A list of basic resources on Web 2.0 concepts and tools

These days I'm busy revising and rewriting some study materials for our E-business course. In this year we'll hopefully be adding a chapter dedicated to currently popular web tools and concepts. For this purpose I've written a quick guide to some Web 2.0 concepts and tools (although I think that the best way for our students to learn about Web 2.0 would be to let them create their own study material using collaboration and Web 2.0 tools).

In this post I'm sharing a list* of web resources that were the most useful to me while writing about these concepts. I hope the listed resources might also be useful (or at least interesting) for you.

Web 2.0 defined:

• Tim O'Reilly: What Is Web 2.0 (the essential Web 2.0 article)
• Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0: "nobody even knows what it means" (if you want to be fair you've got to show other opinions as well)

Web 2.0 related concepts:

• Chris Anderson: The Long Tail (THE Wired article that put a name on the Long Tail)
• Brynjolfsson, Hu & Smith: From Niches to Riches: The Anatomy of the Long Tail (an interesting research paper about the Long Tail phenomena)
• Tony Zhu: Google PageRank: Facts and Fiction (a simple yet interesting Q&A list of facts about Google's PageRank algorithm)
  
• Wired News: Folksonomies Tap People Power (about tagging content and the value it adds to web content)
  
• Dick Weisinger: Metadata: Folksonomy and the Art of Tagging in the Enterprise (thoughts about using folksonomy in the enterprise world)

About wikis:

• Brian Lamb: Wide Open Spaces: Wikis Ready or Not (an article about wikis and the use of wikis in education)
  
• Tom Stafford & Matt Webb: What Is a Wiki (and How to Use One for Your Projects) (a guide for choosing and using a wiki system for different projects)
• Tim Duckett: Four ways to use wikis for project management
  
• Philip Evans: The Wiki Factor (about why wikis are important for business students)
• Wired News: Wikipedia, Britannica: A Toss-Up (yet another article about the comparison of Wikipedia and Britannica)

Some public wikis that might be interesting for our students:

• Wikibooks (freely available wiki books - for business students there's also a business bookshelf)
  
• Wikiversity (learning materials and activities)
  
• Wikimapia (a wiki system that uses Google maps and on which you can add info about locations all around the world)
  
• Wiktionary (a wiki dictionary)

About blogs/blogging:

• Wikipedia: Blog (the Wikipedia article about blogs is imho quite good - I especially like the part about types of blogs)
• Anne Bartlett-Bragg: Blogging to Learn (a paper about blogs in general and more specifically about blogging in education)
  
• Tim Duckett: 10 ways to use blogs for managing projects
  
• Neville Hobson: Blog vs forum: What's the difference? (some thoughts about the differences in focus between blogs and forums)

About web feeds:

• Will Richardson: RSS: A Quick Start Guide for Educators (a really simple guide about web feeds)
• Heinz Tschabitscher: RSS Feeds are the Better Email Newsletters (some advantages of web feeds over traditional email newsletters)

*Do note that this is a very basic list of resources. If you think I've missed any important or interesting links please leave me a comment :)

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Note: This is just an archive post. The blog has moved to a new home at blog.ialja.com, where you will also find a copy of the entire blog.

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