Web 2.0, RSS, AJAX, the whole buzzarky

I've recently been looking at a relatively new tech based news site (the link to which I'm afraid I forget, it's purpose was a bit like "digg"'s though) which relies on user interference instead of algorithmically generated news selections from aggregations of new stories. Interestingly, this received a fair amount of criticism as unnecessarily increasing the running cost of the site, despite the obvious bonuses that human intelligence can be used to genuinely select the most relevant and potentially interesting stories from I suspect a very large number of candidates.

When I wish to see my news, I appreciate the idea of a professional group of news-nerds carefully selecting good material, especially when somewhere like slashdot (by user contribution) has so many duplicate, out of date, and "badly spelled link" stories - include a relatively ignorant bunch of commenters, whose poor (albeit democratic) moderation has left me removing the site from my favourites and only visiting once in a blue moon.

However, and returning to the point of the entry, they have missed out something which I see as ultra critical to a good news site, and that is reliable RSS feeds. I hear that RSS usage is waning, which I find very surprising - It strikes me a far easier way of quickly removing the chaff and getting quickly to the stories of interest, but maybe the interest wanes because it isn't plugged hard enough, or that good free aggregrators are hard to find / use?

To me, Web 2.0 is about creating dynamic websites with multiple ways of accessing the raw data that supports the site to suit the end user. Maybe it involves the user being able to "skin" their page so the information is presented the way that they would like to read it - either way, it allows the user to customise their usage of a given site. RSS feeds are an integral part of this for sites where the user would like to be informed of "updates" - I still think that all forum software should generate concise, intelligent summaries of information on a given forum and thread, or at the very least a thread listing for the forum (some of these do this very well admittedly), purely because it simplifies the job for the end user to reach their desired information destination.

Why, for such a simple and yet powerful tool, is so much more hype and attention given to AJAX. AJAX is interesting, and something I have quite enjoyed playing with recently. However, despite the hype I find that it's application is quite limited. For pages that are having to return tiered hierarchical information from a database, it can make a lot of sense to have only the uppermost tier presented on page load, and by AJAX and javascript populate an element (perhaps a useful box somewhere on the page marked "More Information" or suchlike) with the next level of detailed information on an individual instance when it is clicked on - without having to reload the page itself. This can be a big saving on bandwidth and, often more importantly on database heavy servers, can reduce the load on the db itself. However, you cannot bookmark the AJAX loaded page, as the request is all client sent, so unless you include server side code to replicate the AJAX call and complicate favourite generation to make sure your browser correctly saves the page, you have to remember exactly the steps taken to get there again.

Web 2.0 (which I think is a horribly ambiguous and mostly meaningless buzzword) is overly hyped without justification. A lot of the key individual components have their usage in specific environments, where they can contribute to the site as a whole. But trying to incorporate them just to be "Web 2.0" is frankly quite ridiculous - sites should be designed to achieve and end aim, and technology should be chosen to enable them to reach that aim, not the other way round.

Can we please just allow the Internet to be the Internet, and not force sites to fit into some poorly drawn up sub-category. If there are good technologies out there (such as RSS and AJAX), let them be called individually for their respective merits, and used as required, not bundled into some big package of generic improvement that everyone should try to adopt on principle. Technology is a tool to achieve a goal, not a goal in itself.