Here are some Knowledge Links for today,

Five Best Instant Messangers

Figure out why an Application hangs

Forget Facebook everyone’s a Twitter

Protect your Privacy while Downloading

yahoo-puts-all-the-chips-on-the-table-time-for-somebody-to-fold

Open Social goes live on Orkut

Socialtext makes Wikis social Announce People and Dashboard

Product Pulse: Baidu Startpages, Sina Space And Community Search

Pageflakes Acquired By Live Universe

MindMeister - Collaborative Mind Mapping

AOL and Yahoo plan to strike a deal, Microsoft retaliates

Web 2.0 seems to be the new holy grail for all entrepreneurs and marketers, and while many experts sing its praises, an equal number do predict its demise into enterprise ether. The truth, as always, lies somewhere in-between. But one business area where Web 2.0 certainly has had a major impact is in branding and marketing. This cannot be denied.

Web 2.0 is a broad term that covers all aspects of Web usage or technologies that facilitate collaboration, sharing, online conversations, user-generated content or social networking of some kind. For example, there are over 100 million blogs today and no matter what area of business you are in, someone has probably created a blog about it and someone else is actually reading that blog. (Blog stands for Web Log or Journal or Site that a Web user creates themselves on any subject of their choosing.)

As a brand builder or marketer, ignoring Web 2.0 is ignoring some of the best tools you can find in managing your 360 degree (touching every touch point in your marketing matrix with an appropriate relationship) marketing strategy and your reputation online. Understanding your customer’s buying habits and interests, mapping current trends, getting free feedback and reviews, testing out new concepts on focus groups for free, managing your brand’s reputation through proper message management, distributing viral messages and ideas quickly – what else can a marketer ask for. This is the promise of Web 2.0. However, remember – the opposite can hold true as well – so use these tools carefully. Here are some ideas to help you along:

Idea #1: Spruce up your Website – improve the customer experience on your site: Add a blog-type news desk (Wordpress provides some very good tools for free) so visitors can comment and more. Add a customer assistance tool (like LivePerson or an Avatar - see SitePal or Oddcast), if you are an online retailer add user recommendations and suggestions (use intelligent tools like Cleverset.) And make sure you use some serious Analytics tools to help you measure performance of your site, drop off rates and more (Google Analytics is free and very good but you could try Webtrends for some really advanced reports.) Make sure you set up a team in-house to run your site so it is not an after-thought.

Idea #2: Get Blogging – yes, there are 100 million blogs out there, so before you take the plunge and launch another one of your own (Blogger, Wordpress or TypePad are your best bets) in that vast pool – ask yourself a few questions. How will this benefit my customers? Which blogs exist that already talk to my customers and how can I connect with them? How will I get my customers or target market to ready my blog regularly and become aware of its existence? Also consider using new technologies for announcing and broadcasting messages and news like Twitter and InMail at Linkedin.

Idea #3: Use Social Networks and Forums – This is a great way to test new ideas or get good feedback from people using your products or services. By reaching out to your core base via networks and forums, you will build a relationship with core constituents who will shape the opinion of others about your brand. Build a page on Linkedin (your profile), Facebook, Orkut, Ibibo, BigAdda, or Fropper. Manage this well as your reputation may count on it. If your market does not already have an active network then consider starting your own (have a look at Ning or Community Server – very nice open source social networks and forums you can start on your own.)

Idea #4: Use Email to build relationships and get messages out - Though not officially considered Web 2.0 – managing emails well is critical in your brand thinking for the Web 2.0 future. You already have an Email list - your current list of clients, customers, staff, friends , associates and vendors is your email list. Learning to use this wisely and then grow it is an art and will take some work. Set up newsletters, announcements and new desks so that you can keep your core targets informed regularly and automatically – there are some great email and list management services that are really cheap and let you create beautiful emails in minutes (see Constant Contact and iContact which both are Spam proof and approved.) Allow people to sign up for these on your site. Also consider growing your list in key markets by purchasing or renting lists. This will take some more research and effort on your part but may well be worth it.

Gone are the days when Internet was only a bunch of static web-pages. Today, it’s a live and happening place, full of interactivity, thanks to a set of technologies collectively known as Web 2.0. It’s become so popular that now, even enterprises want to use them. In this story, we explore these technonolgies, and how they can power next-generation enterprise portals. Plus, we take a peek into the future of Web 2.0

In order to understand and appreciate the next generation of web technologies, it’s important to understand what the current generation has to offer. For a long time, websites were nothing but a bunch of web pages put together for people to click and browse. While it proved to be a terrific source of information, there were many limitations in it. For one, people couldn’t interact on it. There was just one sea of pages to go through. If two people were browsing the same site, they had no way of knowing that. If you wanted to modify a web page or a part of it, then you had to be familiar with HTML coding. Plus, you had to modify the complete web page. There was no way to change parts of it. Over a period of time, websites started springing up like mushrooms on a rotting log. The situation became that ‘if it moves, then it must have a website’. With so many websites offering the same set of static pages, life became rather boring on the Internet. Something was needed to break this monotony.]

That something was web 2.0. It didn’t spring up over night. In fact, it has been there for many years now, gradually getting into our lives. It comprises of many technologies that we’ve all heard of already, like JavaScript, XML, ASP.Net, PHP/Perl, MySQL, etc. These gave the web a different way of dealing with data. Using these and other similar technologies, software companies started giving a web front-end to all their existing applications. Others started building applications solely for the web. We’ve all heard of Intranets and knowledge management solutions, online CRM packages, etc. All of these have in some way or the other contributed to building the next generation web technologies. Unfortunately, they’ve all gone by relatively unnoticed.

It was only after some one put these technologies to some real creative use that it started getting noticed. All of us have heard of blogging, wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, etc. All of these have converted the web into more of a platform rather than a static source of information. Blogging allowed ordinary users to post their thoughts on websites without knowing a word of HTML. Wikipedia allowed users to edit what others have written online. YouTube and Flickr need no introduction. They’ve become the torch bearers for the world of social networking. Their names are the first to come to mind whenever someone says ‘web 2.0′. All these applications have given the web a new identity. Users can now, not only access data, but also participate and add value to applications. Integration of applications in the browser, freedom for the user to modify content in real-time, interaction between several users, accumulation of content from other sites and feeding of the same into one’s own site, having the desktop hosted on Web, watching video on a Web browser, blogging-all these are possible now, thanks to major development in the Web technologies.

The emergence of Web 2.0 offers several opportunities for enterprises as well. With the integration of several applications, like Wiki, blogging, RSS feeds, they can make their portal solutions much more interactive and useful for users. When ever reference to technologies behind Web 2.0 is made, AJAX is the first name that comes up. So, let us start with it and as we move on, we will cover some other essential technologies that are shaping up the new Web.

AJAX

Today, every second Internet user has a Gmail account, most of us use flickr to upload and share our pictures on the Web, and some of us use Google Maps to locate the area we are travelling. Surely, you must have realized that a completely new variety of dynamic Web applications are emerging. Most of these applications have looks and feel similar to that of desktop applications. AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is the technology that has enabled this. It makes webpages more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server, behind the scene, so that the entire webpage doesn’t need to reload every time the user makes a request. This helps

improve the overall interactivity, speed, functionality and usability of the webpage. JavaScript is the main programming language wherein AJAX function calls are made and using XML the asynchronously retrieved data is formatted and kept. Being a cross-platform technology enables it to be used across different operating systems, computer architectures and Web browsers. Web apps always had more benefits than desktop apps. They were easy to use, install, and develop, but interactivity was lacking. AJAX solves that problem as well.

AJAX is a combination of several technologies each thriving in its own right, gelling together in a powerful way. We can incorporate a standard-based presentation using XHTML and CSS. Dynamic display and interaction can be incorporated using Document Object Model. Data interchanging and manipulation is mainly the work of XML and XSLT. Data is retrieved asynchronously with the help of XMLHttpRequest and finally JavaScript, residing on client side, binds everything together and dynamically displays and interacts with the information. XMLHttpRequest object has been the key to the success of AJAX, as it enables asynchronous data exchange with servers.

An enterprise can also implement AJAX in its portal. With AJAX you can build applications with rich and dynamic content, by offering simple features like drag and drop and auto-completion. AJAX is a framework model and is now relishing support from both Java and .NET. After the introduction of Microsoft’s ASP 2.0, the things have become still easy for developers working on Web 2.0 compliant Web applications. To the extent that you don’t even need to be an expert in AJAX to use it. With ASP 2.0, a Web developer can compose a page out of separate working parts that communicate independently with the server.

Online spread-sheets spell a new era where desktop applications being overtaken by browser-based applications

ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for quickly creating a new generation of more efficient, more interactive and highly-personalized Web experiences that work across all the most popular browsers.

With ASP.NET AJAX, you can:

• Create next-generation interfaces with reusable AJAX components.
• Enhance existing Web pages using powerful AJAX controls with support for all modern browsers.
• Continue using Visual Studio 2005 to take your ASP.NET 2.0 sites to the next level.
• Access remote services and data directly from the browser without writing a ton of complicated script.
• Enjoy the benefits of a free framework with technical support provided by Microsoft.

Check out in details http://ajax.asp.net/

Today nearly 50% of the traffic is generated by the Google. This is a greatest revolution in the internet scenario. This revolution is done by two PhD researcher Lary Page & Sergey Brin & make Google a company on the international scene.

Google becomes popular due to his algorithm which is made out by the two founders & also by making his presentation very simpler, because “the simplest things are sometimes most effective”.Google has a very simple interface, without doing any advertising & only concentrating only on services of searching & nothing else.

In addition of these search results, Google also succeeded to indexing of large number of webpages approximatelt 2 billion of pages. Recently it also includes new type of documents like: Word, Excel, PDF files, PowerPoint slides, Worpad.

The algorithm is based on two systems

- a precise analysis of the contents of the indexed pages (keywords, occurrences, positions in the document, type of HTML tag, etc.)
- a classification of the pages according to their popularity (PageRank), calculated from the topology of the Web (i.e. the whole structure of the documents and the links between them).

The Effective Website Development is done by a team of specialist which can do an Effective Internet Marketing to get ranked in the Google & making indexes faster.