Blog 7: HTML and Web 2.0

These chapters that Ryan focuses on cover a wide variety of topics. One of the most important topics that he discusses is the creation of Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). A man by the name of Tim Berners-Lee was the person who invented this. He wanted a way of being able to link different content together. This is really what started the boom of what was called the world wide web. This is the Internet that we know today. Another important topic that he talks about is web browsers. You needed a way to be able to find the HTML pages that people created. So people invented web browsers to do this. Some of the early browsers were Netscape, Mosaic, and even Internet Explorer which is still around today. Then Larry Page came around and made one of the most popular websites that has ever existed, Google. Google redefined how you searched for HTML pages. It used a new way of finding pages based off a ranking system. This system basically put the pages that had the most links to them at the top of the Google searches.

Next Ryan talks about the financial side of things. He goes into detail talking about how Ebay became such a big website. I think it surprised me the amount of money that went through that website as it progressed. Another very important topic that Ryan talks about is Web 2.0. This seems to be the inception of social media. Social media redefined how we communicated with each other. These websites will shape our interactions for years to come. Another thing Ryan brings up very briefly is Ajax and XML. These technologies are very important with creating websites today. It allows people to create dynamic web pages rather than static ones.

Questions:

How would the Internet be different today if Tim Berners-Lee would not have created HTML?

Do you think there will be something like social media that will redefine how we interact with people and world around us?