A Mike Life – The Life of Mike!

My conversion to Web 2.0

// July 26th, 2007 // fun

Some of you have no idea what Web 2.0 is. I didn’t really a month ago, but I’d heard the term in the past and sort of had an understanding of what it was all about. But not until I really got into it did I learn the magic of today’s online world.

The idea behind Web 2.0 in layman’s terms is basically doing everything online, without the need of a desktop operating system. It’s the way the internet is headed.

Most of you know, as an example, that Microsoft XP is an operating system. You open your Outlook on it, you open up iTunes, you use Word and Excel to write and control finances, you use it to launch AOL Instant Messenger and chat with friends and all kinds of things. You store files, you backup data on other hard drives or thumb drives and you search using Windows, or whatever.

Think about your laptop being stolen or lost. You’d lose a heck of a lot more than your computer. Files, data, history, email, your entire life could be on that thing. If I lost my laptop, all my data on our finances is there. My Outlook email is stored there. How would I ever get it back? There are a ton of other examples of the horrors this would cause all of us.

Now, imagine not needing that thing. Imagine if you were on one laptop, doing all your work, emailing, whatever, and suddenly it died. What if someone could hand you a second laptop, with nothing on it but a simple operating system that connected you to the internet, and you could continue your work in a matter of minutes?

Well, that’s the reality we live in right now. It’s here and growing exponentially. Right now I’m in a training class, in some classroom in Tempe, but with this simple internet connection, I am chatting with friends, emailing and reading all the blogs I subscribe to. I’m also writing this blog. If I had done more, I could also be working on my book and messing with my finance spreadsheet if I felt like it.

Best of all…it’s free.

So how do you do it? Ah ha! I knew you’d ask. Well, in the coming days, I’m going to write some blogs about the best things I’ve found out there, links to these places and what it will do for you.

And you’ll probably be seeing the name “Google” a lot in those.

Should be fun.