The lightweight AJAX programming model has taken the PC browser market by storm. This panel, moderated by AJAXWorld 2006 Conference Chair Jeremy Geelan and with panelists including both the Father of DHTML and the Creator of the Term 'AJAX,' will look at the totality of its impact and at the impact of Rich Internet Applications as a whole.

Building modern SOAs and Web 2.0 sites requires an design style that goes with the 'grain' of the Web. REST, a natural extension of HTTP created by the co-inventor of HTTP, is getting a lot of attention these days because it's easy to work with, aligns well with the Web, and is very high performance. Used architecturally, REST is called Web-Oriented Architecture or WOA. But whither SOAP, the canonical Web services protocol up to now? This panel will discuss that and more.

Before starting them in on 4-5 hours developing code, Dion Hinchcliffe gave attendees at the first-ever AJAX University Bootcamp a rapid-fire overview of the fast-paced training course ahead of them. 'We're going to try everything from mashups to the depths of Dojo pub-sub,' said Hinchcliffe, as he primed attendees for what he called 'Programming to the Metal.'

The latest person to highlight the precariousness of public understanding of Web 2.0 is one of the absolute pioneers of a richer web, Nexaweb's founder and CTO, Coach Wei. Wei's concern centers on the common misapprehension that Web 2.0 is solely a consumer phenomenon - MySpace, Flickr, Flock, YouTube, etc - instead of realizing that, as Wei puts it, 'Web 2.0 can fundamentally impact core enterprise IT operations in a way that can only be matched by the shift from mainframe computing to client/server computing.'

Imbibing AJAX cheek-by-jowl with Yahoo!, Sun, Intel, Nortel Networks, McAfee, and a host of other major headquarters buildings is a salutary experience. It is as if the AJAX approach, which got itself a name in San Francisco but is based on technologies spawned in the Valley and elsewhere, has come home.

The AJAX wildfire is about to break out at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley, as the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo - the biggest ever tradeshow devoted to AJAX, Rich Internet Applications, and Web 2.0 - opens its doors October 2-4. The three-day event kicks off tomorrow with an all-day AJAX University Bootcamp, led by Dion Hinchcliffe.

Mark Knopfler once said, 'I don't like definitions, but if there is a definition of freedom, it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it, to change it, rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than that.' Anyone with that kind of gift for succinctness ought to be let loose on defining 'Web 2.0'!

Japan knows web 2.0 - probably better than us in US. But very few people in Japan have heard of or paid attention to MySpace. Their attention is on Mixi, the biggest social networking site in Japan.

With all the noise the Web 2.0 revolutionaries are making, it's easy to ignore another &emdash; this time velvet &emdash; revolution: 'E-commerce 2.0' is coming into maturity and getting ready to relieve its now ten-plus year old predecessor. It's about time.

To make the concept of attention compelling and to prove to the consumers that their attention information is important, we need to build applications that provide useful services. And to build these applications we need a platform for the attention players to plug into. In short, we need attention ecosystem, where application providers can interplay and deliver definitive value to the end users.

In considering the 'Internet Singularity,' Mark Scrimshire has been postulating a series of guidelines or rules. He has already written about the first; here he looks at the second and third rules.

Web 2.0 is putting me back in touch with all that was good about those pre-Web days: putting me back in control, if you like. Instead of webmasters, let alone media moguls. That is why it is so fascinating to watch the players act out their parts. For example that of 'The Money-Mad Media Mogul' (let's use, for want of any better example, Mr Rupert Murdoch as our avatar here) who swaggers onto the Web 2.0 stage and buys MySpace (and now even Jamster)...without any real sense of how his $580M will be recouped, let alone the $187.5M he just okayed to get a controlling interest in the Crazy Frog ringtone.

All the buzz these days seems to be about websites that let users generate the content (while the site collects most or all of the revenue). From Wikis to MySpace, and Digg (and their millions of clones), all the cool kids are letting the users dictate most if not all of the content on the site. Though lately these stars have been falling from grace.

The current storm of change in Web development and online business models, coming as it does together with a simultaneous revolution in the way that users are choosing to use the Web, is an opportunity for us all.

The idea of Web services was to create a standard interface, programming model, description language, and a directory which would allow this to happen in and between very different systems. This is becoming a very important component to Web 2.0, or the ability to mix and match 'outside-in' services for use within enterprise applications.