Tech Talk: Internet Quiz

Dale Dougherty, a publisher from O'Reilly Media (founded by Tim O'Reilly), coined the term Web 2.0 in 2004 during a joint conference held with MediaLive International. Although Dougherty was probably just doing his job, he managed to set off a firestorm of debate -- no one completely agrees on what Web 2.0 actually means.

In September 2005, about a year after the term Web 2.0 was coined, Tim O'Reilly posted a blog entry in which he gave his thoughts on the subject. On top of using the Web as an applications platform and employing new methods for distributing information, Web 2.0 allows for the democratization of the Internet.

Web 1.0 sites are generally static, meaning they may contain useful information, but there's no public interaction. With comments and updates, Web 2.0 sites may change several times a day.

Most official online encyclopedias, unlike online wikis that include user-generated content, are considered Web 1.0 because they are fact-checked, edited and attributed to a specific author. Online bookstores like Amazon.com and social networking sites like Facebook.com fall under the umbrella of Web 2.0 because of the interaction the sites allow.

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee developed the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), the backbone of the World Wide Web. HTTP is simply the set of rules Web browsers use to interpret Web documents.

Although it may be easy to confuse HTTP and HTML -- especially since they both have the word hypertext in their names -- they mean two different things. Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) is the set of rules Web browser use to communicate with each other, while hypertext mark-up language (HTML) describes to your Web browser how a page should look.

The Internet is technically a network of a wide variety of networks. These networks connect to each other in different configurations, which gives you several different types -- your school may have a specific network, for instance, while satellites and cell phones have their own networks. All of them are considered part of the Internet.

The World Wide Web uses hypertext to access several types of information over the Internet -- browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari interpret HTML in order to display text, images and videos on our computer screens.

The Web is the most popular way of accessing the Internet, but it isn't the only system we can use. It's possible to access the Internet without using HTTP with e-mail or instant messaging.

In 1958, soon after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the world's first satellite, Dwight D. Eisenhower started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) to increase U.S. technological advancements. By 1969, the first ARPANET network connection was launched -- it crashed, but after the second try, the network that would become the Internet was born.