How-to: Web 2.0

Have you heard about the Web 2.0? Do you know what a wiki is? How about a mashup? Meg and I have already been throwing the term "RSS" at you, but there's always the chance (slight though it is, due to our phenomenal instruction skills) that it's still confusing.

Do you need to care about these terms? How do they help you? Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's quick money to be made by knowing or even implementing or using these technologies. However, I would suggest that at least having an idea of what they are can be immensely helpful in several ways, professional and personal.

An article by Per Casey and Andrew Smith of Law.com's Legal Technology News, "How Web 2.0 Could Light Up Your Law Firm", provides short explanations of what some popular Web 2.0 technologies. Admittedly, it's kind of techie (especially AJAX--yikes!), but there is some general description for RSS, wikis, and folksonomies.

Speaking of folksonomies, Google has just released a beta (see the above article for the definition of "perpetual beta") version of Blogger, the online software we use to host this blog. We are now able to add labels/tags to each post that you will then be able to use search our blog postings more easily. For example, you will be able to search for summaries of cases about "negligence per se". Or, if you vaguely remember a post about Microsoft Word, you can use the label "microsoft" to find all the posts fitting that label.

I love being able to play with this stuff!