Today’s project demonstrates that by changing how we see information, Web 2.0 also affects how we think about that information.

Flickr introduced the type of display known as a “tag cloud”, and it can subtly affect one’s perception of a block of text. Want a quick glimpse at the content of a large block of text? How about getting a general impression of the text in an article, a web page, an important document, or even a recent chat?

The online text-conversion tool at TagCrowd made that project page possible…

1. open text file (page source, chat archive, etc.)
2. copy text into text editor
3. remove some strings (time signatures, etc.); then copy and
4. submit at TagCrowd.com

Looks as though the forecast will be partly cloudy for quite some time…

And here is a new trail of breadcrumbs: The URL for shared items from my Google Reader feeds has been added to my Links blog (blogroll). Currently, the items shared are all articles containing various bloggers’ predictions for technology and the Internet in 2007.

Yes, Web 2.0 empowers the user. Just read “A Day in the Life of Web 2.0.”* However, the Internet user has been empowered for a decade now, right? Newer technologies, including web applications, certainly ease the entry of wannabe-geeks (like me) into the web. Perhaps increased desire for involvement by non-IT folks (like me) is driving the changes being labeled as web2.0. One account of Internet history indicates 1995 as the year AOL began. Another places the birth of Yahoo! in 1994. These events—the creation of easy-to-use, consumer portals—represent a node of popularization for the Internet.

The idea really began to catch on.

That the cultural popularity of the web dawned over a decade ago might suggest that the Internet has had plenty of time to mature. But, there is evidence that the Internet is just beginning to find itself.

Given the rapid and sustained pace of innovation in the underlying technology, the rapid growth of usage, the continuing shift of spending to the Internet and the proliferation of new businesses created on the Internet, I find it hard to characterize this space as “maturing” – my sense is that it is still in its infancy.
— from Edge Perspectives with John Hagel

The Internet was created to share information. Now, information is not only more accessible, it is more properly filtered and sorted (see RSS).

The change and evolution of this medium fascinates me.

Now, if I can just find a way to perform a secondary filter on the RSS feeds within Google Reader, so that sites like Stephen’s web—occasionally feeding dozens of links—are not so unwieldy…

* For a detailed, authoritative article discussing web2.0, see this article by Tim O’Reilly.

“Everything is happening” cooed those groovy “Almost Famous” girls. Sort of a gooey-sweet way to say there is so-o-o much going on that all I can do is chirp and mew.

And now it’s the same with this new Web2 (point-OH). There is too much happening to think that any one site could follow everything that is going on. Even if all the new developments were scanned on one blog, that would be too much to see. And, since search engines are still designing computer programmers, it seems there is a need for some artificially intelligent filtering, sorting, and virtual taste-testing.

Enter edParadigm.

The best of the web—where ed’s concerned—we’ll ferret that out, with what we have learned. The web-based applications I have seen or read about in just the last three days would be enough to leave a crease in the “Page Down” key, so this first entry will offer just one. But, it may turn out to be a whopper. Google presents “Google Apps for Your Domain”, another suite of technology to access and manage information on the web.

“Google Apps for Your Domain lets you offer private-labeled email, IM and calendar accounts to all of your users, so they can share ideas and work more effectively.”

Staff and departments, faculty and students, or even just site visitors can get linked up and synched up, gobbling up even more data storage than before. Stir in all the potential of Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets, Notebook, Reader, and more, and you may soon be cooking up something new yourself.