Web 2.0 News & Articles

The University of Phoenix and Institute for the Future recently combined forces in order to produce the Future Work Skills 2020 report, examining what exactly propel's change and which skills we'll have to fine tune if we want to keep up. 

Backbase (news, site), provider of the portal products for the financial services industry, announced the release of Backbase Forms 5.0, which completes the company’s Bank 2.0 Portal Suite. Backbase Forms allows non-technical users to update forms and define business rules with limited involvement from technology teams.

Successful community engagement takes more than just a worthy cause. It helps to have a useful, collaborative platform from which to organize events, facilitate fundraising and track supporters’ behavior effectively. Launched in April, NationBuilder aims to be a new community toolkit that connects community organizers with supporters so that non-profits, political campaigns and other community organizations can spend more time engaging, building and making a difference.

One way of making a website more interactive and up-to-date is by pulling content from other, relevant sources. While content aggregation is one thing, adding a social dimension to content mash-ups will make things more interesting. Popular social bookmarking site StumbleUpon (news, site) has launched an application that makes such sharing of content easier through widgets.

Social network behemoth Facebook (news, site) is receiving criticism yet again for acting first and explaining later -- this time with developers on its application framework. Facebook implemented a “new enforcement system” that resulted in several popular applications being disabled.

We’ve said it before: Data is getting bigger and more valuable. Modern consumption leaves a trail, and that left by Internet consumers is no different. Like a boat in a digital ocean, constant connectivity, rampant social media, location-aware mobile devices and other online interaction is leaving bits of debris behind -- data -- and marketers want it. Companies are aggregating this information in an attempt to have a more holistic image of the customer to engage more completely, but why should companies have all of the fun? A new brand of personal data aggregation services is emerging that changes things.

LinkedIn (news, site), went public yesterday, generating a barrage of press and headlines, and a lot of nostalgia for the dot-com days. Is this a sign of things to come?

Despite the recent move to a freemium model, WorkSimple (news, site) continues to add features to its platform. And yet the question remains: Is WorkSimple social goals management or micromanagement-as-a-service?

Clearspring (news, site), best known for its "AddThis" widgets for making it easier for readers to forward links to a page to their social media community, has raised an additional US$ 20 million, now from Silicon Valley investors -- and hinted that it might go public.

Today sees the kickoff for Internet World 2011 and we'll bring you all the news and events throughout the three days of speeches, keynotes, news and any rumors or gossip that emerges.

The Web, according to Jon Udell, is constructed of a number of small, easy to understand building blocks. Yet while billions of people make use of the Web every day, few really understand its fundamental concepts. This leads to a poor use of the Internet and greatly reduces the reach and effectiveness of the information produced.

According to Udell, by creating products and information services in accordance with the key concepts, we can make the Web a better place -- one that is is more useful to humanity as a whole.

Udell's seven key Web concepts:

1. Authority
2. Indirection
3. Structure
4. Naming
5. Scope
6. Publish / Subscribe
7. Services

This morning at the J. Boye 2011 conference in Philadelphia Jon expanded on each of these ideas. In the following video is he spends 44 minutes digging through the details and illustrating them via a pet project called Elm City.

You may want to skip around if you're viewing this at work. We also apologize for the dim video lighting -- we were shooting in a low light environment with a bright background. Not ideal.

Here is a section index for the video: Topic Introduction (00:00-07:18), Elm City Example Project Intro (07:18-10:18), Authority Concept Discussion (10:19-14:39), Indirection Concept Discussion (14:40-19:28), Structure Concept Discussion (19:29-26:10), Naming Concept Discussion (26:11-34:34), Scope Concept Discussion (34:35-38:38), Publish/Subscribe Concept Discussion (38:39-41:10), Services Concept Discussion + Wrap-up (41:11-End).

What I enjoyed most about Jon's talk was the discussion of tags as information services. I think this is an extremely powerful idea and one that is probably under appreciated. We tend to rely on Google or some form of an index to locate information we want. But tags used well have almost the same mind-boggling power as a major search engine, without requiring anything like the same brain or CPU power. Jon illustrated this with a Yahoo! Pipes example and discussed the concepts more generally in the "Naming" part of the video (minutes 26:11-34:34).

What does a former attorney and Blackjack Tournament winner have in common with some of the most prestigious media outlets? According to Sheldon Goldberg, targeted online advertising. And that’s why he’s suing them.

ECM platform provider OpenText (news, site) has made its Web Experience Management offering just a little more engaging. The company has announced improved digital media handling capabilities in the product, including support for mobile devices such as the iPad.

Microsoft (news, site) was showing off some early code for IE10 and Windows 8, but you can actually go play with the in-development browser right now.

Cotendo, a site acceleration and content delivery network (CDN), announced the general availability of a cloud-based CDN, Cloudlet. The CDN provides better support for targeted and personalized content, a necessity for Web 2.0 style sites.