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Creative Commons provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from "All Rights Reserved" to "Some Rights Reserved."

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004,[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O'Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted. Though the term suggests a new version of the Web, it does not refer to an update to Internet or World Wide Web technical standards, but to changes in the ways those standards are used. According to Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."[2]. Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether the term is meaningful, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have been present since the creation of the World Wide Web

This 'Introduction to Online Communities' has been written to give an overview of the different types of online community, what makes an online community, and the various community tools. Every community is unique and it is difficult to give a guaranteed recipe for success, but I will cover common factors found in every good online community. It is also worth remembering that as in real life communities take time to grow, and will continually evolve. This is the challenge of online Community Management.

K-Log guru and advocate John Robb presents the benefits of K-Logs as:1) Answers. K-Logs make it easy for people to find answers to problems they need to solve. A simple search of K-Log archives will quickly find an answer if available.2) Experts. Because K-Logs organize knowledge and information byindividual, it is easy to find people with the expertise you need. They can be found via search, cross linking from other K-Loggers, or community tools.3) Organized archive. K-Logs provide a permanent archive of all posted knowledge. Employees may come and go, but their knowledge remains.He sells the economic benefit of K-Logs as:1) Shorter time to find. Giving you faster, more accurate responses to customer inquiries, etc. 2) More accurate decision making. Use of experts, revealed by K-Logs, will improve the quality of corporate decision making. Improved knowledge transfer will expose wasteful projects and inaccurate assumptions. It will also unlock hidden knowledge resources within the company.3) Faster training for new employees. New employees can quickly find the information, context, and insight they need to become productive quickly. A new team member can synch up quickly with an ongoing project by reading the team's K-Logs.4) Simplified management and improved corporate control. The elimination of what is that person doing (?) or how is that project progressing (?) questions that plague managers.

A new open-source social networking software gains its power to be used in schools and other organizations. University of Brighton was the first to introduce Elgg, a social network to help teachers in their interaction with children and use social networks like MySpace, blogs and document.write(MLnkMk('=b!isfg>#iuuq;00efm/jdjp/vt#!!ubshfu>#`cmbol#?Efm/jdjp/vt=0b?'))Del.icio.us feeds for educational purposes. If earlier, the access to these sites were seen as a an obstacle and were banned, now many teachers see it a helpful tool as this attracts great interest among teenagers. Every participant taking part in the project will have a blog with profile page, and have an opportunity to share photos, ideas and communicate with friends in online communities.

"Individuals are forced to consider more information and opportunities than they can effectively process. This information overload is made worse by ‘data smog’, the proliferation of low quality information allowed by easy publication. It leads to anxiety, stress, alienation, and potentially dangerous errors of judgment." Complexity and Information Overload in Society: why increasing efficiency leads to decreasing control by Francis Heylighen. Even when we’ll have much better summarizing and other meaning-making tools than we have today, no amount of technology will give us peace of mind when we will need it most - in the midst of rapid technological changes which affect how we live, work, learn, and play. To rightfully trust our capacity to learn as fast as necessitated by the pace of changes which affect us--individuals, communities and organizations--, we need to learn how to learn faster together. Recommendations and pointers to resources, emailed by friends and colleagues in our social and knowledge networks, are some of the signposts that many professionals and managers use for navigating in today’s fast-moving landscapes. If none of us is as smart as all of us, then creating shared resources, shared social and knowledge capital, is one of the smartest things we can do. The intent and core idea of Collaboration Campus™ is to provide a space for mastering the arts of collaborative learning, and building valuable social capital just by participating in the life of the campus community.

Working via networking Dear Helen, thank you! Yes, it's actually amazing! Currently our company is in some projects and we are responsible for a lot of things. I'm practically alone in my office for days on end, at the same time virtually I'm extremely busy networking with project partners and my employees constantly. We interact via Skype, email, wiki and phone, and sometimes it amuse me with how much people from different countries I contact at once. But what's become clear to me after all - an idea that virtual collaboration could be effective only when it is supported by periodical face-to-face (or at least, vocal via phone/Skype) conversation. Otherwise, a level of trust and mutual responsibilities is reduced even you were a good partner earlier. Helen Baxter, 10-Oct-06 @ 03:41AM Networking = Happiness & Higher Productivity I now run two networked companies, a record label and 3D/TV production house. We have studios interconnected with a combination of free Google Tools and the wonderful Basecamp PM system. Innovators & Creatives don't keep office hours and tend to work on a results not time basis. Overall I think my crew are much happier and far more productive than if we all tried to work out of the same office. This way I never feel like I'm herding cats ;)