and extended, with features such as the ability to change fonts, formatting and suchlike bolted on.
Then came the browser wars of the late 1990s, in which Netscape and Microsoft developed different, proprietary HTML extensions understood only by their own browsers. This resulted in a horrible, tangled mess of a World Wide Web, which started to accelerate away from Berners-Lee’s vision of a communication tool and towards a commercial conflict with battle-lines drawn along the traditional business principles of instant gratification and market share. Academic notions of purity went out of the window, as both Netscape and Microsoft stuffed their browsers full of features that would let people produce desktop publishing-style layouts using simple HTML. Hot on the heels of those extensions was the advent of DHTML (Dynamic HTML), allowing for animations and so on. This convenience-led approach ignored two things in particular: first, accessibility; second, the notion that it’s desirable to separate content from presentation.
After the turmoil of the 1990s, sanity has now pretty much prevailed. The Internet community, led by the World Wide Web Consortium or W3C, has blazed a trail in making the Web accessible for those with disabilities; publishing standards documents so that a Web page usually renders in the same way on all browsers; and hammering home the notion of separating content from presentation.
 |
| Tim Berners Lee is the father of the web. |
Building a website (cont.)
The Web 2.0 standardisation overhead
The downside of this move to a pure, consistent Web is that in order to be standards-compliant (and you owe it to the online community to make it so) you need a more formal approach to producing a site. There’s more boilerplate administration code required in order for your page to be properly understood and rendered correctly by a browser, and you can’t take quick-fix shortcuts to make your pages look the way you want. Here’s another very bad Web 1.0 example:
<html>
<body>
<font size = 20>A terrible old-school web page!</font>
<img src ="picture.jpg">
</body>
</html>
Quick and simple, but horribly wrong in the Web 2.0 world. The equivalent page, brought up to date to be standards-compliant, would look like this:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<title>Welcome to the 21st Century</title>
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
</head>
<body>
<div id="MainText">
A standards-compliant web page!
</div>
<div class="ImageBox">
<img src="./picture.jpg" alt = "A photograph of Tim Danton"/>
</div>
</body>
</html>
You can see that there are several lines in the file that are simply housekeeping, including the DOCTYPE declaration that tells the browser exactly which flavour of HTML you’re using — in this case, it’s XHTML, which is the W3C’s current preferred variant. But it’s no use declaring the type of HTML you’re using if the file then doesn’t comply with that definition. To check this, you can use the W3C validator engine, which will process the file and highlight any errors.
Accessibility
You’ll notice that the line telling the browser to display our picture (picture.jpg) contains what’s known as “alt text”. This is a textual description of the contents of an image, which is provided so that anyone with a sight disability can tell what the picture contains, via a Web page reader that reads out the contents of a page using speech synthesis or a Braille machine. All images in a W3C-compliant page must have alt text. If it isn’t there, the W3C validator will let you know and the validation will fail. This is just one example of the way in which Web pages should be designed and written in order to be accessible by those with disabilities. It’s another overhead, but one you must comply with.
In addition to the HTML file itself, for the standards-compliant version you also need a CSS (cascading style sheets) file that defines the visual aspects — the formatting and presentation — of the page via the Body, MainText and ImageBox styles referred to in our example HTML file. The good news is that CSS is beautifully elegant, intuitive and powerful once you get to know it. It’s also very readable, being written very nearly in plain English. The CSS file for our example might look like this:
body {
margin: 25px;
background-color: white;
border: 1px black;
text-align: left;
background-image : url(“background.jpg”);
}
#MainText {
font-family : sans-serif;
font-size : 11px;
}
#ImageBox {
width : 575px;
height : 625px;
background-color : pink;
border-style : solid;
border-width : 0;
border-color : black;
}
CSS earns its name because each property cascades downwards and remains in force until it’s subsequently overridden. So, for the “body” definition — the main style that applies to the page as a whole — we define white as the background colour. This will cascade down into the MainText definition, but in the ImageBox definition it’s overridden to be pink.
The joy of CSS is that you only need to write one file, which you can use with all your HTML pages by embedding the tag pointing to it in each page. This is the beauty of separating content from presentation: make one change to your CSS file and the presentation of all your HTML files will change too, saving time and allowing you to keep everything in sync. Not only that, but having content free of explicit formatting means you can apply different stylesheets depending on the context in which the page is being used. A good example is when printing the page: you can simply add a reference to a separate stylesheet so that when the page is sent to print the browser can, for instance, set the ImageBox background to white rather than pink (which will print as grey on a monochrome printer and probably look terrible).
The next step
Making your site accessible and compliant is the first step, but it’s currently more Web 1.5 than Web 2.0. To really get up to speed, your site needs to be dynamic. The definition of a dynamic site is simple: the pages that are served to site visitors don’t already exist as a file on a hard disk somewhere; they’re generated from templates plus scripts (or full-blown programs), processed by the server and delivered to the browser when they’re needed. This has enormous benefits. The first is that you can make your site database driven; there isn’t a major site on the planet today that isn’t. When you sign into MySpace, for example, the server will query its database for your ID, then extract all the relevant data it needs to render the welcome page: your default photo, profile text, messages from MySpace friends and so on. It then inserts these into the basic template, generating a complete page that didn’t previously exist, which is then delivered to the browser. Clearly, it would be impossible to maintain the site as static HTML.
 |
| Visual Web Developer Express Edition provides a complete development environment. |
First steps to a dynamic site
Dynamic websites are trickier than static ones when it comes to hosting. You need a host with Web servers that support whichever database and dynamic page-generation system you decide to use, and you need to make sure your Web-hosting plan allows you to use them. Things are getting much better in this regard: a few years back, you’d usually have to pay extra for any kind of database hosting or server-side scripting. Many hosts now provide the services as part of the standard package.
Which Web framework?
For small-scale sites, the most popular and arguably the easiest system to use for dynamic site generation is the trio of the Apache Web server, MySQL database server and the PHP server-side language. It also just so happens that all of those packages are free and open-source, and run better under Linux or Unix than Windows.
The Microsoft equivalent system is the combination of the IIS (Internet information services) Web server, Microsoft SQL server and the ASP.NET application language. The advantage of the Microsoft approach is expediency; Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition provides you with a complete development environment free of charge.
You can download it from the Express site, which includes plenty of tutorials.
The downside is that ISPs tend to support Apache, PHP and MySQL rather than Microsoft, and more ISPs charge for ASP.NET hosting than for PHP.
A rapidly rising alternative to those two is the Ruby on Rails system. This is a combination of the Ruby language and a Web-server framework called Rails. The developers claim the system allows you to set up a database-driven site from scratch within minutes, and there are convincing “screencasts” and tutorials to prove it at www.rubyonrails.org.
Not quite there yet
But even a dynamically generated site doesn’t necessarily equal Web 2.0. The pages are still static, in the sense that they’re delivered to the browser as an HTML file with a link to a stylesheet, which the browser will then render into the page. For the information on that page to change, the browser needs to send some information back to the server — for instance, if the user has clicked on the Submit button in a form. The server then processes that information and sends the browser a completely new page, even if only one small element of the page has changed as a result of the interaction.
Although there’s no formal definition, most Web developers will say that Web 2.0 implies an element of client-side processing, using DHTML or the current darling of the Web 2.0 world, AJAX. Standing for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, AJAX gathers together a conglomeration of techniques that allow for Web pages to query the server and update isolated parts themselves, without the whole page having to reload, and also process some types of user interaction locally without needing to hit the server at all. One of the best examples of the latter is Google’s personalised homepage feature, which uses JavaScript and DHTML to allow you to drag the contents of your chosen newsfeeds and widgets around the screen, rearranging them without any interaction with the server. There’s also Google Docs & Spreadsheets, which probably represents the pinnacle of what’s currently possible with AJAX. What AJAX gives you is behaviour that’s far more like a traditional local application than old-style websites.
The problem is that AJAX, being based on elements of DHMTL, JavaScript and XML, is a tricky technology to define and even more dastardly to implement. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to get your head around it without looking at some pre-built examples first.
One way to see it in action without too much pain is to download Sun’s amazing Java Studio Creator, which is another free, complete Web development environment that can build sites in a similar way to Visual Studio Web Developer Express.
The system installs a local Web and application server on your PC, so there’s no need to set up a Web host in order to test your applications. The great part about it is that there are pre-built examples of AJAX components (such as a progress bar and auto-updating text fields) and you can drag and drop AJAX components onto your application too. Be warned, though, that because it’s built around JSP (Java Server Pages), to use the resulting site you’ll need a host that supports JSP. Since it’s designed as a heavyweight business-oriented system, JSP hosts tend to be expensive. But the development environment is a great way to play with AJAX and see what’s possible.
 |
| Shopify is an example of what can be achieved with Ruby. |
We show you how to reach a worldwide audience in a matter of seconds.
Websites and blogs are a fine way of sharing news, but isn’t it time to embrace the visual age? Thanks to sites such as Flickr, PBase, Metacafe and, of course, YouTube, photos and video clips have become as easy to upload and broadcast as the written word. In their most basic form, these services give us the means to share photos or home movies with family and friends, but on the larger scale they enable a kind of amateur, collaborative broadcast, where the producers create what they want to create and the community of users decides what content sinks or swims.
These sites offer space to upload your media to their servers, and a range of tools with which to define who can see it and how they do so. These are more than basic Web galleries, however; you can accompany images or videos with text and categorise them via a system of intelligent, updateable metatags.
You can then collect them in albums, blogs or your own TV-style channels. Should your collections reach a wider audience than your friends and family, that audience needs a way to have its say, adding comments or ratings, even adding further metadata so others will find their way to your handiwork. It’s this social aspect that makes them so compelling; if enough people see and like what you do, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get your 15 minutes of fame.
The technology behind these sites is generally standard (and standards-compliant) stuff: Flash, PHP, MySQL, Java or Perl. On YouTube or Metacafe, you don’t even need to worry about file format conversions or plug-in viewers; the website does it all for you. Otherwise, the user benefits come mostly in space on a server that can handle thousands of concurrent users, ease of use and having a high-profile platform from which to operate; YouTube receives an estimated 72 million visitors each month.
For the service providers, the kickbacks vary. The photo-sharing service Pbase relies on subscriptions, charging a minimum US$23 a year for 400MB of server space, while the likes of Flickr, Metacafe and YouTube work on an advertising model, offering the service for free but earning revenue from embedded adverts. In some cases, content producers get their own cut. Metacafe’s rewards system means producers of successful videos can earn thousands of dollars.
Everyone knows this is a huge Web 2.0 growth area, and the long-established Internet players have been keen to get involved. Flickr is now part of the Yahoo empire, Microsoft is trialling its own YouTube-style service, MSN Soapbox, and nobody was particularly surprised when Google bought YouTube in October (although the US$1.65 billion price tag raised a few eyebrows). With more than 100 million clips viewed each day, the potential ad revenue is huge.
The fly in the ointment? Copyright. Within weeks of YouTube’s appearance, users had started to upload TV shows, music videos and movies, and Hollywood was quick to respond.
Universal Music is known to be taking legal action against similar video-sharing sites, Grouper.com and Bolt.com, while YouTube has so far staved off trouble through a search and destroy policy on copyrighted uploads, and by limiting clips to 10 minutes outside of a professional Premium Content program. However, the sheer volume of uploads makes filtering copyrighted material difficult, while users have worked around the latter by segmenting TV programmes into 10-minute chunks.
The only way forward seems to be closer cooperation with the studios and networks: YouTube has signed deals with CBS, Universal, Sony BMG, NBC and Warner Music Group to allow the distribution of copyrighted material for a share of the advertising revenue, with the companies reserving the right to block content.
Will such sites retain their appeal on a diet of pre-approved content? That’s the $1.65 billion question.
The Wikipedia Phenomenon
Wikipedia is one of the world’s biggest knowledge resources, offering a breadth of information that paper encyclopedias can only envy, and is constantly updated; within a day of the 2006 US mid-term election results coming through, you could see them displayed and dissected on the site. Yet Wikipedia isn’t a money-making exercise run by a vast team of experts. The world’s best-known free Internet encyclopedia is funded by a non-profit organisation, and created, edited and maintained by an immense team of ordinary volunteers.
Literally anyone with an Internet connection can contribute. Read an article and spot a mistake, and you can click on the blue “edit” or “expand” link, type your changes and upload them to the server — you don’t even need to log in to the service. Within minutes, someone else could then be editing your edit. The theory is based on the wisdom of crowds: if enough people work on an entry, biases, errors and omissions should gradually be ironed out. And as the Wiki technology it’s based on means articles can easily be reverted or revised, even the worst edit needn’t cause lasting damage.
Wikipedia is, if nothing else, utopian. While some critics see it as a free-for-all, the site has its own strict guidelines, espousing a neutral point of view in which all sides of any debate are represented fairly and equally, without any side given undue weight or stated as fact. The “no original research” rule makes an attempt to stave off oddball theories and unsupported opinion, while further regulations state that articles should only contain material that has been published by a reliable, verifiable source.
Up to a point, this works. Studies in the science journal Nature and The Journal of American History have reported that Wikipedia compares well with traditional encyclopedias for the veracity and depth of its coverage, although the Nature study was questioned by some sources, not least the Encyclopaedia Britannica. However, the ideal doesn’t always work. While around 2000 volunteers (with a 200-strong hard-core inner circle) patrol the articles, fix errors and battle transgressions, the sheer daily volume of edits and additions means anomalies slip through. Articles are regularly amended or vandalised by Neo-Nazis, shifty politicos or anyone else with a grudge to bear. “The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom,” Robert McHenry, a former Encyclopaedia Britannica editor-in-chief, has said. “It may be obviously dirty, so he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly doesn’t know is who’s used the facilities before him.”
Most notoriously, in November 2005, the retired journalist John Siegenthaler found his Wikipedia entry implicated him in the assassinations of John F and Robert Kennedy — the result of a stupid workplace prank.
What’s more, the Wiki approach doesn’t always make great copy; many entries suffer from an awful pseudo-academic style, repeated information and a lack of structure. And while the sheer number of articles is mindboggling — there are nearly 1.5 million of them, compared with 4500 on Encarta and 65,000 in the 2007 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica — the subject matter and weighting reveal the preoccupations of the Wiki hard-core. Socrates gets 4000 words, Michelangelo 3676, while Dr Who and Nintendo’s Mario boast more than 7000. But why gripe about Wikipedia’s faults when you can help to fix them yourself? Like it or not, Wikipedia is here to stay.
 |
| Wikipedia is updated so regularly that election results or critical reactions to a movie will be online within hours of them coming through. |