Week 9 Lecture- Web 2.0

 I find it hard to say without sounding geeky but I found the idea of Web 2.0 and its future relying on us really exciting. I read the web 2.0 and long tail articles before the lecture and could instantly see the community that the web has become. Up until this point I had taken this as a granted or given but the article web 2.0 really put it all into perspective. That collective intelligence on the web has resulted into things such as the long tail model is phenomenal. After reading it you can really get an appreciation for what people at the forefront of web 2.0 are trying to do.

I thought that the page rank system that Google implemented was interesting. Which pretty much catapulted them to internet glory in which they were able to start establishing their empire! Now I use the term empire due to a little segment I saw on the ‘Hungry Beast’ which you guys might like- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfV6RzE30 unfortunately it’s not available on the site anymore but I still recommend checking it out!

The way that AJAX was implemented it the webpage Twistori I thought was really impressive and it had me thinking about possible webpage designs that could implement it in a similar way. My immediate thoughts were about tag clouds, not that I have a problem with tag clouds just they can be really ugly sometimes depending on the colours the designer picked. It can sometimes just make a page look a bit disorganised. So working on the same idea that Twistori put together, why not use it in a similar way for tag clouds. We create a search bar in a cloud graphic then when a user searches a tag AJAX does its thing and we have links to articles that are related to the tag fall out of the cloud down the page. When the user clicks on a tag as it passes we have the article pop up in a blackout window. User can then return to continue searching through articles.

We have two options with what happens with the articles that are still moving. It could just be a continuous cycle of a few articles or could we program the AJAX to freeze the feed of tags while the user is reading?

Anyone have any thoughts?