Reasonate testing completed and a good quote

I have been taking a bit of a break after the successful completion of the Reasonate testing within the BBSc303 course. There's been a couple of interesting articles appear in my newsreader recently. The first has a good construction analogy for 'Web 2.0'.

"An analogy from the world of building construction perhaps clarifies the distinction. Web 1.0 was like building houses from cement, sand, crushed bricks and aluminium. You had to mix cement, bricks and sand together to make concrete, then use concrete to make the house. With newer Web 2.0 technologies you effectively have concrete, prefabricated walls, corrugated iron sheets, etc to build houses. So you can make more interesting and elaborate houses than before.

Many Web 2.0 building blocks are available as open-source software products. These products are, for the most part, free to use. Further, the source code (ie, the engineering blueprint) is usually available for developers to modify as needed. Since there is a huge variety of open source software (for example, SourceForge, a repository of open source software, has over 115000 projects), the programmer can mix and match the right tools and build a program very quickly (and cheaply.)

So, continuing our construction analogy, Web 2.0 programmers not only have ready-made concrete, but it is free ready-made concrete!"

Unfortunately there has been a lot of debate recently over the term 'Web 2.0', mainly caused by O'Reilly making moves to copyright the term because apparently it was Tim O'Reilly who originally coined it. This move certainly peeved a lot of people off who had considered the term more a definition of a genre/ideology rather than some new trademark to be monetised. Anyway in the future I'll be steering clear of using the term Web 2.0 just to avoid any controversy that will continue to plauge the term over the next six-twelve months.