All new or emerging businesses are rightfully cautious of the big investment required to launch a successful web presence. A new cost-effective and time-saving service enables companies to fast track their strategic and tactical web initiatives while still actively growing their user base. Unlike past methods of web development, rapid prototyping is a back-to-front development process that allows the product user interface to be fully designed before writing any code.

As the Internet's newest way to connect brands with consumers, widgets have officially arrived. These portable applets appear on blogs, websites, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Offered by third-party developers as embedded Flash (.swf) objects, the self-contained badges allow page owners to personalize their sites with photo slide shows, music playlists, games, and other content.

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselves to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

Marketing online isn't as easy as it used to be. Back in the day, all we had to do was write some slick ad copy and hand it over to the Webmaster to be published online. If these pages somehow made their way onto one of the various search engines, it was a pleasant bonus. Today, copy is called content, Webmasters are called engineers, and the goal is making the first page of Google, which is trading at nearly $700 per share.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Can afford to take just one day off, get out of your cubicle and see what other people up to these days? Is J2EE still in favor? What's this ESB is about? Have you even heard of using Flex as a Web front end of your Java applications? Do not miss an event in NYC this Monday, that is created for people who think that they are way too busy to take several days off and spend them in the class. Just take one day off and attend the Real-World Java event. The discounted rate for this event is $395. To get this discount, enter the coupon code ?JUGgold' while registering

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'!

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.

A wise man once quipped that 'There's nothing more difficult to make a prediction about than the future.' Matt Hartley, a contributing writer to OSWeekly.com, discovered the truth of this first-hand - and painfully - this week when an item that he'd written got picked up (and mauled) by Slashdot.

'One of the challenges for anyone who, like Jesse James Garrett ('Ajax') or Tim O'Reilly ('Web 2.0'), has devised a new word or phrase that catches on and spreads like wildfire is what to do for an encore. O'Reilly's technique is ...

Since most any two words can and will be put together in this world, what with us being Homo Loquens and all, it is easy just to shrug when you hear new colloquies like 'social software,' 'social networking' or 'social computing' and dismiss them as just three more inevitable permutations in a world of whirling words and phrases.