I wrote this article for the Hudson Valley Business Journal.  It appeared in the March 9 issue. 

In planning a strategy to market yourself, your business or your organization on the Web, the use of technologies considered Web 2.0 can be very helpful in providing improved Web visibility. Along with a professional website, exposure on appropriate social networking sites, strong use of bookmarking and tagging, and, if appropriate, syndicated distribution of information, all considered Web 2.0 technologies, can work collaboratively to give your business optimized exposure online. The newer Google algorithms for search engine ranking take all these channels into consideration.
The most widely recognized Web 2.0 application is the Social Networking websites. In a social networking website, the users, in effect, create the content and the internal links. A social network service focuses on building online communities of people who share interests and/or activities, or who are interested in exploring the interests and activities of others. The most famous of these sites in this country are MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn. These and many other social networks are expanding to include business communities which can serve as a network service for a business or organization. Social network services generally provide a variety of ways for users to interact, such as e-mail, instant messaging and blogging.
Blogging is a Web2.0 technology whose popularity is continuing to grow exponentially. A blog works such that the primary contributor, the owner of the blog, contributes regular entries. These entries can be like a personal diary in nature, or used as a platform for the contributor’s thoughts on a particular subject or subjects, or, as is often the case in business logs, as a means of communicating information on a company or industry. Blog readers are encouraged to respond to the entries with thoughts or information of their own. In social networking websites, blogs are used as the main vehicle for communication among members.
Web indexing using tags, or more technically, metadata, is a way in which users can supply a human search engine function. Also considered a Web 2.0 application, users or website owners apply tags to Web entities such as Web pages, digital images, maps, blog entries, and social applications, for the purpose of categorizing information and making associations between related objects or concepts.

An excellent example of tagging is social bookmarking. In social bookmarking, users bookmark Web pages on a shared website and then tag them with many descriptive words, allowing subsequent users to search by those terms and find pages that were found to be helpful and/or related. An example of a social bookmarking website is del.icio.us. If a "bookmark this page" link for del.icio.us and/or other social bookmarking sites is included on a Web page, it encourages social bookmarking of the page which then contributes to the Web page’s visibility to further users as well as to search engines. This same type of tagging can also be used for sharing and grouping images online.

Web feeds are considered a feature of Web 2.0. Web feeds use specialized protocols to create Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format. Web feeds generally include full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. They benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They allow readers to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. Podcasts are a series of audio or video digital media files distributed over the Internet by syndicated download, through Web feeds, to portable media players, personal computers and cell phones.

The term Web 2.0 is somewhat debated in the Web industry. Some feel that the types of technologies normally classified as Web 2.0 are, more accurately, logical extensions of Web 1.0. The terminology is secondary to what these applications mean for businesses, for Web users and as an indicator for the direction in which the Web is going. Whereas, for awhile now, a professional website has been a vital aspect in promoting your business, it’s now even more important as a central ingredient in an expanded and integrated Web strategy.

For more information about how Web 2.0 technologies can help your business, please contact us.