I can’t help but question the validity of the source, as Net Applications, the suppliers of the data only display percentages – no raw numbers.  Depending on the amount of data collected 1% changes could be less than the margin of error, which means this data could be nothing but hype.

Please note you will need a fairly large USB stick for most versions of Linux (1GB should do) and the laptop must have a floppy disk drive (old school right?).

1. First you need to format a USB stick with a bootable version of Ubuntu on it.  You can do this manually, however the process is a bit complicated, so the easiest method is a freeware utility called UNetbootin.  The best part about this application is it will not only create the bootable USB stick for you but it will also handle downloading the Linux ISO for you.
2. Next you will need to download an application called PLoP bootmanager.  This is a nice little application which you can install on a variety of different devices, including a floppy disk.  The application itself enables you to boot from a number of different devices even if your computers BIOS does not support it by default. (I wish I had found it sooner)
3. Once you download PLoP you must write the disk image to a floppy disk.  If you don’t already have a method of doing that and you’re on a Windows machine use RawWrite – its free.
4. Now you are ready to go, put the floppy disk in the computer, plug in the USB stick, and boot her up.
5. If PLoP does not boot up the screen you’ll have to go into your BIOS and make sure it is set to boot from the floppy drive first.
6. When you get PLoP on the screen, select USB (use the arrow keys) and hit enter and you’re done.

After using this method I installed Ubuntu without a hitch, until I removed the USB stick and floppy disk and attempted to restart the computer.  The master boot record was not found.  I was able to access Ubuntu again through the USB key and the floppy, and fixed the problem inside of Ubuntu by re-writing the master boot record.

This is done through the following process for GRUB.  Inside of a terminal:
sudo grub
root (hd0,1)
setup (hd0)

Note that if you installed the OS on a different partition it might not be (hd0,1) you can however type ‘root (‘ and hit tab to view the current paritions.

Good luck.

More interestingly to me is that more than half of those 120 million users are out of college according to the Statistics page over at Facebook.  I would be really interested in seeing how active the users are, though I don’t think that we’ll ever know.

I think the real winner here is showing the power of PHP.  Facebook runs on PHP, which is an open open source (free as in beer) scripting language specifically made for web development.  While the language may not be as object oriented as Java, or as funded as ASP.net, it clearly is scalable and powerful.

Now everytime you search on Youtube, you’ll have to guess whether the video is really relevent to your search or if it is just paying to be there  Most times it should be clear, but now money could buy you popularity – atleast on Youtube.

The comic really speaks for itself, however I must say that after reading the article in the school newspaper about JuicyCampus, I have begun to have mixed feelings about keeping the web completely neutral.

Link to web comic from xkcd.

Seeing all of these tools which are freely available does make me wonder though.  How can all of these websites be making enough money to simply exist?  What revenue models do they use?  A lot of questions arise when you look at the number of Web 2.0 tools around the internet that all do the same thing (and most of which are free).

I suppose figuring out what happens when the startup funding runs out is best left for another post.

The post might be a little misleading as someone might believe that addons are purposely causing security issues.  This isn’t exactly the issue, the issue is that the addons are not written to the same standard as wordpress itself, and they are not monitored.  They are unknowingly allowing malicious users to gain access to information which should not be possible to obtain through the default features of wordpress.

Please note, this does not affect people who use wordpress through wordpress.com, it affects those who have wordpress installed on their own servers (wordpress.org).  WordPress.com is a fairly secure environment and only allows a limited number of plugins.

Yes, Web 2.0 is dead.  Web 2.0 was a matter of moving beyond the confines of Web 1.0.  The technology was already decided upon during Web 1.0.

So this means that Web 2.0 was alive at one point, and by alive I mean growing.  It was alive during Web 1.0.  Back in the late 1990′s until around 2004 when Web 2.0 was said to have been born.

The internet is a very static thing.  HTML, CSS, and even JavaScript are limited to what the web browsers can support.  New versions of the ‘Web’ are only capable of using the technology available on the majority of Web browsers.  By the majority of web browsers, I mean the web browsers which are being used by the majority of individuals who are using the internet.  The following chart shows the web browsers which were being used around the beginning of 2005 when Web 2.0 “began”. The data for the chart was provided from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp.  Note a few things. Mozilla is literally Mozilla 1.0, which turned into Firefox in late 2004, and Firefox is also Firefox version 1.0.  In total the numbers on the pie chart only add up to 97.5% which leaves 2.5% “other” browsers being used, however these browsers are basically negligible.

So what does this mean?  Well, first it reiterates my prior post; Web 2.0 “began” when we were sure that we could use the new technology.  It also displays the limitations which were created when Web 2.0 was formed.  Web developers right now are still developing primarily for the web browsers which are listed on the chart.  They make sure their websites work with new browsers, but they don’t really make use of the new technology available for those web browsers.

Therefore, new versions of the Web are only as alive as the technology available prior to their releases.  They are dead upon their releases, and at that time the new version of the Web begins to form.  So welcome my friends, to Web 3.0, we’ve already witnessed its birth and we watch it grow up as we speak.

However, I would like to think that Web 2.0 was more than just advancement in technology; it was a movement of the developers.  When I first began web development in the early 2000′s JavaScript was something that could be used to add cool effects to your website, or possibly add some sort of dynamic content.  But it was never used for something that was absolutely needed.  Every website which I designed had to be fully functional with JavaScript disabled.  JavaScript was complicated, confusing, and browser compatibility was a nightmare.

The same could be said for CSS to an extent.  Back then you used CSS for styling the text, and to do basic things which were known to be browser compatible, but no one created an entire website in CSS.

Then everything changed for CSS.  Eric Meyer showed the world that CSS could be used to create an entire page layouts, a lot of the time this was done by using flaws within how browsers parsed CSS.  But why put yourself through the hassle of creating full CSS pages?

Well these pages had one major benefit; the layouts were smaller in physical size, a lot smaller.  Still it was hard for large companies to catch on, and I really don’t know which company did first, however I do remember distinctly when ESPN changed their home page to a complete div based CSS layout.  This happened in 2003, an entire year before the Web 2.0 term was coined.

ESPN’s web page size decreased by 50KB’s when they switched layouts and this translated to saving them bandwidth.  From ESPN’s perspective they were happy, because bandwidth is relatively expensive and when you’re talking that ESPN averages 40 million visitors per day, that is a lot of money.

Not only was ESPN happy, but viewers should have been as well, as long as they had a web browser which properly displayed the new layout, the page would load in about half the time.  Remarkable, just prior to the Web 2.0 craze we had websites trying to decrease their page sizes for faster presentation.

ESPN’s switch really wasn’t an easy decision to make.  Since they were using newer technology, their website definitely would no longer be compatible with all web browsers.  This was a major concern for web developers back then.  You had people who were still browsing the internet using Internet Explorer 4.0, or an old version of Netscape Navigator, or maybe Safari, who knows.  There are so many web browsers and various issues with how they display things, or if they will display things at all.

During this time companies wanted websites which were compatible, compatible with everything.  They wanted to reach as many people as possible, and this was becoming a major challenge for web developers.

So where is all of this rambling going?  Well, Web 2.0 was a revolution, a revolution of web developers finally saying, we’re not going to take it.  No, we’re not going to make websites compatible with IE 4.0, hell we’re barely going to make them compatible with IE 5.0.  We’re moving forward with technology, everything is becoming faster, everything is becoming smaller and quicker, and we want in.

But this wasn’t good enough; developers needed an actual reason to say this, so Ajax became the scapegoat.  They begin using Ajax to allow content to be refreshed without refreshing the entire browser.  This would save their clients money when it came to bandwidth, and would allow them more creativity with their designs.

So there it was, with the decision to use JavaScript (Ajax) Web 2.0 was born.  This allowed developers a good reason to stop developing for older browsers.  You had to have a modern web browser to use Ajax, so now we only have to develop for web browsers which are compatible with it.

So that is it.  That is why Web 2.0 isn’t really about the advancement in bandwidth or hardware.  In fact individual websites are probably more bandwidth friendly than they ever were pre-Web 2.0.  Web 2.0 was a movement in the developer community, a movement which allowed developers to stand up, and say we want to move forward with technology, not develop for the same old technology.  That is Web 2.0.