This is a list of resources for getting started with Web 2.0, how to understand it, where to find examples of people practicing it, where to learn the technologies behind it, and where to obtain the software that powers it. Originally prepared for my talk on Web 2.0 Opportunities at the Sonoma County Web Developers SIG, so that we could have a discussion about opportunities without getting too bogged down in learning the techniques.

What is Web 2.0?

What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software

O’Reilly Media first popularized the term Web 2.0. This is Tim O’Reilly’s essay on the trends and companies defining the second generation of web development.

Wikipedia Entry on Web 2.0

Wikipedia’s entry on Web 2.0 with links to major resources. Wikipedia is itself an example of the Web 2.0 idea, “architecture of participation,” where the entire content of the encyclopedia is voluntarily contributed, editited and maintained by its readers. For example, the history page for their entry on Web 2.0 shows hundreds of updates from scores of users over the course of the last 16 months.

All Things Web 2.0 – The List

Need examples? This page lists several hundred companies that are built around the ideas of Web 2.0.

Design

Current Style in Web Design

Overview and examples of the designs that define web 2.0, like simplicity and effective use of whitespace, color, and big text.

Yahoo’s User Interface Design Patterns

Solutions to the most common design problems with descriptions. Great starting place for the fundamentals of web design. Includes when, why and how to use auto-complete, breadcrumbs, tabs, pagination, and ratings.

Yahoo’s UI Components

Downloadable UI Widgets and Ajax libraries including a calendar, slider, and tree view.

A List Apart

Articles on web design, graphic design, and user interface design.

Digital Web Design Articles
More articles on web design.

Programming

Ruby on Rails
Plenty of people are still building websites with Java, PHP, Perl, Python, and .NET. But plenty of other people are finding Ruby on Rails to be a platform that makes the common things trivial while staying out of your way when you want to do the hard things. This is the official Rails site with links to tutorials and documentation.

Rolling with Ruby on Rails

Great tutorial on how to get started with Rails. Takes you from installation to a simple cookbook application

Javascript Tutorial
Before you get too far with AJAX you’re going to have to learn some basic javascript. This is a decent tutorial along with very good documentation.

Getting Started with AJAX

Tutorial that takes you from beginning to end of a simple AJAX page.

script.aculo.us and Dojo
Getting AJAX to work correctly across browsers is hard. So it’s always better to start with somebody elses code. These are two of the best AJAX libraries.

Markup

Learning XHTML

Short and simple explanatioin of the differences between HTML and XHTML.

Learning CSS

Great starting point for learning CSS.

Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML
Great book for learning HTML and CSS.

What is RSS?

RSS is a formt for sharing and subscribing to feeds of site updates. Blogs are the most common sites to produce RSS feeds for their sites.

Bloglines

Even if you’re not producing RSS, subscribing to other people’s feeds can be very convenient. Signup for bloglines, a website that specializes in managing subscriptions, put a subscription link on your browser toolbar, and start subscribing.

Microformats
These are easy ways for you to provide semantic information about the data in your pages so that other people can programmatically parse and process the information. These are just starting to get mainstream traction.

Software

Blogger

Blogger is a blog hosting company. They let you create your own blog and start blogging in a matter of minutes. Odeo’s blog is run by bloggger.

MovableType

They offer free blog software (the paid versions are for extra support) and have an active community of developers creating add on products. Also their comment spam blocking is very good. That’ll come in handy if you become popular.

Word Press

Offers both blog hosting and free blog software.
MediaWiki

Software for collaborative writing where any visitor can add or edit content. This is the software that runs Wikipedia. There’s lots of other software that you could choose from, but I think this is the most polished.

PBwiki

Hosted Wiki. You can signup and get started in a matter of minutes.

The latest web trends are enabling incredible business opportunities at almost cost. The people hyping these trends as Web 2.0 are too immersed in the technology and the pundentry to apply the trends where the real value is, everyday problems and needs, most of which already have been solved but are ripe for improvement or replacement.

These trends are hot, their implementation costs low, and their business applications untouched.

That’s the theme behind my upcoming talk at Sonoma County Web Developers, “Web 2.0: Opportunities to Make It Big While Keeping It Small,” 6:30PM Tuesady April 11, Santa Rosa, CA

Official Announcement | Directions

The SCWD is the perfect group to have this talk with. They’re some of the most pragmatic and down-to-earth developers I’ve ever met and I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity.

I’ll focus mainly on three areas:

User Generated Content - Give people a voice and they’ll speak. Give them tools and incentives and they will fill your site with content. Hint: the incentive is not money.

Web Services/Components – Companies want to give you features for your website. For free. Most of these features are prohibitively expensive to build on your own.

Blogvertising – Blogs are fantastic for cheap marketing. You don’t even have to write a blog to take advantage.

This How Much Is My Blog Worth calculator is old news. My blog is currently worth $1693.23. What I want to know is how much individual in-bound links contributed to that. In other words what did one time links from Marc Hedlund on Radar and Hugh MacLeod contribute to that pricing. And how much should I pay them to link to me again.

Update: Now worth $7339.02. Does this vary by day or something?

Yay. Hugh is giving the ok to post your favorite GapingVoid cartoons. Here’s the six that I’ve kept saved in my RSS reader because I couldn’t stand to part with them.

And here’s more from Russell and Arvind.

Seth Godin, well known marketing author and blogger, just released a forty-five page ebook. It’s free nice to read about blogging from a marketer’s perspective. Also, it’s free.

I’m testing out an in-development Connection feature which may or may not be called Leaderboard. One of the leader lists is most active authors, and the most important test is checking if any of the active authors are at all interesting. So far yes! And my two favorites are people I’d never heard of.

Check out this sample from Lisa McMillan:
Best of. Web apps for web developers edition.

Also check out Ian Blenke and his fantastic blog.

Until recently comment spam at work was easily identifiable because of the following style in the A tag.

’style=”display: none’

It didn’t take long for someone to suggest that all of our comment spam problems could be solved with just fifteen minutes of programmer time. Just add a simple pattern match and ignore comments that matched that pattern. Just!

I think that approach is doomed to failure, spammers adapt. We ended up taking a different approach (delinking) and spammers reacted immediately by testing out a series of new attempts. Here’s my favorite:

<p style=”overflow:auto; height: 1px;”>oreilly (http://www.test.com) </p>

A fight using manual pattern matching is just a test of wills. You may as well remove the posts manually.