By: Shannon Margolis

Microsoft’s .NET technology is a technology designed to connect. What to connect? Well everything that can be connected through software – people, systems, computers, and other things and devices.

A more thorough definition of .NET would be that it is a top level domain, initially designed to be used by Internet Service Providers, but now it has expanded and everyone can make use of a .net domain. It uses the Internet DNS (domain Naming System) and it is an abbreviation of the word ‘network’.

.NET can hold servers that provide web services or the tools needed to create these services.

What are Web Services and their benefits? Well they can be called enhancements that help businesses expand and connect with their customers and partners. Their benefits are that they make the communication between business partners much easier and even increase the profits by making a business known and available to much more people through the help of the Internet.

An Important part of the .Net technology and framework is the ASP.net set of technologies. These web development technologies are used in the creation of Websites and Web services usable on the .NET infrastructure.

ASP.NET was built by Microsoft from one of their older technologies and web programmers can use any programming language they want to write ASP.NET, from Perl to C# and of course Visual Basic.NET and any other language understood by the .NET technology.

The advantages of the ASP.NET technology are that it makes building Websites, Web applications and Web services very easy and with less code that older languages. Also, the applications compiled in ASP.NET run faster and with less errors

You can find many free tutorials and documentation about how to use the .NET framework and about the ASP.Net platform so getting started in this domain can be pretty easy. You can also find many examples amd articles about things that are easy to make and that you can study and use for learning and understanding. After learning a little you will be able to create easy-to-build applications that allow users to organize their own page’s appearance.

Also, if you’re going to use ASP.NET applications you should get one of the specially designed software packages for ASP , like Visual Studio.NET or the ASP.NET Web Matrix.

So the .NET and ASP.NET technologies are very popular and have an extremely large number of business-enhancing uses and applications.

A good place to start learning more about how people-ready applications and systems can be built using the .NET 2.0 framework is the Microsoft Practice section of www.unitekconsulting.com.

By: Michaela Cernescu

Web 2.0 is considered the new generation of websites. It stands for websites that are interactive with its members, allows its members to dynamically change the sites, add content to them, and interact with other members of the site like never before.

This is a huge shift in mentality. In Web 1.0 my website was only mine and nobody dare to touch it! In Web 2.0 my website is like a huge forum where people are active, add content and really interact with each other.

We can divide The Web 2.0 sites in these categories:

• Social Bookmarking
• Social Networking
• Video sites
• Pod Casting

Some people add Blogs as a distinctive category of Web 2.0 sites because of the openness and conversational nature of Blogs.

1) Social Bookmarking.

Includes sites in which people store, classify and share links. Examples: del.icio.no, Digg, Furl, Yahoo’s My Web 2.0, Flicker, Simply, Technorati, Blinkflip, Blinklist, Squidoo, Stumple Upon, Mywebtop, Bloglines, Fark.

The best tool I know, a social bookmarking services, is onlywire.com. You can submit with a single click your site to multiple Web 2.0 sites.

Sometime Social Bookmarking and Social Networking are consider one single classification, I think the separation I made, the definitions and the examples I provide will show a clear cut, and implement the idea that they must be treated separately.

2) Social Networking.

It is about being able to group people into specific groups – online community of Internet users. As soon as you are granted access to a social networking website you can begin to socialize with the people in the group. Social Networking is usually open memberships where you begin to create your own network of friends.

Examples: MSpace, FriendFinder, Yahoo 360, Facebook, Orkut, FriendWise, Friendster and so on. Social Networking sites are extremely popular, easy to use, and easy to navigate. You have to register but the majorities are free to use: Yahoo 360, MySpace.

The aim of Social Networking sites is to meet new people on line, get access to free video music, get assess to free blogs. The most popular is MySpace with over one hundred million members and growing. Orkut is Google’s social networking website; it is very easy to use.

3) Video Sites.

They exploded in the last year, it is the idyllic way to get your videos in the search engines quickly by tapping the video with specific keywords and put them in videos description.

Examples: YouTube, Google videos, BlipTV, Flurt, SelfCastTV, Bott, ZippyVideo just to give you a couple.

4) Podcasting. It is a method of publishing audio broadcasts via the Internet and listened to when listeners wish to. Podcastingis a convenient digital method of distributing updated audio info that can be listened to at the listener’s discretion.

Podcasts can be played by iPod, digital audio player or a computer with an audio playing software. The beauty is that independent producers can be you and me, anyone, and there are not any regulations about creating Podcast. This is freedom and people really enjoy it! My belive is the Podcasting has a great potential in future they will include content as well, not just audio and video even though now is an audio format.

There are also specialized podcasts which become more popular. Examples:

• Autocasting – is automatic generation of podcast from text
• Vidcasting – is podcasts using video
• Godcasting – is religious podcast
• Palmcasting – is podcasting to Palm OS Based devices
• Learncasting – is able to deliver instructional content by RSS
• MediaRSS – is media file syndication used by Yahoo
• Skypecasting – is recording Skype text, voice or video conversations

All of those are part of the big umbrella of Podcasting even though they a specialized.

We got so far that we have now podcast directories: podcastdirectory, digitalpodcast, podcast, yahoo.com and so on.

All those directory have a lot of podcasts to choose from.

As you can see, the Web 2.0 is already established and this is the direction in which I think the development will go.

If other people have more info and more experience in this direction in which web is going, I’ll be glad to read your comments and happy to learn more.

Michaela Cernescu is an Education Specialist trained by eBay, Internet Marketer, Digital Products Writer, Affiliate, and honest Joint Venture partner.

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