Google recently launched a service that allows webmasters to feed Google pages they would like to have indexed. Up till now, webmasters had no control over what pages Google crawled. Webmasters could only submit their homepage to Google and hope that Google would crawl through links to find the rest of their web site. Google’s new service, Google Sitemaps, provides webmasters with a method to inform Google exactly which pages they want crawled, how often these pages change, and the order that these pages should be crawled.
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Mashups
It’s been called the essence of Web 2.0. It’s the ability to combine pieces of different web sites to create something new, something meaningful. Something for you and the people who have your tastes. Your social network. Not some mass market portal built by corporate programmers who think that they know you and your personal tastes.
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Google Desktop is a free downloadable application that offers an easy way to search for information on your computer, across your personal computer network and from the web. It includes full text search over your primary computer’s email, files, music, photos, chats and web pages you’ve viewed. By making your computer searchable, Desktop puts your information easily within your reach and frees you from having to manually organize it. Searching your computer is now as easy as searching the web with Google.
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Everybody is now talking about Web 2.0, a Web that is more dynamic, richer, more interactive, and, ultimately – much more exciting than anything we know now. It’s just human nature to look for unusual and new stuff. But, what does that mean for business applications?

Let’s look at Google Maps. Yes, we are all excited by Google Maps. It looks great. It is very interactive. And, most importantly, it behaves completely differently from what we expect to see in a “normal” browser. But, compared to any realistic business application – say something like trivial Internet banking – Google Maps is nothing. It supports just a few use cases compared to the hundreds or thousands of use cases for a typical business application.
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2007 has been a great year for the Web. On the one hand, there has been an upswing in the number of Web 2.0 start- ups globally, while on the other hand, popular Web 2.0 start-ups like Facebook, jaiku, feedburner and others have been acquired or invested in by the giants of the Web like Microsoft and Google. Closer home in India, the trends have been similar, though still in a nascent stage, as social networking became a buzzword with Orkut. That led to start-ups like Minglebox (which obtained funding from Sequoia Capital), BigAdda (backed by Reliance), Desimartini (recently acquired by HTMedia), and many others. Though launches occurred at a lower frequency than in the US, India has seen over 150 Web 2.0 start-ups launched during this year (according to internal research at WATConsult) in different spaces from social networking, social bookmarking and blogging, to media sharing, local search, etc. Let’s take a look at some of the…
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When integrating data from multiple sources, a key task that online communities often face is to match the schemas of the data sources. Today, such matching often incurs a huge workload that overwhelms the relatively small set of volunteer integrators. In such cases, community members may not even volunteer to be integrators, due to the high workload, and consequently no integration systems can be built. To address this problem, we propose to enlist the multitude of users in the community to help match the schemas, in a Web 2.0 fashion. We discuss the challenges of this approach and provide initial solutions. Finally, we describe an extensive set of experiments on both real-world and synthetic data that demonstrate the utility of the approach.
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