THE SOCIAL WEB

Over the last few years there have been significant shifts in the way people are using the web and the kinds of services that are emerging in response to the way people want to use the web. A number of factors are associated with this shift but amongst them are web-based technologies that make it almost effortless for individuals to contribute to web based discussion; the spread of broadband services enabling the sharing of multimedia files; and the growth in web-services that support social interaction and exchange in one form or another. Whether it’s sharing bookmarks in del.icio.us ; photos in flickr.com ; videos in youtube.com ; opinions in blogger.com ; knowledge in wikipedia.org ; or friendship in myspace.com the web has become much more social in nature and much (though not all) of this web based interaction is used for informal learning about hobbies, passions, and obsessions. For many thousands of people the social web - or web 2.0 as it has been labeled - is a place for networking, community building and sharing collective experience: leading some to describe this new phenomenon of massively distributed collective intelligence as “the wisdom of crowds” . Some of the technologies and techniques used to support informal learning on a massive scale will be familiar to you, others less so: we describe five of them below: blogs; wikis; podcasts; social bookmarking; and RSS.

Next >> Blogs and blogging