Technologies

Web 2.0 is a term that is used to define the evolution of the World Wide Web. This second generation of the web, also called the read-/write web, aims to enhance creativity, information sharing, and collaboration among users. This is in contrast to the traditional internet that does not feature interactive components or community building. Web 2.0 has had a major impact on how people think, communicate, prioritize, express themselves and collaborate in both professional and personal settings.

Social software encompasses a range of software systems that allow users to interact, collaborate and share information. This computer-mediated communication has become very popular with social sites like MySpace, Facebook, media sites like YouTube as well as commercial sites like Amazon and eBay. Social software offers new forms of cooperation and goes far beyond the potential of existing traditional communication media such as telephone, e-mail or phone

An RSS-Feed (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary feed) is a source of RSS updates for a given website and provides summaries of web content in a simple format. News websites often have RSS feeds from which users can be sent news headlines as they are published. Users need to subscribe the RSS Feed and it informs them via email about what's new since the last time they checked a certain website, without having to visit the website itself. Hence, people are able to keep up with their favorite web sites automatically rather than checking them manually.

See also: http://www.commoncraft.com/rss_plain_english

Tagging is a way of organizing and/or classifying information on the Internet, providing contributions with keywords. This tagging method refines searches for various terms (topics, contribution types, document types, etc..), enables other users to achieve better searching results and to identify otherwise insignificant information and contexts.

Open Source is a general term describing several parts of the Free Software License movement. It is a less-confusing name for what is also called 'Free Software' and describes an approach to the design, development, and distribution of software that is freely available for anyone and that allows people to read, work on, modify and to learn from the program's source code as well as to use it in other projects.