By now you’ve heard why Ajax is great for web-based applications:

• It is standards-based
• It is degradeable with unsupporting browsers
• It is relatively easy to implement
• The benefits of a one-screen interface (no disruptions for page refreshes)

The Side Benefit of Ajax

But there’s another side benefit, that I think might be as influential as any of the above. When you build an Ajax application, you need to break down your server calls into smaller chunks. You’re no longer requesting complete web pages when you hit your server, you’re requesting information via a simplified API that you create (something as simple as a PHP script, perhaps).

This is yet another step toward microcontent, or pieces of data that live on their own and are called together to form applications screens or web pages. If you weren’t planning on accessing your content in this way before you decided to use Ajax techniques, you will definitely have to if you move that way.

This seems to be an overall trend, however. First we gain granular access to our own content for our own needs, and then we provide public access to others after we see how useful it is.

Doc Searls has a nice writeup of Blog Search engines, including the new Google Blog Search, IceRocket, PubSub, Technorati, Blogpulse, and A9.

He answers the question: What’s the difference between a Wide Web Search and a Live Web Search?

The difference? Syndication. I wonder how long that distinction will last.

(via Infodesign) In The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems Scott Golder and Bernardo Huberman of HP Labs examine folksonomies. From the abstract:

“Collaborative tagging describes the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content. Recently, collaborative tagging has grown in popularity on the web, on sites that allow users to tag bookmarks, photographs and other content. In this paper we analyze the structure of collaborative tagging systems as well as their dynamical aspects. Specifically, we discovered regularities in user activity, tag frequencies, kinds of tags used, bursts of popularity in bookmarking and a remarkable stability in the relative proportions of tags within a given url. We also present a dynamical model of collaborative tagging that predicts these stable patterns and relates them to imitation and shared knowledge.”

I now have veritable proof that Web 2.0 as a term is working to describe the changing web. How do I know? People told me so. Last night I led a talk for the Macromedia Boston Users Group called “Web 2.0 Interfaces, the Future of Design”. I used Keynote for the first time, and I […]

Continue Reading: Talking about Web 2.0 with Designers

An interesting piece at Wired about a new browser called Flock.

The first question will probably be, unfortunately, this: How do you monetize a browser?

Instead, let’s ask this one: What does this do that I can’t do now?

Tom Coates writes up how to build bubble-up folksonomies. It’s an interesting piece, sure to become more useful over time, as systems migrate toward bottoms-up instead of top-down.

Are you thinking of building something like this?

I’m happy to announce that Richard MacManus and I are writing a book about Web 2.0 for O’Reilly Media. As many of you know, I’ve swallowed the Web 2.0 bug here at Bokardo and Richard has what is probably the most popular Web 2.0 blog, as well as a Web 2.0 column on Digital Web […]

Continue Reading: Web 2.0 Book

Boy, I wish I had seen this when I wrote my recent piece on Writing Semantic Markup. Joe Reger, who calls what he does “data blogging”, has released a screencast of him uploading an XML schema file to his blogging software, which takes the schema file and creates a new log type out of it. […]

Continue Reading: A Glimpse of the Future: Joe Reger’s XML Schema Coolness

The next wave of applications will be web-based. Many will be online equivalents to what we have on the desktop. In recent months the push has been toward applications that mirror Microsoft Office: made up of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation programs.

ThinkFree Office is in Beta, written with Java, and pretty darn robust.

You can try out the apps, too:

Write | Show | Calc

My new favorite blog is the Web 2.0 Explorer, written by Richard MacManus over at ZDNet. As many of you know, I’ve been writing with Richard about Web 2.0 Design over at Digital Web, and now he’s writing with the big boys. Congrats, Richard!

Web 2.0 Explorer Feed