An aggregator, or feed aggregator, is the same idea as an RSS feed reader. An aggregator is a piece of software or an account on the web that is used to collect or subscribe to RSS feeds. Bloglines.com is a free online RSS feed aggregator--one place to collect the RSS feeds to which you wish to subscribe.

iTunes is even an RSS feed aggregator for podcasts. You can subscribe to podcast series in iTunes. Each time a new podcast is created in a podcast series to which you have subscribed, iTunes automatically downloads it to your computer for you.

See also: RSS
Wikipedia Link: Aggregator

The above Wikipedia article includes a list of links to several aggregators for RSS feeds, media feeds, and assorted feeds.

Dictionary.com Link: Aggregator (about the 3rd definition)

One of the powerful features of most blogs is the work the blog system does, in the background without your ever being much aware of it, to keep things nice and organized for you. So think of archiving as keep things organized. Every time you post you give give your post a title, and a body, and you associate your post with at least one category (and hopefully at least one tag)--really a very simple process. In fact, it's just as easy as sending an email!

But the blogging system is adding extra information to your post for you. It knows who you are based on how you logged in, so the system assigns your name as the author: Post by: Tim Tyson. It also looked at the clock on your computer to get the date and time you published your post and saved that information with the post too: Posted by: Tim Tyson on June 19, 2007, at 9:31PM. The blogging system then files all of this away neatly for you and your visitors.

So when a reader clicks on the June, 2007, archive link in the sidebar, the blogging system knows to bring up that post that was posted by: Tim Tyson on June 19, 2007, at 9:31PM, and all of the other posts with a publication date in the month of June, 2007. This is part of the archiving process that makes blogging systems so popular. Archives keep things neatly organized! There are usually three types of archives created by most blogging systems:

• Date-based
• Category-based
• Individual Entry-based

Each entry is automatically filed away in each of these areas. I just explained the date-based archive in the paragraph above. Now let's look at the category-based archive. If you associated a post you published back in 2005 with a "Curriculum" category and a reader clicks on the "Curriculum" archive link today, your post from 2005 will be included in the list of all of the posts you ever assigned to the "curriculum" category. The blog never forgets. It never loses your post. It always knows where to find things!

The last type of archive is individual-entry-based. It's just that--a link to one individual entry. It is a permanent link that never changes and only applies to that one single post. Each post you publish is assigned this permalink. You can learn more about the permalink by clicking on this link (which is the permalink for the post about the permalink!). The permalink is an individual entry-based archive. It is a permanent link to an individual entry you have published. When you clicked on the "Curriculum" category archive link mentioned in the paragraph above, you got a complete list of all of the posts in that category. Each title in the list is a link to that single entry. If you click on the title (a permalink), you go to that individual entry. You can use these individual entry-based archive permalinks (now that was a mouthful) in a variety of ways discussed in this post on permalinks.

The banner on a blog is the top section of the page in which the name and a description of the blog typically appear. The banner is frequently rather constant, changing rarely. Often the banner appears on every page of the blog. Frequently, under the banner, the user will find navigation links to different sections of the blog. These are meant to be eye catching and brand the blog to the viewing public. Below is an example of a banner. It includes the blog's name, "The Clem 2005" it's description, "Room 204," and navigation links, "Home, About, Contact, Contribute, Links" as well as links to the blog's RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds. What I really like about this banner is that it suggests something to the reader. What does it quietly suggest to you?

So my point is this: give some thought to what you use for a banner. Make it well represent who and what your bog is about. And also keep in mind that if you choose to uea large picture for your banner, it will take some time to download on the page, especially for users with slow internet access.

A website that is very easy to maintain. If you can send an email, you can publish to a blog. Typically blogs contain entries that are published to the site in reverse chronological order: the most recent post appearing at the top. Blogs frequently invite interaction from readers and often feature photos, videos, podcasts, text, links to sources, and are therefore considered an integral part of social networking.

Wikipedia Link: Blog
Related Wikipedia Links

• Blog software
• Blogger
• Blogger's Code of Conduct
• Blogskin
• BROG - (We)blog Research on Genre project
• Citizen journalism
• Collaborative blog
• Corporate blog
• Dream blog
• Edublog
• Google bomb
• List of blogging terms
• Blog search engines
• List of social networking websites - includes many blog and journal sites
• Massively distributed collaboration
• Online diary - the precursor to blogs
• Political blog
• Project blog
• Tumblelog - a related form of social media featuring smaller, more frequent posts
• User-generated content
• Webmaster

Dictionary.com Link: Blog

Sometimes a blogger will want to share on his or her blog a list of the blogs he or she reads personally. Most of the time this is done in the sidebar and is called a Blogroll. With advanced uses of RSS, the blog owner can even have the blogroll include titles and even summaries of recent posts to the blogs in the blogroll.

Wikipedia Link: Blogroll

When you set up your blog you can define the categories you want to use. These categories can be anything you, as the owner of the blog, want them to be. Naturally, you would want the categories to be related to the broad themes of your blog. The categories would then serve as a natural way to organize the material you post. The categories are typically listed as links in the sidebar of your blog. When a user clicks on one of your category links, only the posts you have assigned to that category appear in the main area of your blog.

If you are using your blog as a central hub for your classroom, you might decide to use categories like these:

• Assessments
• Extend Your Learning
• General Information
• Homework
• Projects
• Podcasts
• Student Posts
• Today In Class

Each post you publish is then associated with one or more of your categories. So if your post contained general information, such as your classroom policies (including your guidelines for turning in homework), you could assign the post to the two categories: "General Information" and "Homework." You would want the categories you create and associate with each post to appear logical to the user.

Some blogging systems even allow you to have two types of categories: Top Level Categories and Subcategories. These usually appear in an outline format in the sidebar. The subcategories are indented under the top level categories. You can find an example at this blog called Podcast Central.

A word of caution: Don't create too many categories as you might make finding information on your blog too complicated for your readers. And, conversely, don't have too few categories.

And one final thing: Blogger refers to categories in two ways. Sometimes they call them labels and sometimes they call them categories.

A blog can have one column, two, three, even more. Sometimes multiple columns can become confusing to your reader. Have style, but also be user friendly. Perhaps the most common blog layout is two columns as pictured on the left. The smaller right hand column in the example is the sidebar. On the right is an example of a three column layout. Both of the smaller columns on the right would be considered sidebars.

One of the powerful features of a blog is building a sense of community, developing a "conversation" between you and your visitors. This is frequently done by allowing readers to comment to what you post. In most blogging applications, you can choose to allow comments or not. If you choose to allow people to comment to your blog, you can then choose to have their comments post to the blog immediately (unmoderated) or only after they have been approved (moderated) by you.

In the school setting, when comments are open, I would strongly suggest you moderate all comments. While some more advanced blog systems allow the owner to restrict comments to members only, usually anyone in the world can comment rather anonymously to your blog if you open comments. Comments can be a powerful and positive tool. They can also be very abused. Spam can also be posted in comments advertising anything you can imagine.

If you choose to allow comments, teaching your students how to comment appropriately is just as important as teaching them to ask meaningful questions in class. Comments that are reflective and represent intelligent behaviors are a welcomed addition to the learning process. Comments that are inappropriate, offensive, or unrelated to learning can minimize the effectiveness of this learning tool.

One final word on comments: I have referred to comments as being open (on) or not available at all (off). But comments can also be closed. Most blog systems allow you to open comments and then, after you feel the need for the comments has passed, close the post to comments. When comments are closed, the reader can see the previous comments that were published to the post but can not add a new comment.

Think of ways you could use comments to enhance learning on your blog. What are the trade-offs involved?

[As a teaching tool, I have opened comments to this blog. Counting on your professionalism as part of this learning community, I have not chosen to moderate the comments, so comments are not required to be approved before they appear. To comment to a post simply click on the word "Comments" in the footer of each entry. The number next to the word "Comments" indicates the number of comments already published to that post. My comments are set up to require the commenter provide an email address. Under what conditions might this be wise in the school setting?]

See post.

Some blog systems allow you to create an excerpt for your RSS feed. The excerpt is just a teaser or a small portion of your original post. For those who read your blog through RSS, this is what will represent the post. Choose wisely what you use as an excerpt. If your RSS feed has interesting excerpts, you will entice your RSS readers to click on the link to read the entire post.

Excerpts are usually completely optional.

Most posts should be rather short and to the point. Readers typically desire quick access to important information on a blog not extended meanderings through a lengthy topic. But sometimes the blog author may need to write a lengthy post. If you need to publish a long post but do not want it to fill up your main page, forcing the reader to keep scrolling down, down, down to get to the next post, you can use the extended entry.

The material you place in your extended entry does not appear on your main page. Instead, at the end of the main post section the reader will see a link that usually expresses something like this: Click here to continue reading this post. When the reader clicks that link, everything you have included in the lengthy extended section of your post will then appear. I have provided ...

Continue reading "Extended Entry" »

You will find two types of footers: those at the end of each post, and sometimes, though less often, a footer at the end of the main blog window. As of this writing I have not included the later. But such a footer at the end of the main page could be a convenient way of presenting links, contact information, or branding for a blog. Footers, like banners, typically remain constant, rarely changing.

However, you will notice that at the end of every post in The Geek Glossary is a footer that tells you who published the post (convenient when your blog has multiple authors), the date and time the post was published, the permanent link to the post, and a link to comment and read comments.

Some blogging systems allow you to assign keywords to a post. Keywords help the search feature of the blog work a little bit faster.

Links to other blogs or websites is an important feature of the web, allowing us the capacity to connect to a learning community. Unlike books, which remain static on the page, a blog can take us places, extending our learning and thinking beyond that of one source. I strongly encourage you to become adept at placing links on your blog. This is not hard to do!

Many blog systems have a simple tool to allow you to highlight the text you want to become the link and then assign the web address to that text. I encourage you to navigate to a web address, copy it, and then paste the web address to your posts. Web addresses can be easily mistyped, making them useless.

If your blogging system does not have a tool to make posting links simple, below is the html code to use in your post that will accomplish the same thing. The blue parts must appear exactly as typed, and don't forget both of those tiny little quotation marks! You would change the red parts to make them read exactly what you want them to say.

<a href="Paste_the_exact_complete_web_address_here_beginning_with_http">This is the text the reader sees in your post that serves as the actual link that is usually blue and underlined</a>

Here is an example:

"Click here to visit my site." actually looks like this in the html code: "Click <a href="http://drtimtyson.com/">here</a> to visit my site." You can do some other fancy things to the link if you want. The example below is the same link code but will do two new things to the link: 1) When the user clicks on the link the site opens in a new window. 2) If the user holds the mouse over the link without clicking on it, a little box pops up that says, "This guy is a great person!"

Now "Click here to visit my site." actually looks like this in the html code: "Click <a href="http://drtimtyson.com/" target="_blank" title="This guys is a great person!">here</a> to visit my site." The additional target tag (in bold black)opens the site in a new window. The additional title tag (in bold green) creates the little pop up when the mouse hovers over the link without clicking on it.

A common problem is the link going on the the end of your entire post--everything is the link. If that happens, you simply forgot to put the last little tag at the end of the link: </a>

On many blogging systems the sidebar contains sections. Each section is typically referred to as a module. In The Geek Glossary blog, the sidebar only contains two modules: a search module and a widget. Modules usually have a title and then the module's content.

Often a blog has several sections. Common sections might include:

• About
• Contact
• Picture Gallery
• Links

Each of these sections might be a separate page. For example, the About page could contain information about you, your school, your classes. In many blog systems you can include links to help your readers navigate to these special pages. The navigation links are often placed under the banner or in the sidebar by editing the template of those areas to include them.

Posts do not stay on your main blog page forever. You decide when you set up your blog how long you want your posts to remain on the main page. Display setting might be: "display posts for 10 days," or "display the last 20 posts." So what happens to the post when it is 11 days old and it disappears, or when it is post number 21? It automatically goes into the archive of your blog.

Each post always has a permanent link to that individual post. So when it disappears, you can use that link to go to the post. Sometimes the permalink, as it is called, appears under the post and says: permalink. Sometimes the title of the post is also a permalink to that post.

So how do you get the permalink to a post that no longer appears on your main page? You can use your blog's search function to find the post. Locate the permalink on the post when you find it. And then you can paste that link in a new post to refer to the original post.

Here's an example:
"Remember class, we first learned about the order of operations three weeks ago. You can refresh your memory by clicking on this link to that post. Now we will learn an additional step to this process." In this example you would include the permalink to the original post, which has long since disappeared from your blog's main page, on the order of operations in the bold text.

Click on the permalink in the footer of this post to see what an individual entry link produces.

Pings can be sent by some blogging systems to let search engines know you have published a new post. You may not initially have a need to "turn pings on" for your blog if you are only targeting your student and parent audience.

Some blogging systems allow the blog owner to install third party plug ins that add additional functionality to the blog. For example: MovableType, a powerful blogging solution, allows the owner to install plugins such as Workflow. The Workflow plugin allows the blog owner to have editors on the blog. Students can be editors. When they "publish" the post goes to the author, the teacher, for approval. If the teacher approves the post it is then published to the blog. Plugins are an advanced feature that most beginning bloggers will not yet need to use.

A podcast can be several things. In its broadest sense, a podcast is digital media that you can listen to or see whenever you want. Unlike a broadcast, which you have to watch or hear when it "airs," a podcast can be very portable. You can experience it whenever and where ever you want--place and time shifted would be the geeky way to talk about it. :o)

In its simplest form, a podcast is an audio file on the internet. You can listen to it on your computer. You can download and save it to your mp3 player. Once it is on your mp3 player, you can listen to it whenever you want. The most popular mp3 player on the market today is the iPod.

Podcasts can also be video files. Just like the audio podcast, these can be viewed in your browser on your computer. They can also be downloaded to a video iPod or other supported player.

Perhaps the most powerful aspect of the podcast technology is that it can be combined with RSS. As a teacher, you could have a podcast series for your class. Using RSS, anyone in the world could subscribe to your podcast series. Once a user subscribes, every time you publish a new episode to your podcast series, everyone who subscribed to it automatically gets a copy downloaded to his/her computer. If they use an RSS aggregator like iTunes, the next time the user plugs in his/her iPod, the podcast is downloaded to the iPod.

Podcasts are much easier to create than most people realize. In fact, the most complicated part of making a podcast is creating quality content, not the technical aspects of making the podcast!

The iTunes store has many, many podcasts for education. You can browse them K-12 and higher education. You can also search for specific content keywords.

Wikipedia Link: Podcast
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Podcasting Directories

Dictionary.com Link: Podcast

The post (noun) is the very heart of the blog. Each post is an entry the author publishes. Because publishing to a blog is so easy, authors are more likely to post (verb) on a fairly consistent schedule. A post usually consists of two main parts: a title and a body, but posts can have other parts, which are listed below in an unordered list, as well.

• Title (important)
• Body (important)
• Exerpt (optional and is discussed in another glossary entry)
• Extended Entry (optional and discussed in another glossary entry)
• Tag(s) (optional and is discussed in another glossary entry)
• Category(ies) (important)
• Permalink (requires no effort on the part of the author and is discussed in another glossary entry)
• Author (requires no effort on the part of the author)
• Date & Time (requires no effort on the part of the author)

The body of a post can contain text, pictures, links, video, podcasts, and links to documents such as word processing, presentation, or excel files available for download. The content of the post is entirely up to the author and can use basic text formatting such as bold, italics, color, underlining, bulleted lists (like the one below), numbered lists (like the one below), indentation, and block quotations. Many blog software products make formatting fairly easy. However, I strongly suggest that you always preview your post before publishing it. Many times you may get very unexpected results as the code the system writes for you to format your entry on the internet may have limitations.

This is an example of a bulleted (sometimes called an unordered) list that just happens to contain four unordered of bulleted items:

• Bullet One
• Bullet Two
• Bullet Three
• Bullet Four

This is an example of a numbered (sometimes called an ordered) list that just happens to contain four ordered or numbered items:

1. Bullet One
2. Bullet Two
3. Bullet Three
4. Bullet Four

The next section is a blockquote.

This text is an example of a basic blockquote. It is indented on the left even as the sentence continues to a different line of text. The block quotation is frequently used when quoting from other sources.

Special WYSIWYG (pronoucned "wissy wig" and stands for What You See Is What You Get) editors are available. Some work in your browser while others are stand alone applications that connect to your blog. These editors make formatting text much easier by eliminating the need for you to know html or xhtml code. By the way, your basic code for html content is really very easy!

And finally, posts are never permanent. In most blogging systems you can edit them even after they are published. You can delete them after they are published. You can even save them without publishing them. Some high end systems even let you even write a post that will automatically publish itself at a specified time in the future!

RSS is generally thought to be an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is a very powerful but widely unknown technology on the web today. You will frequently hear about RSS feeds. So what is it and what can it do?

When a user publishes a post to a blog, many blogging systems automatically create or update a special file, the RSS feed file. If other person in the world "subscribe" to that RSS feed file, then the new content published to the blog goes to them automatically. In other words, they don't have to go back to look at the blog every day. The blog comes to them, so to speak.

Many internet users have an RSS feed reader, which is a way to subscribe to RSS feeds. Feed readers can be free online accounts at places like Bloglines.com. Feed readers can also be little inexpensive (maybe even free) applications you install on your computer. But every feed reader is a place to keep all of the feeds to which you subscribe. So, to read all of your feeds from all of the blogs you like, you only have to open your feed reader. You don't have to go to each individual blog one at a time. Each individual blog to which you subscribed sends your feed reader all of the new posts on the blog.

Here is an example: If I have two children in Geek Middle School, and each child has 6 teachers, and each teacher has a blog, I would have twelve blogs to read every day--that's twelve different websites to go visit! But then Geek Middle School has a blog for the principal, one for the nurse, one for the cafeteria, one for the counselor's office, and one for the PTSA. Wait! I now have seventeen blogs to read?! Some of the blogs are only updated once a month or so. And then I like to read the news websites, the websites for the tennis teams, etc. This can quickly get out of control.

So I set up a free Bloglines.com account to use as a feed reader. I create three folders: one for me and one for each of my children. In each folder I subscribe to the feeds that relate to that person. So now everytime one of the teachers posts to his/her blog, the number of unread posts next to that folder increases. Each time I read the feed (post by the teacher) the number decreases. In one convenient organized place, I have access to all of my RSS feeds.

CommonCraft has posted this really great, short, entertaining movie on RSS in Plain English. I encourage you to watch it.

Wikipedia Link: RSS
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Atom
• Podcasting
• Syndication
• RSS Readers
• Yahoo! Pipes, a tool for creating mashups of RSS feeds.
• Rss tracking

Dictionary.com Link: RSS

Most blogs have a search function. Using the search field on your blog users can retrieve information from previous posts that may no longer appear visible on the main page but are still neatly archived away in your blog. Some blogging system search engines also search the entire world wide web and not just your blog.

Notice a search field in the sidebar of this blog. Try it out to see how it works. Your students and parents will love the search feature. Truth be told, you will love it too as your blog grows and becomes really large.

A typical blog has two columns that appear under the banner: one is a larger area which provides space for the posts that are published to the blog on a fairly regular schedule. The other column(s) is usually less wide than the main area and is commonly referred to as a sidebar. The sidebar is often used for content that is updated less often, thus remaining rather constant. Typical sections that may be included in the sidebar: a calendar containing links on the days the blog author posted, a search field, archive links to previous posts, and links to the categories used in the blog among other options such as widgets. For the knowledgeable user, the sidebar can be customized to suit needs and taste.

Everyone is familiar with using a bookmark in your web browser, just a simple way to return to a web site with one click instead of having to retype the entire web address or URL. So, what is social bookmarking?

Instead of keeping your bookmarks on your local computer, you save them to an online account. You can share the bookmarks, tag them, and describe them for future reference. When you add a bookmark to your online account, you can see who else in the world has also saved that bookmark. You can see other bookmarks they have saved that relate to that bookmark. You can see what they said about the bookmark. In this way you can expand your network of related information.

Some online social bookmarking services, like del.icio.us or furl even allow you to send you saved bookmarks to friends or publish them to your blog.

You can tag your bookmarks. For example, a math website might be tagged DistributiveProperty or SubjectVerbAgreement. You can create bundles of tags. For example, the bundle name could be the name of a unit of study. All of the tags that relate to that unit of study could then be associated with that bundle.

Tags can be searched. Using these, you can find any bookmarks that other users around the world assigned the same tag. Tags can be shown in tag clouds which is a grouping of tags based on size and/or shade of color. The larger or darker the tag in the cloud, the more people are using or searching for it.

Wikipedia Link: Social Bookmarks
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Collaborative tagging
• List of social software
• List of social bookmarking sites
• Semantic Web
• Social networking
• Social software
• Collaborative Bookmarking
• Chipmark
• Bookmark manager

Dictionary.com Link: Bookmark

When you subscribe to an RSS feed, all of the new content published to that site will come to your feed aggregator. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you no longer have to go to the site to check to see if new content has been published or posted.

There are typically two ways to subscribe to an RSS feed. Watch this little video to see a quick and fun overview about what RSS is and how to subscribe to RSS feeds. You can also learn how to subscribe to RSS feed at Bloglines.com. It's easy.

Think of a tag as a label (metadata). Tags are usually personal and informal, in other words, you are assigning whatever labels you want to assign. It's completely up to you. However picking a tag or a label that you think others would also use makes the tag more powerful.

You can tag many things, but most commonly tags are used for pictures, videos, blog posts, and social bookmarks. But with new online office applications like ThinkFree (which is like Microsoft Office: word processing, number crunching, and presentations) you can even tag the documents you create online.

When these files or posts appear online, users can search for them based on their tags. Tag clouds show users which tags are used more frequently by presenting them in a larger size based on frequency of use.

Wikipedia Link: Tag
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Collaborative_tagging
• Tag editor
• Folksonomy
• GeoTagging
• Machine tag
• Metadata
• Ontology
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Tag cloud
• Web 2.0
• Resource Description Framework (RDF)

Dictionary.com Link: Tag

Similar to the blogroll, tags will sometimes, though less often, be displayed on a blog. When these appear, they frequently appear in a "cloud" format (example pictured below). The cloud is simply a collection of the tags, sometimes in alphabetical order. The tags that are used more frequently are typically larger in size in the cloud. But tag clouds can present even more interesting information when using color or shade to convey meaning. For example, in the tag cloud presented below from del.icio.us (click the cloud to enlarge it) you can see that the size indicates how frequently people around the world use a given tag. The red tags in the tag cloud are tags that I have used that fall into the frequently used tags by other people around the world.

So what's the advantage of using a tag cloud? I can quickly get a sense of what is on people's minds around the world, what they think is important at any given moment in time. When a dramatic news event happens, that tag cloud swells in size as people post about it. By clicking on the larger news-related tag, I probably can quickly find eye witness accounts or the opinions of real people around the world rather than relying on the news media as my only source of information. I might even be able to comment to their post about the event and thereby participate in an interactive rather than a passive relationship with the news event.

I can click on a tag and see what the most popular items are that have been assigned that tag. For example, in the above tag cloud from del.icio.us, I could click on the "howto" tag, one which I have used (it's red) that is also a popular tag around the world. A list of the most popular sites on del.icio.us related to "howto" will appear in order of popularity. Popularity is defined by the number of del.icio.us members around the world who have assigned that tag to the same website.

Now I can read popular sites that have the same tag I used. In other words, this is a list of popular sites that relate to the same topic or tag I find interesting. I probably will not know about most of these site. I can expand the breadth of my knowledge. I am now navigating through the web in a less haphazard way than just random searches gleaned by search engines. As I become comfortable and skilled with exploring tags, I may start to see recurring names of uses who have similar interests (tags) to me. I can then explore the sites they are tagging. I am building a social framework around my sphere of knowledge!

An example of a tag cloud presented on the wikipedia site.

The template is a file that tells the blogging system where to put what. Here is a really simplified example: the blogging system will have a template tag for each of the page elements: the banner, the body, sidebar one, sidebar two, sidebar three, module one, module two, module three, etc. The template for My Wonderful Blog might then only use the following template tags: the banner, the body, sidebar one with modules one and three. I would get to decide which ones are used and tell the blogging system where to put them on the page. For example, would I want my sidebar one on the left or the right of my body? Which module do I want on the top of my sidebar?

So the template tells the blogging system what stuff you want on your blog and how to organize that "stuff" on your blog.

Here is a screen shot from the Template settings on Blogger. Click the thumbnail to enlarge it more. Each section (or what I referred to as template tag in the text above) can be moved around on the page, changing what will appear where on your main page.

One of the considerations for publishers of blogs is the amount of time it takes for the content on the blog to travel from your server to the user, who might be on the other side of the world, and then appear on the user's computer monitor. If the user connects to the internet through a traditional telephone modem, the time it takes for a blog to load on the monitor may be significant. With high speed internet connections, this is seldom an issue.

To help decrease the amount of time a blog takes to load, large picture files should be avoided. In fact, depending on the monitor of the end user and the resolution setting of that monitor, many of the pictures taken with todays inexpensive digital cameras will not even fit on the computer screen. Introducing the thumbnail! A thumbnail is a small version of a larger picture. The user can see the thumbnail and decide if s/he wants to take the time to see the larger picture. If yes, all the user must do is click on the thumbnail, and the larger picture appears usually in a new window.

I personally think it's always a good idea to use thumbnails. This post features an example of a thumbnail that is aligned to the left side of the post. Click on the thumbnail (which is only about 100 pixels wide) to see the larger version. Notice that it takes a little bit of time to download the larger image, which is a tiny file (only about 100 kilobytes in size, and measures about 750 pixels wide).

This term became popular around 2004 as a way of referring to the web as a more interactive medium. Prior to that time publishing websites was rather involved and therefore remained rather constant, rarely changing. But as publishing tools made it easier to place content on the web, such as blogs, and encouraged people to interact with the content, through comments and forums, the nature of the internet began to change. The term Web 2.0 was intended to reflect that change from just a read content web to a read and then write back web.

Social integration was becoming popular on the internet. People could interact with their favorite blogs by publishing comments to the posts. Then the commenters could comment to one another's comments. Social interaction was taking place in very public ways on the internet. Communities began to emerge around these site.

So Web 2.0 refers to internet activity that supports community and social interaction through the web. It is a growing lifestyle among the young people as they share their ideas, media, and other content over the web, building extensive social connections and relationships with people they may never know in the physical world.

Wikipedia Link: Web 2.0
Related Wikipedia Links:

• Authentication 2.0
• Blog
• Collaborative learning
• Collaborative Networked Learning
• Collaborative learning-work
• Comparison of accounting software
• Comparison of e-mail clients
• Comparison of office suites
• Consumer-generated media
• List of online spreadsheets
• Crowdsourcing
• Enterprise 2.0
• Generation C
• Learning 2.0
• Library 2.0
• List of office suites
• List of personal information managers
• Mashups
• Media Studies 2.0
• Micro-blogging
• Mobile office
• Office 2.0
• Office Suite
• Photo sharing
• Service-oriented architecture
• Social bookmarking
• Social computing
• Telecommuting