Las Palmas Medical Center has seen the evolution of Stanton Street over the last six years when we contracted with them to build our web-site. Our web-site has improved along with the company. Stanton Street has grown from a concept to a company with the expertise to build business using web technology. We have been so pleased with the results that we asked Stanton Street to design our market web site!
Terri Wyatt
Community Relations Director
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What is Web 2.0?
August 21, 2009
 Web 2.0 is a hot topic floating around technology-related conversations lately. But what exactly is it? Is it an update to the World Wide Web? Is it a brand-new Internet? Through all the talk and speculation, it is hard to come up with a definite answer.
Well, Web 2.0 is simply a buzzword used to classify new approaches which engage users over the Internet. If you were to define Web 2.0, the closest definition would be something like "Social-Media, Openness, Rich Interfaces, and New Digital Interactions". Quite a mouthful, but it’s a lot simpler than it may seem. In a nutshell, it’s new approaches for getting users more involved on the web.
Although various industry folk claim to have coined the term “Web 2.0”, one of the earliest was in 1999 by Darcy DiNucci, an information architect from San Francisco, California. So, obviously, Web 2.0 is nothing new. In fact, its principles have been applied for years now.
Web 2.0 can be broken down into four main categories: Social Media, Openness, Rich Interfaces and New Digital Interactions.
Social Media is online content created by you, your friends, your families, and people all over the world through an existing site structure. If you combine this information into one centralized location, it completely revamps how people retain almost any type of information and content. Simple examples of social media are web applications such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia and even review-based feedback from sites such as Amazon.
With the ability to find and publish just about anything comes the power of Openness and free speech. Instead of relying on content supplied by the general media, people are now being educated by even the smallest of voices all over the world from different walks of life.
With this tremendous amount of information now available to the general public, it brings problems for some website operators as well. How do I keep my users involved on my site and not my next-door neighbor’s? Using a combination of Rich Interfaces and New Digital Interactions, like Flash and JavaScript, and mashing them up with outside applications such as Google maps, web developers are now able to engage the users in full application-based “adventures”. This transforms the Internet into more than just an information gateway. It fully engages users in highly interactive “video game”-like experiences and allows them to actually interact instead of just reading text. A few examples of this are Google Maps, Facebook, Flickr and just about any smart phone application ever made.
By examining the aspects of Web 2.0 you can see it isn’t anything new. It’s simply a different approach to understanding the power of your web presence. It’s not just the idea of having a website, but having a website done right and the impact in can have on the end-user.
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Stanton Street
