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Those hours that other people spend on Facebook or MySpace could be part of a cunning plan to equip themselves with the latest must-have IT skills, if new reports from Forrester Research and Gartner Group are to be believed. "Web 2.0" technologies, which began by appealing to end users – and bean counters – because they offered the possibility of doing things for themselves and cutting out expensive IT people, are now being taken up by those very IT people. Web 2.0 has been variously described by senior industry commentators as "a major trend that is building steadily" and "a bagful of old technologies under a new name". The term was coined by technology publisher Tim O'Reilly in 2005. The characteristics O'Reilly identified include "perpetual beta": there are no scheduled software releases, just continuous improvements. Web 2.0 developers can come up with a feature in the morning, write it in the afternoon, put it out overnight, and wait for the response the next day to decide whether to continue or withdraw it. O'Reilly identified scripting languages like Perl, Python and Ruby as optimised for this kind of programming. Now that free downloadable tools and open source community support have removed cost and the long learning curve as a barrier to entry, anyone can be a web developer. Or so the hype goes. Web 2.0s users are "co-developers", and the more of them there are, the better things get, thanks to the "wisdom of crowds" effect. Forrester's report, IT Departments Play Key Role In The Acquisition And Deployment Of Web 2.0 Technologies, argues "budgetary controls, the need for integration and technical skills, and the growing importance of Web 2.0 tools are all putting IT departments in the driver's seat". It turns out that, for all their scorn about wikis, blogs and social networking, IT people have really been heavy users all along! But they still want to be in charge, and they still don't want non-professionals doing what they like. 80 per cent were concerned about the risks of employees bringing unsanctioned technology into the enterprise. They want people to be given the right Web 2.0 tools, while not putting the business at risk. Pioneers in the corporate use of social networking are attracted by its promise to improve collaboration within the company, and to encourage customers to give up information about themselves, and feedback about products and services. Gartner Group finds that social networking is full of untapped potential for business, but that companies still need policies to deter inappropriate use in company time. Fortunately, Web 2.0 technologies are mostly underpinned by standards from the World Wide Web Consortium, like XML, HTML and XTML, the XMLHttpRequest API, and Cascading Style Sheets; or the European Computer Manufacturers Association, like JavaScript and Jscript. Savvy contractors will already be aware of these, and keeping an eye on techniques like Ajax (Asynchronous Javascript and XML), a new approach to rapid development of more responsive rich Internet applications. Microsoft professionas can learn ASP.Net Ajax from www.asp.net/ajax/. The attractions of all these technologies to contractors, as to the wider public, is that you can download and learn to use them for nothing. And the attractions of contractors with these skills to IT departments is that, unlike the majority of over-excited end-users, they know what they are doing with them, and have experience and an understanding of the disciplines and safeguards of programming. For as Jakob Nielsen, the foremost authority on human-computer interaction, has said: "Employees are pre-vetted: they've been hired and thus presumably have a minimum quality level. In contrast, on the Web, most people are bozos." And as AT&T researcher Will Hill has observed, "unfortunately, those people who have nothing better to do than post on the Internet all day long are rarely the ones who have the most insights." So is social networking the new IT training? It depends who's paying for your time. Nick Langley Jul 18, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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