A NOTE ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
I thought it might be useful to have a list of the tools that we have talked about in the book. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, and will almost certainly be out of date within the life of the book, but it should at the very least let you know what I meant throughout the book when I have referred to “these tools”.
Forums
Sometimes called a bulletin board or newsgroup, a forum is a place where people can post questions or statements and get answers or discussion from any of the other users in the system. Originally based on mailing lists and then Usenet, forums have been developed a lot recently and tools like Yahoo Groups and Google Groups have added in diary, file sharing, user profiles etc. to make them much richer collaborative environments. Forum functionality is also now built into sites like LinkedIn, Google Plus, and Facebook. Our forum was the first tool we put in at the BBC which eventually grew to around 25,000 users and despite being less glamorous than some of the more modern tools is still a great engine on which to build your ecology of tools.
Weblogs
Weblogs are simply online journals but there are a number of things that make them significant. Firstly they are really the first time that it has been trivially easy to publish into a web environment. Until now you have had to be geeky enough to write code or pay for dedicated applications. With a weblog (blog) you use your web browser to access free, or cheap, blogging tools, write ...
