Web 2.0 generally refers to a second generation of services available on the World Wide Web that lets people collaborate and share information online. Web 2.0 application often use a combination of techniques devised in the late 1990s, including public web service APIs, Ajax and web syndication. They often allow for mass publishing (web-based social software). The term may include blogs and wikis.
Lately, a new Web 2.0 application has launched called SayOutLoud. SayOutLoud is an interesting and new approach to your average discussion board site. It’s not a discussion system that you download and install on your site, but a one location where anyone can go and discuss anything at all. It uses tagging rather then using forums and threads to organize content. The system is extremely minimalist and is designed in a way that anyone can get in and start a discussion.
A tag is a keyword which acts like a subject or category. A keyword is used to organize webpages and objects on the Internet. Each user “tags” a webpage or image using his/her own unique tag. An image or webpage may have multiple tags that identify it. Webpages and images with identical tags are then linked together and users may use the tag to search for similar webpages and images.
When you submit your story to SayOutLoud, it notifies several other Web 2.0 services including Del.icio.us and Technorati about your post. Because these systems also support tagging, hundreds of users watching a the tag(s) you posted to will immideately discover your post. You can have the experts reading whatever you had to say out loud in minutes.
SayOutLoud also features your average discussion board functionality where you can search posts and users, manage your profile, and post new threads. Although the main difference is that everything is organized with folksonomy so when searching for users and threads, you can search by tag. Because of this, it also makes it easy for me to find people with related interests and to follow their discussion simply by searching for users on a specific interest tag. I type in “AJAX” and I get a list of members that are interested in Ajax. Same applies to threads. Furthermore, you can also view a tag cloud so you can find new and popular discussions.
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