Ingles

Social Networks
Do the names MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, etc. ring a bell? They probably do because they are some of the most popular sites on the internet today. These sites are all called 'socialnetworking' sites because they help people meet and discuss things online. Each of these social networking sites has its own strengths: MySpace is especially popular among teenagers, Facebook ispopular with college age people, Orkut is especially loved in Brazil, and CyWorld is the site to visit in South Korea. The common thread between all of these social networks is that they provide a place forpeople to interact, rather than a place to go to read or listen to 'content'.
Web 2.0
Social networks are considered to be web 2.0. What does this mean? To understand this, it's important tounderstand what the original web did (often called web 1.0). Back in the nineties, the internet - or web - was a place to go to read articles, listen to music, get information, etc. Most people didn'tcontribute to the sites. They just 'browsed' the sites and took advantage of the information or resources provided. Of course, some people did create their own sites. However, creating a site wasdifficult. You needed to know basic HTML coding (the original language the internet uses to 'code' pages). It certainly wasn't something most people wanted to do as it could take hours to get a basic pagejust right. Things began to get easier when blogs (from web log) were introduced. With blogs, many more people began writing 'posts', as well as commenting on other people's blogs.

Social NetworksDo the names MySpace, Facebook, Orkut, etc. ring a bell? They probably do because they are some of the most popular sites on the internet today. These sites are all called 'social networking' sitesbecause they help people meet and discuss things online. Each of these social networking sites has its own strengths: MySpace is especially popular among teenagers, Facebook is popular with college...