History of the World Wide Web 2.0

A Short History of the World Wide Web 2.0

ARPANET:

World Wide Web 2.0 sounds like another one of those modern day catch phrases. Nobody wants to take the time to consider how long it took to create, or who was involved in creating it. Most people are way too busy and don’t want to stop and think about the Internet or how it started.

The Internet like most modern day inventions started out rather innocently. It’s basically, when you consider the topographical lay out, and the internetwork connectivity, and the almost instant access to any part of the world a huge global network. If you don’t count the government, commercial, and privately owned LANs’ there are no real restrictions to worldwide access, other than hardware and connection speed, to most of the web sites, and they are available to anyone with a web browser, a credit card, and an ISP. Most of the web sites on the Internet are privately controlled and are free to visit. Although, on some of them there are ads, andyou must be a registered user, and others charge a fee to use their services. There’s no real centralization or control over the World Wide Web, or the traffic that passes over it, and there very possibly never will be.

The history of the Internet began with the development of computers in the 1950s. This began with point-to-point communication between mainframe computers and terminals, and expanded to point-to-point connections between computers, and then early research into packet switching. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking, where multiple separate networks could be joined together into a network of networks. Under ARPANET several major innovations occurred: email (or electronic mail), the ability to send simple messages to another person across the network in 1971, telnet a remote connection service for accessing another computer in 1972, and FTP (file transfer protocol), which allows information to be sent from one computer to another in 1973.

ARPANET a project funded by the department of defense in 1969 was started in California with three computers connected to one computer in Utah. Networking nodes were set up at UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California Santa Barbra, and the University of Utah. In 1972 TCP/IP protocols replaced NCP (Network Control Program) as the ARPANET’s principal protocol, and ARPANET became a component of the early Internet.In 1984, DNS was introduced and the number of computers on the network exceeded 1,000. Commercial internet service providers (ISPs) began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s. The ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, and in 1990 world.std.com become the first commercial provider of dial-up Internet access. The Internet was commercialized by 1995.

Search Engines:

Even before the World Wide Web, there were search engines that attempted to organize the Internet. The first of these was the Archie search engine from McGill University in 1990, followed in 1991 by WAIS and Gopher. All three of these systems predated the invention of the World Wide Web, but all continued to index the Web and the rest of the Internet for several years after the Web appeared.

As the Web grew search engines and Web directories were created to track pages on the Web and allow people to find things. The first full-text Web search engine was WebCrawler in 1994. Before WebCrawler only Web page titles were searched. Another early search engine, Lycos created in 1993 was a university project and was the first to achieve commercial success. During the late 1990s, both Web directories and Web search engines were popular. Yahoo! founded 1994, and Altavista founded in 1995 were the respective industry leaders. By August 2001, the directory model had begun to give way to search engines, and Google was founded in 1998. Directory features while still commonly available became after-thoughts to search engines. On June 3, 2009, Microsoft launched its new search engine Bing. The following month Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.

The NeXTcube used by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN became the first Web server

Web 2.0

Beginning in 2002, new ideas for sharing and exchanging content ad hoc, such as Weblogs and RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. This new model for information exchange and sharing was coined Web 2.0. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, video sharing sites, mashups and folksonomiesWeb 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. By increasing what was already possible in “Web 1.0“, they provide the user with a user friendly interface, software and storage facilities, and new applications to power new technology. Users can provide the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise some control over that data. A third important part of Web 2.0 is the social Web. This was a fundamental change in the way people communicated over a network. The social web consists of a number of online tools and platforms where people share their perspectives, opinions, thoughts and experiences. Web 2.0 applications tend to interact much more with the end user. The end user is not only a user of the application but also a participant. Blogs, wikis and RSS are often held up as exemplary manifestations of Web 2.0. A reader of a blog or a wiki is provided with tools to add their own comments and even, in the case of the wiki, to edit the content.

Blogs:

The history of blogging started with several digital precursors. Before “blogging” became popular, digital communities took many forms, including Usenet, commercial online services such as GEnie, BiX and the early CompuServe, e-mail lists and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS). In the 1990s, Internet forum software, such as WebEx, created running conversations with “threads”.Usenet was one of the primary serial medium included in the original definition of the Internet. It featured the moderated newsgroup which allowed all posting in a newsgroup to be under the control of an individual or small group. Most such newsgroups were simply moderated discussion forums. After a slow start, blogging rapidly gained in popularity. Blog usage spread during 1999 and the years following. The short form of weblog, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used “blog” as both a noun and verb (“blog” meaning to edit one’s weblog or to post to one’s weblog) and devised the term “blogger” in connection with Pyra Labs’ Blogger product leading to the popularization of the terms. A history of Blogging can be found here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging.

Wikipiedia:

The “wiki” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia was launched in January 2001.Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Wikipiedia grew to approximately 20,000 articles and 18 language editions by the end of 2001. By late 2002, it had reached 26 language editions, 46 by the end of 2003, and 161 by the final days of 2004. English Wikipedia passed the two million-article mark on September 9, 2007, making it the largest encyclopedia ever assembled.

RSS:

RSS originally RDF Site Summary, often dubbed Really Simple Syndication is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video in a standardized format. An RSS document which is called a feed, web feed, or channel includes full or summarized text plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship.RSS feeds can be read using software called an RSS reader, feed reader, or aggregator, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The basic idea of restructuring information about websites goes back to early 1995, when Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group developed the Meta Content Framework.The first version of RSS, was created at Netscape. It was released in March 1999 for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal. This version became known as RSS 0.9. In July 1999, Netscape produced a new version, RSS 0.91, which simplified the format.

There is a lot more on the Internet than just the Web 2.0. There are sites about all most everything you can think of and new ones are sure to be on the way. The only real problem we have is in finding and using them. The idea of an Internet, as we have come to know it, is still the same as it was when it started. We have only changed the technology and added a few new ideas here and there to help run it. Programs, protocols,applications, hardware, and a lot of hard work have helped changed it into the World Wide Web 2.0. that we know and use today. The idea of the first network that started the modern Internet was on a much smaller scale then what was finally visualized, but without it and the Web 2.0 where would we be today?

Bibliography:

Gralla, Preston. How the Internet Works. 8th ed. Indianapolis, In.: Que, 2007. Print.

Internet History. “History of the Internet” Wikipedia.org. 17 March 2012. Web. 9 March 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

Arpanet’s Start, “ARPANET” Wikipedia.org. 7 March 2012. Web. 12 March 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arpanet

RSS Feeds. “RSS” Wikipedia.org. 15 March 2012. Web. 15 March 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_feeds

Invention. “Inventors of the modern Computer.” About.com. n.d. Web. 16 March 2012

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa091598.htm

Web 2.0. “What is Web 2.0 Anyway.”.techsoup.org. n.d. Web. 17 March 2012

http://www.techsoup.org/learningcenter/webbuilding/archives/page9344.cfm

Posted by Roy McGregor

Here’s a link to my web cast at Youtube.
http://youtu.be/zUl5775CmeQ
Some of the effects that come with web cams are fun to use. The avitars and filters can change your appearance and make you look like somebody else. There are also backgrounds you can use to make your web cast more interesting. The video chat for person to person is another option. If you buy one you should do some research ahead of time to find one you will like. Here’s a link to a Youtube review of a logitech web cam.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyebAe-U_gM&feature=related

I find the Face book concept kind of like a good versus the bad type of social interaction. On the good side you have all of your friends and you can share photos and chat. You can meet new people and talk about things that interest you. It all sounds good, right.
Now the bad side. Anyone, anyware, with a computer, and a face book account can find you and get all kinds of information about you. Were you live, what you look like, how old you are, and all kinds of other stuff.
It’s another one of those new web technologies that have been developed from the Internet that might have been put to better use.

Here’s a link to a Youtube video about Wikipidia and how they started.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVFPW0r4jWk&feature=related
I think one of the main problems with wikis’ and the web 2.0 in general is that there is way too much information out there to read, watch, or just surf. Even with a fast connection you could spend all your spare time on the net and never get very much of anything else done. All that information could send certain people into a state confusion or mental collapse of some kind if they were not careful.
Roy McGregor.

One of the options Internet surfers have always had available to them are the radio and television web sites. There are sites running for most of the local stations now. I don’t think a lot of people use them very much because of all the other things they have going on every day. There are also the newspapers, and the schools, and other types like the free movies sites that are out there just waiting for people to log on to. Here are links to a radio talk show and one for free television shows.

http://www.komando.com/

http://www.hulu.com/

The online gaming aspects of the web 2.0 world are one of the options that people might forget to look at. Online gaming started with the old multi-player on-line games and transformed into the World of WarCraft and the many other types of pay for play games. Now there are so many online, multi-player, and pay for play games, and sites there’s no way to keep track of them all. It’s hard to imagine where all of it is going to lead.

Here are some links to online gaming sites:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/?-

http://worldoftanks.com/

A History of Google Docs:

Google Docs is a free, Web-based office suite and data storage service offered by Google. It allows users to create and edit documents online while collaborating in real-time with other users. Google Docs combines the features of Writely and Spreadsheets with a presentation program incorporating technology designed by Tonic Systems. Data storage of files up to 1 GB total in size was introduced on January 13, 2010, but has since been increased to 10GB, documents created inside Google Docs do not count towards this quota. The largely anticipated cloud storage feature by Google is said to be replacing most of Docs’ features in 2012.

Google Docs originated from two separate products, Writely and Google Spreadsheets. Writely was a web-based word processor created by the software company Upstartle and launched in August 2005. Spreadsheets, launched as Google Labs Spreadsheets on June 6, 2006, originated from the acquisition of the XL2Web product by 2Web Technologies.

Google Docs is Google’s “software as a service” office suite. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations can be created with Google Docs, imported through the web interface, or sent via email. Documents can be saved to a user’s local computer in a variety of formats ODF, HTML, PDF, RTF, Text, Microsoft Office. Documents are automatically saved to Google’s servers to prevent data loss, and a revision history is automatically kept so past edits may be viewed (although this only works for adjacent revisions, and there is currently no way to find and isolate changes in long documents.). Documents can be tagged and archived for organizational purposes. The service is officially supported on recent versions of the Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Chrome browsers running on Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux operating systems.

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs

My photos are on Photobucket. It was the easiest for me to create an account there. Some of the web 2.0 sites are easier to use and to understand for me, and I’m now fairly good at figuring out some of the options on the various sites. Some of the sites are not as easy as they look to navigate on. They should make the sign up pages as simple as possible for people to log on to and to get started on. I think many people like me must be intimidated by all the pictures, links, and options when they first log onto some of the web sites. It seems kind of strange that no one, to the best of my knowledge, has ever brought this problem up before. Still I think the photo sharing sites are a good addition to the web 2.0 experience.

Here is the link to my photos:

http://s1245.photobucket.com/albums/gg582/RoyMcGregor/#!cpZZ1QQtppZZ16

Social tagging:

Social tagging is like a really big collection of favorites that are saved on an Internet web site. There’re saved according to different topics and offered as web links to the members of the site. The web links or pages are chosen by members of the service and posted on the web site as links. The site organizes the links into categories and posts them on the web site as links for the members to view. The book marking services or sites also offer other links, or options such as links to blogs, or options for adding comments, or following a page, or a topic, or a poster.

They seem like a great way to find topics and web sites that you might not be able to find any other way. They’re more refined than the other search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing, in their own way They almost seem to have a human touch, if that is possible on the Internet, as they are not just randomly generated by a search engine on a server somewere someplace.

Twitter and the New Social Media Sites:

Why do people feel they need to communicate their endless, mindless, and somewhat useless facts, and information about their daily lives to all the people in the world to read on Twitter and the other blogging and media sites?

            Maybe they feel left out of the mind-numbing daily assault of the public media. Maybe they’re just trying to get back at them for all the pain and suffering they’ve had to endure every day for years. Maybe they just want to meet new people, talk to old friends, and influence new ones.

            Whatever the reason, the Internet has definitely changed the way people look at the world and will continue to do so until we find something new to take its place. The world as we know it is a thing of the past. If we want to stay in touch and up to date with what’s going on in the world and what is happening around us we are going to have to keep up with the new world order on the Internet.