How To Get Started With Web Trends and the Social Web
By Daniel Nations, About.com Guide to Web Trends
The Internet is evolving, and Web 2.0 is changing the way we interact online. This guide will help those new to the social web gain an understanding of social networking, social bookmarking, social news, personalized start pages, and other aspects of the new Internet that can help gain increased productivity or, simply, have more fun.
Social Bookmarking
Having started out as a way to store your browser bookmarks online so that you can utilize them on different computers and share them with friends, social bookmarking has grown to such an extent that it can now be used to search the web instead of relying on traditional search engines.
- What is Social Bookmarking?
- How To Get Started With Social Bookmarking
- Social Bookmarking as a Search Engine
Social Networking
Whether it is gathering businesses relationships, or making friends, social networking has always been a central force in our lives. Web 2.0 is bringing social networks alive on the web by merging new technologies with the Internet.
- Social Networking Basics
- How to Get Started With Social Networking
- How to Create Your Own Social Network on Ning
- Social Blogging - What Is Xanga?
- The Top Social Networking Sites
Social News
Spawned from social bookmarking, social news is a great way to find the quality articles in an ocean of news and to engage in discussions about current events, sports, technology, or other interesting subjects.
Personalized Start Pages
A replacement to popular search portals like Google and Yahoo, personalized start pages let you gather what is important to you in a central place and are increasingly being used to boost productivity by keeping up with to-do lists and acting as an event scheduler.
Wikis
A simple collaborative content management system, wikis have burned through the Internet like a wildfire. Their ease-of-use and ability to pool together the knowledge of people from all over the world have made them a popular resource for the web savvy and the web novice alike.
Widgets
A great source of utility and fun, widgets are broken into two basic categories: the web widget and the desktop widget. A web widget is a small piece of code that can be placed on a website or blog, such as embedding a video from YouTube. A desktop widget is a small application that runs on your desktop, sometimes accessing the Internet for information, such as a desktop widget that shows the local temperature and weather.
