Week 3: Web 2.0 and Podcasting where is this heading?

Web 2.0 is a new way of web development, it has the services like social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, etc. which based on everyone’s participation, and the sharing between users. Some examples of web 2.0 are Google map, RSS, APIs and widgets. The web now allows us to do our personal things, like the APIs, we can use the Word, Excel or some other applications through the web so that we don’t have to buy them and install them to our computer. We can check for the most recent news by RSS, and also find a place through Google map. So nowadays we do not just use computer to store our own data, through the World Wide Web, we can interact with people everywhere.

The web or companies like Google or Youtube are adding more and more applications for people to use. They are trying to find more space in the web for users to store their information. In the future, all those software that inside a computer could be found on the web, people may then trend to use the virtual drive and not the hard drive or software. This will make a competition between the companies that create hard drive (e.g. Microsoft) and the companies that focus on the web (e.g. Google and Youtube).

Podcasting is like a radio, the different is people can listen to the audio everywhere at anytime. Not like the radio, we have to follow the radio station’s time schedule so that we will not miss anything. But the podcasting is, people can find the audio through the web, then download it to iPod or mp3 player, then they can bring it to everywhere and listen to the audio as many times as they want. In the university, some professors would record their lectures and put those audio online and let their students download it so that they can transfer the lecture audio to their iPod and study in anytime.

The future of podcasting could be expended more on education. Since nowadays everyone has an iPod or mp3 players, it is easy for students to upload the lecture audios to their iPods and study for it. It could be a replacement of radio because people can now download the radio programs online. The future of our technology is an unknown, but the web must going to be more efficient, faster and cheaper.